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
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
The trouble with blogging …
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax.…
