Rob Boston: The Most Important Church-State Decision You Never Heard of

Television preacher Pat Robertson can barely contain his anger when he talks about a 1947 Supreme Court decision calledEverson v. Board of Education.

Robertson attacked the ruling on his"700 Club" several times last year. Everson came out of anti-Catholicism, he sputtered in January of 2006. Four months later, he blasted the decision because in it the justices"relied on a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists talking about a wall of separation that isn't in the Constitution."

Robertson is not the only one riled up over Everson. The case, considered a seminal ruling in modern church-state law, marks its 60th anniversary next month. Acknowledged as the most pivotal church-state ruling of the 20th century, Everson has become a magnet for both Religious Right broadsides and law review blasts from right-wing legal scholars.

Why is the far right so eager to discredit Everson? The case is crucial because in it the Supreme Court laid down a concise and wide-ranging definition of the First Amendment's religion provisions that have had a profound effect on church-state law. In addition, a unanimous court strongly endorsed Jefferson's assertion that the American people, through the First Amendment, have"erected a wall of separation between church and state." For anyone seeking to undermine that wall, discrediting Everson is job one....

Everson was not the first time the Supreme Court made note of Jefferson's wall, either. The Supreme Court cited the metaphor in one of the Mormon cases, Reynolds v. United States (1879). In this ruling, a unanimous high court mentioned Jefferson's wall-of-separation metaphor favorably, remarking,"Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] amendment thus secured."

Reynolds was handed down 68 years before Everson. So where did this notion come from that the high court invented church-state separation in the latter case? It was fabricated by the Religious Right, eager to discredit Jefferson's handiwork.

This distortion is possible because in the public mind the Everson case remains somewhat obscure. Few outside legal circles can name it or talk about how it came to be. The facts are easy to discern: New Jersey in 1941 passed a law authorizing local public school districts to provide transportation to students. Ewing Township extended its subsidies to pupils attending parochial schools. The move was promptly challenged in court....