He travels about the country, interviewing people who are linked to a dozen or so of the landmark cases. He calls on worshipers at the CloudWater Zendo Buddhist temple in Cleveland (the city instituted a school-voucher program that the Supreme Court upheld in 2002). He interviews the chaplain of the US Senate (the object of several futile court challenges to the prayer that opens its sessions). And so on.
The tour-guide device might have bombed in a lesser writer’s hands. It works for Wexler because of his gift for filtering arcane legal sludge into clear explanations, his keen eye for detail, and his self-mocking, zanily irreverent sensibility.
Between the comic moments, Wexler critiques how the Supreme Court has defined the separation of church and state under the First Amendment. His is an unabashedly liberal bias: wary of the government’s sponsorship of religion and predisposed to see it as encroaching unacceptably on the free exercise of religion.
Wexler treats religion respectfully, proposing that public schools teach far more about it as a way of “promoting tolerance.’’ Still, much of what he writes is likely to rankle readers who share, say, Justice Antonin Scalia’s conservative philosophy.
Surprisingly, given Wexler’s perspective, he sums up the high court’s record positively, stating that it has “gotten a lot of things right in the area of church/state law.’’ In that assessment he parts company with some of his liberal colleagues who object adamantly, for example, to the court’s rulings allowing the federal government to fund social programs of faith-based organizations.
In a typically candid self-portrayal, Wexler describes himself as a “heathen atheist Jew.’’ But, presumably in the interest of full disclosure, he confesses that he once did come “pretty close to praying’’ upon learning that his “appendix was about to explode.’’
