This work celebrates the historic decision embodied in the First Amendment. However, it also delineates and reflects on the continual pull of the past, the persistence of the notion that in the absence of a core religious belief system sustained by the State, freedom or even society itself is in danger of destruction.

Those who would return to state-supported religion, who seek the functionality of an established church while simultaneously attempting to avoid its inherent coercive features, are easily recognizable, most clearly to their opponents. The position that government may promote religion for the purposes of strengthening public morality has a long history, and it still attracts a good deal of support in America.

Those who perceive that the First Amendment set a different direction for America also respond to the tug of history, although in a less obvious way. Although they eschew the concept of state-supported religion, they often fail to recognize that they themselves would have government impose a nonreligious ideology as a central organizing force for society. In an attempt to guard against the tyrannies of the past, they would not only have judges disallow religious legislation but would permit them to evaluate the religious consequences of secular legislation, that is, whether such laws aid or hinder religion. Instead of limiting the role of government, this approach would confer on it powers equal to those of the most authoritarian regimes of modern times by enabling judges to review virtually all legislation according to a religious criterion. Many who rightly laud the achievement of the United States in dispensing with established religion would nevertheless endow government with power to determine not just the function of the State but the proper sphere of the Church. They would not only have government define and arrange what is political but declare, as well, the boundary between the sacred and the secular.

Failure to sufficiently understand the radical break with the past represented by the First Amendment has resulted in the amendment's being viewed through an ideological mindset that it was enacted to avoid. My own experience tells me that readers will often seek first to determine whether the author of a work dealing with the amendment is "separationist" or "accommodationist" and then proceed to read the historical evidence the work discusses solely in the light of that determination.

The influence of such ideology in discussion of the First Amendment has resulted in the triumph of a literalist approach over a historical one. The fundamental tenets of both sides of the existing ideological divide can only be maintained by discounting historical evidence that does not comport with positions already established and by a fervent adherence to metaphors - such as the "wall of separation" or "the naked public square" - rather than to a more careful and practical search for definable terms.

This dominant literalism is characterized by a preponderance of assumptions that the First Amendment was enacted by a people whose ways of thinking matched those of modern Americans and who dealt with the same Church-State issues that prevail in America today. As a result, studies of the amendment often treat it as a statement intended to provide answers at the time to specific questions in a distant future rather than as a proclamation of principle by a people unable to envisage its application beyond the limits of their own experience.

This work proceeds from an understanding of the amendment as a limiting, self-denying ordinance restraining government, a mandate that the State will exercise no power in religious questions, that "Congress shall make no law" in that domain of human experience. Religious freedom proceeds from government's leaving people to decide on their own religious beliefs and practices. Some would, with the best of intentions for society, now have government return to the practice of sponsoring and promoting religious beliefs and observances. Others, equally well intentioned, would guard against the abuses of the established religions of the past by endowing government with power to corral religion, to locate the Church behind a wall or barrier of the State's making.

In reality, the First Amendment is about government's lack of power. It is no more a mandate to promote religion than it is one to create a boundary defining the sphere and activity of religion. Rather, it embodies a new way of arranging government, the full understanding of which is still emerging. The gravitational force of Christendom, built up over more than fifteen hundred years, remains strong. The silence of those empty spaces created by the disappearance of established churches can still disturb or even terrify those who are not religious. Nevertheless, the great American experiment still challenges religious believers to realize that the denial of government power over the Church resulted not from a depreciation of religious belief but from a profound appreciation that religion was too important to be left to politicians, too precious and necessary to a vibrant society to be made the tool of government manipulation. The following pages are offered as a guide to that developing understanding and to a realization that the limited, secular, non-ideological government mandated by the Constitution and the First Amendment provides the best hope for Church and State in the new millennium.

The above was the Introduction to Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America, by Thomas J. Curry.