The preeminent act of America’s first Congress was passage of the Bill of Rights on September 25, 1789. Comprised of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratification was completed on December 15, 1791 with Virginia providing the necessary final vote to complete the process. The first section of the First Amendment reads,
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
That the words were written in 1789, however, does not translate into their having the same meaning in the 18th century that they have in the 21st. As a starting point, the First Amendment was initially directed at “Congress”, i.e. the federal government, not state and local government. It wasn’t until ratification of the 14th amendment in 1868 that the mandates of the Bill of Rights were extended to the states,
“No State shall make or enforce any law [that abridges] privileges or immunities of the citizens…; nor shall any State deprive any citizen…without due process of law; nor deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws.”
Prior to the end of the 19th century, official religious discrimination was rampant in the United States. The religious freedom provisions of the Bill of Rights were not conceived to protect the practice of Hinduism or Islam, but rather to protect the practice of various forms of Christianity and to prevent the establishment of a government religion, such as Catholicism in France or the Anglican Church in Great Britain.
Though some of the American founders were generic deists and were closely associated with the less doctrinaire Unitarian movement, most maintained membership in mainline Christian churches. Benjamin Franklin, for example was a titular Presbyterian, known to have once attended church on five consecutive Sundays but who preferred to “worship” from the privacy of his home. The singular exception who would have been more inclined to modern views of religious freedom was the anti-clerical, some say atheistic, Thomas Paine.
Deism notwithstanding, both the American Revolution and the new nation were promoted in the language of Christianity. In particular, reference was made to the coming “American millennium” based on the Book of Revelation and the Old Testament story of the rock rising into a mountain, the rising mountain being the United States compared to a corrupt and defunct Europe.
To understand the distinction between the strictures of the First Amendment as originally conceived and the modern notion of religious freedom one need only refer to court records. The most prosecuted crime in early America was not murder or theft. It was heresy. Well into the 19th century “heretical Christian sects” like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [Mormons] and Jehovah’s Witnesses were being routinely driven by force from states, counties and municipalities at the insistence of elected officials with the assistance of state militias and deputized sheriff’s posses.
If Christian sects received such treatment, one need only imagine the treatment accorded non-Christians, most clearly exemplified by the response to “heathen” Native Americans and, later, Chinese immigrants. In spite of the First Amendment, many federally sponsored expeditions to open the western territories included Christian missionaries or preachers whose role was to convert the heathen. What passed Congress and was ratified by the states couched in the words of “religious freedom” could more accurately be described as “mainline Christian freedom” for the first 75 years of America’s history.
Beginning in the late 19th century and accelerating in the early 20th century, the concept of religious tolerance, beyond tolerance for varieties of mainstream Christianity, began to take hold as part of the popular cultural understanding of religious freedom. It is likely no accident that this coincided with increasing urbanization and industrialization, though many laws, including federal immigration laws, continued to discriminate, favoring immigrants of “Christian” nations, until well into the 20th century. It was probably not until the second third of the 20th century, with the persecution of the Jews in the lead up to, and during, the Second World War that broad-based religious tolerance became firmly entrenched in American culture as being fully included in the practical application of the First Amendment.
In Part II, the modern view of religious freedom, including religious tolerance, and the laws, federal, state and local, that now instruct our governmental institutions and how those laws impact the NYC mosque controversy will be examined.
Sources for Part I: Wikipedia [History of Christianity; Thomas Paine], religioustolerance.org “The Burning Times”; socrel.oxfordjournalist.org “The Seventh-Day Adventists: Heretics of American Civil Religion”; earlyamerica.com “Benjamin Franklin and the Presbyterians”; blackwellreference.com “Colonial Religiosity: Nuns, Heretics and Witches”; Constitution of the United States (with official annotations).
[Author’s Note: the image above is Thomas Paine]
Cross posted at Elijah’s Sweete Spot.
Contributor, aka tidbits. Retired attorney in complex litigation, death penalty defense and constitutional law. Former Nat’l Board Chair: Alzheimer’s Association. Served on multiple political campaigns, including two for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR). Contributing author to three legal books and multiple legal publications.