Reshaping the Wall

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THE wall of separation between church and state is being refashioned by a new judicial philosophy.

While recent United States Supreme Court rulings do not seem out of line in their outcomes, the legal concepts by which the court's majority arrived at these decisions represent a sharp change from the past. In cases involving school Bible clubs and religious ceremonies of American Indians, the justices have departed from longtime precedents interpreting the First Amendment's Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.

This new reasoning, if carried to extreme by a conservatively controlled court, could eventually lead to allowing prayer in the public schools; opening …