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"It is impossible to build sound
constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of Constitutional history.
… The establishment clause had been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s
misleading metaphor for nearly forty years. … William Orville Douglas was a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 36 years, after teaching law at Yale and Columbia University. In the 1952 case of Zorach v. Clauson, Justice William Douglas asserted: “The First Amendment… does not say that in every respect there shall be a separation of Church and State…. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other.” Justice Douglas continued: “We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being…. When the state encourages religious instruction… it follows the best of our traditions.” William Orville Douglas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
When the First Amendment was passed it only had two
purposes. The first purpose was that there would be no established, national
church for the united thirteen states. To say it another way: there would be
no “Church of the United States.” James Madison (1751-1836) clearly
articulated this concept of separation when explaining the First Amendment’s
protection of religious liberty. He said that the First Amendment to the
Constitution was prompted because “the people feared one sect might obtain a
preeminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to which they
would compel others to conform.”116
Nevertheless, a number of the individual states had state
churches, and even that was not considered in conflict with the First
Amendment. “At the outbreak of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen
colonies had conferred special benefits upon one church to the exclusion of
others.”117
“In all but one of the thirteen states, the states taxed the people to support
the preaching of the gospel and to build churches.”118
“it was not until 1798 that the Virginia legislature repealed all its laws
supporting churches.”119
“In Massachusetts the Massachusetts Constitution was not amended until 1853 to
eliminate the tax-supported church provosions.”120
The second purpose of the First Amendment was the very
opposite from what is being made of it today. It states expressly that
government should not impede or interfere with the free practice of religion.
Those were the two purposes of the First Amendment as it
was written.
As Justice Douglas wrote for the majority of the Supreme
Court in the United States v. Ballard case in 1944:
The First Amendment has a dual aspect. It not only
“forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice
of any form of worship” but also “safeguards the free exercise of the chosen
form of religion.”
116
Edward Corwin,
The Supreme Court as National
School Board, Law and
Contemporary Problems, 14, (1949), pp. 3, 11-12.
117
Herbert W. Titus, Professor of
Law, O. W. Coburn School of Law,
Education, Caesar’s or God’s: A
Constitutional Question of Jurisdiction
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
120
Ibid.
Schaeffer, F. A. (1996, c1982). The
complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer : A Christian worldview.
Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books.
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