Yep that's more or less what Justice Thomas writes, here:
" The text and history of the Establishment Clause strongly suggest that it is a federalism provision intended to prevent Congress from interfering with state establishments."
I agree with his assessment.
By using the term "grandfathered" you are suggesting that these churches were allowed to operate with the states' blessings despite the fact that the constitution forbade them to do so, only because they so operated before the Constitution and were "grandfathered in."
Yes, I agree.
Not so.
You are simply denying historical fact. -- Feel free to do so, but it makes your position look foolish.
You are the one denying the historical and legal fact that the Establishment clause did not outlaw state churches, but did precisely the opposite.
They weren't "outlawed". The establishment clause was a political compromise that worked.. -- State churches no longer exist. -- They died out because of sheer apathy, imo..
-- Utah's statehood fight proves that such establishments were seen to violate our guarantee to have a Republican Form of Government in every State.
Your motivation is your ignorant and bigoted hatred of decent, moral, religious Americans. Hillary Clinton would be very proud of your tyrannical nationalism. You liberaltarians are a bunch of terrorist-loving anarchist dope-fiends.
Whatever. Such ignorant & hateful comments belong in the backroom.
State churches died out because bigots like you distorted the Constitution in order to oppress the members of a religion they didn't like.
The Mormon Question Mormons and their opponents began their conflict in a legal world that was far different from the one they created. In 1830, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in upstate New York, the federal government was weak and legal power was decentralized. The national Constitution, which occupies so much legal space in the early twenty-first century, was all but invisible in most Americans' day-to-day lives. If anything at all was clear about constitutional law in the new nation, moreover, it was that the constitutional amendments known as the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. Freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, trial by jury, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, unreasonable searches and seizures by government officials, all of these limited the power of the national government. But unlike the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in which federal constitutional rights have been applied against state as well as federal government action, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, states were immune from federal intervention in crucial areas of civil liberties. Confirming earlier cases, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1845 that the First Amendment, which addresses the "free exercise" of religion as well as separation of church and state, did not limit the rights of states to govern within their borders.[5]
The establishment clause, for example, as the provision of the First Amendment that prohibits Congress from enacting legislation "respecting an establishment of religion" is called by constitutional lawyers, prevented the federal government from establishing a given denomination as the official federal church. It also protected the established religions in six of the original thirteen states from federal interference. Thus it is a mistake to assume that the national Constitution guaranteed the separation of church and state or religious liberty to all citizens from its inception: "[T]hat is left," held the Supreme Court, "to the state constitutions and laws." There had been momentous and important changes in law and religion by the 1830s, to be sure, but it was not the federal Constitution that mattered.[6] ...
Disestablishment, or the separation of institutions of religion from institutions of government, had been a new and potentially upsetting idea in the late eighteenth century. But the American colonies, and then the new states, especially in the mid-Atlantic region, were as diverse religiously as they were ethnically. Pennsylvania, just to give one example, was home to English Quakers, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, German Moravians, and many more. In the new nation, the separation of church and state formally began in Virginia with the enactment of Thomas Jefferson's Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom in 1785. Jefferson's bill was not motivated by the conviction that religious belief would flourish in a disestablished state; instead, the skeptical Jefferson hoped to purge Virginia politics of religious influence. Religious diversity affected politics as well as worship in Virginia, however; Baptists and other dissenters were crucial to the enactment of the bill, as they joined forces with Jefferson and elite rationalists to defeat the Anglican establishment.
Six states retained establishments into the national period, though they generally were weak and underfinanced. Other states either followed Virginia's lead or had never had a formal establishment. Even those states that maintained a formal establishment soon found that religious diversity and republican government undermined its value to the holders of the privilege. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, only Massachusetts maintained an establishment, and it, too, was in crisis. Following the lead of other states, the Supreme Judicial Court in 1820 held that the majority of voters (rather than only those with the most impeccable religious credentials) could decide whom to employ as their minister. Disestablishment eventually followed this decision. Embracing democratic rule for established faiths, state court judges also implicitly attacked nondemocratic theologies. In the early Republic, Roman Catholicism was the primary object of such attacks. American judges, by convincing themselves that democratic institutions were essential to religious as well as secular governance, allied themselves with a fundamentally Protestant conception of religious liberty. Local decision-making, majority rule, and a minister's accountability to his congregation rather than to a remote and hierarchical (read Roman) authority all distinguished Protestantism in American "nativist" theory from foreign, "papist" Romanism. Thus in a constitutional world defined in part by anti-Catholicism, separation of church and state took root and flourished.[8]
The law of religious liberty also dovetailed comfortably with Protestantism. As one eminent New York judge put it, religious freedom was bounded by majority rule in much the same way that establishments were. The "moral discipline" created by the "people of this state" reflected their "profess[ion of] the general doctrines of christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice." The great majority of the people were Christians, and the law mirrored their preferences. An argument that religious liberty should protect anything other than "general [Protestant] Christianity" was thus an attempt to shield undemocratic beliefs and practices, confusing the abuse of liberty with its exercise. Disestablishment and constitutional protections of religious liberty in the states may have unsettled centuries of English legal tradition, but by the 1830s, American jurists recrafted links between democracy and "general" Protestantism, reassuring themselves that their government was neither heathen nor sectarian.[9]