The Meiji government had, from the 1870s, drawn a formal line between State Shinto, administered by the government as a matter of civic ritual and national ideology to which subjects of every religion were expected to conform, and Sect Shinto, treated as one religion among others. State Shinto funded and staffed shrines through the Shrine Bureau, mandated shrine attendance and reverence for the emperor as a living deity in the school curriculum, and provided much of the ideological infrastructure the wartime government drew on to mobilize the population.
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur's occupation administration issued the Shinto Directive on 15 December 1945, ordering the Japanese government to end all of this: state funding and sponsorship of shrines, the Shrine Bureau itself, compulsory shrine visits, and the teaching of State Shinto doctrine, including the divinity of the emperor, in public schools. Shrines were required to reorganize as private religious corporations, competing on the same legal footing as Buddhist temples, Christian churches and every other religious body, a change the directive framed as guaranteeing the freedom of religion the new constitutional order was meant to secure rather than as an attack on Shinto belief or practice as such.