Down with the woke cartels

How key professional associations became a privileged cultural establishment

The ABA logo.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Everyone knows the Constitution prohibits Congress from any "law respecting an establishment of religion." In the conventional interpretation, that means not only that church and state must be legally separate, but also that particular sects or denominations shouldn't enjoy advantages denied to their rivals.

The reality of church-state relations isn't quite that simple. When it was ratified, the First Amendment was understood to protect state-level religious establishments. Rather than being snuffed out by the Bill of Rights, these survived for decades. Massachusetts was the last to disestablish in 1833. And it was around a century after the demise of state establishments that the Supreme Court began to force state and local governments to disentangle themselves from less obvious forms of church-state partnership and favoritism.

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.