The Supreme Court has moved away from the old separationist orthodoxy. The shift was symbolically marked by Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in the Wallace v. Jaffree case of 1985. There, the soon-to-be chief justice would pronounce the words that would trigger the steady demise of the old order: “The ‘wall of separation between church and state,’” he avowed, “is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
