INTRODUCTION

On 2 March 1898, delegates to Australia's constitutional convention voted to include a section in their new Constitution guaranteeing religious freedom and prohibiting religious establishment. Australia's Section 116 was deliberately modeled on the religion clauses of America's First Amendment in what one Australian legal scholar has termed “a fairly blatant piece of transcription.” Yet despite its nearly identical language, Section 116 has been interpreted vastly differently from its American counterpart. While American courts have read the First Amendment broadly, as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state, the Australian High Court has interpreted Section 116 narrowly, as prohibiting only the “statutory recognition” of a single church. These divergent interpretations have led the courts to play decidedly different roles in defining how secular education would be in each country: while American courts have, since the late 1940s, taken the lead in forging a new secular settlement in education, Australian courts have been only minor players.

Why did the courts play such a central role in the negotiation of America's new secular settlement? In this chapter, I argue that it is because they constituted an accessible institutional target for a concerted, strategic campaign to redefine and nationalize America's religious education policy. In the face of theological division and new ecumenical trends, the divide between Protestants and Catholics that had long structured the politics of religious education began to break down in the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, new players – Jews and civil libertarians – forcefully entered the debate over religion and education in the postwar years. These developments altered the dynamics of religious conflict, destabilizing the established politics of the nineteenth-century settlement and creating room for an assertive campaign for “strict separation” of church and state largely organized by the new players.