Religious freedom in Canada and the United States
* Provost and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. E-mail: eisgrube{at}princeton.edu
** Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan. For helpful comments, the authors thank Ran Hirschl, Stanley N. Katz, the editors of I·CON, and the participants in the Conference on North American Constitutionalism held at the University of Toronto in October 2004. E-mail: zeisberg{at}princeton.edu
This article compares the constitutional treatment of religion in the United States and Canada in light of differing patterns of religious practice in the two countries. It focuses on two questions. First, to what extent might constitutional norms or constitutional structures have contributed to their differing levels of religiosity? Though the evidence is inconclusive, the article argues that there are several constitutional differences—including differences with regard to the disestablishment of religion and the fragmentation of political authority into multiple jurisdictions—that might have affected levels of religiosity significantly. Second, to what extent have the religious differences between the two countries produced different constitutional norms of religious freedom? The article argues that, in general, the religious freedom jurisprudence of the two countries is surprisingly convergent, but there is one important difference: the idea of a "strict separation of church and state" pursuant to which any state support for religion or any state entanglement with religion is unconstitutional, has great power in the United States but little in Canada. Discrepancies between Canadian and American religious history have undoubtedly contributed to this difference.