Was “religion” in the First Amendment implicitly understood to mean “Christian denominations” or “Christianity”?
Not by everyone. During the debates over disestablishment in Virginia in 1785, Jefferson explained that the vote on one amendment proved that “they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.” Jefferson certainly would have understood the First Amendment in the same fashion.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Restoring Man at Notre Dame
It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…
Deliver Us from Evil
In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…
Natural Law Needs Revelation
Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…
