Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem - And What We Should Do About It.

Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--And What We Should Do About It. Noah Feldman (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Back from an overseas stint helping draft a new Iraqi constitution, Noah Feldman, a prolific NYU law professor, offers new advice on interpreting our own Constitution. He worries that Americans, including those on the Supreme Court, are increasingly divided on the proper relationship between religion and government. To minimize tensions, he would have us allow more room for religious symbols in public debate while banning public funds for religious institutions and activities, including vouchers for religious schools.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Feldman's compromise points in the opposite direction from recent Supreme Court precedent, and he argues for it mainly on historical grounds. He shows that many of the framers believed all tax-funded support for religious institutions violated citizens' liberty of conscience. Meanwhile, the ugly 19th-century debates over the funding of Catholic schools, in his view, reveal the drawbacks of letting the government determine which religious institutions should receive public support.

True enough, but Feldman fails to cast as critical an eye on the alternative, which is to force all those who can't afford a private education into public schools, where ongoing conflicts over the teaching of evolution, school prayer, and other religion-infused issues have done little to foster religious harmony.