Few areas of public policy in the United States are as politically contentious and legally confusing as church-state relations. And today the traditional view of a strict separation of church and state is being further confused by increasing levels of religious pluralism. This timely book provides the first analysis of a new paradigm for discussing church-state relations -- equal treatment, also sometimes referred to as neutrality -- that has growing popularity in Congress and has recently been used in several Supreme Court rulings. Ten leading scholars of constitutional law and political science trace the development of equal treatment theory, consider its implications for public policy and church-state relations, and evaluate it from a number of ideological perspectives.
