That is exactly right...although unfortunately mostly unknown now...less than 60 years after the Supreme Court first created the fiction that the Establishment Clause applies to the states.
Of course, the idea that the First Amendment prohibits states from compelling the Pledge of Allegiance, hanging banners that say "God Bless America" or even from establishing their own official state religions is probably the most easily proved lie of the many the Supreme Court has issued through the years.
The First Amendment, as made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth...commands that a state 'shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
--Justice Hugo Black, Everson v. Bd of Education of Ewing Twp., 330 U.S. 1 (1947)
This declaration by the Supreme Court was the first time it informed everyone that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was applicable to the states. Before that time, state-religion issues were not the province of the US Constitution or the federal courts. But was the Supreme Court right? Did the 14th Amendment make the Establishment Clause applicable to the states?
Go back to 1875 (7 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified)...President Grant asks Congressman James Blaine to introduce a proposed amendment, Section 2 of which reads, in its entirety:
No state shall make any law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The Blaine Amendment (which would have been the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution passes the House but fails in the Senate. Senator Frelinghuysen of NJ, in introducing the amendment in the Senate states:
The [Blaine Amendment] very properly extends the prohibition of the first amendment of the Constitution to the States. Thus the [Blaine Amendment] prohibits the States, for the first time, from the establishment of religion, from prohibiting its free exercise, and from making any religious test a qualification to office.
Senator Eaton of Connecticut, in objecting to the Blaine Amendment states, on the Senate floor:
I am opposed to any State prohibiting the free exercise of any religion; and I do not require the Senate or the Congress of the United States to assist me in taking care of the State of Connecticut in that regard.
Senator Whyte agreed:
The first amendment to the Constitution prevents the establishment of religion by congressional enactment; it prohibits the interference of Congress with the free exercise thereof, and leaves the whole power for the propagation of it with the States exclusively; and so far as I am concerned I propose to leave it there also.
The Congressional record during the debates over the Blaine Amendment shows that not one member of Congress...the majority of whom were in either the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment or one of the state legislatures that ratified it...not a single one...mentioned that the Blaine Amendment was unnecessary...it seems that none of the Congressmen who ratified the 14th Amendment knew that they thereby incorporated the Establishment Clause against the states.
So...if the text of the First Amendment says..."Congress shall make no law...."
And if the majority of states maintained taxpayer-supported churches long after ratification of the Constitution...
And if those that ratified the same Amendment that the Court now tells us "incorporated" the First Amendment against the states...apparently had no intention of or knowledge that they had done so...
Exactly what authority do federal courts have to, on their own initiative, create a new meaning and application of the First Amendment...demonstrably contrary to the meaning and application as intended and understood by those who ratified the Constitution and its amendments?...
None...these wall of separation rulings are completely illegitimate
Very interesting stuff -- had never heard about that amendment. Goes to show that the understanding we are talking about persisted into the post-Civil War period.
The 14th amendment has been the source of an incredible amount of judicial abuse.
The States were not perfectly free, at the time of the founding, to have established religions. The people in ten of the States would have found any fool what suggested a legal establishment of religion and tossed his miserable butt into the American Religious Liberty Hall of Shame alongside that Patrick Henry.
The people of seven States had already stripped their governments, both “on paper” and in real life, of authority to establish religion. Georgia, Maryland and North Carolina had some meaningless “only on paper” religious authority. The authority did not derive from the consent of the people (it came from the old colonial charters) and was therefore never exercised by any of the three States.
In summary, in 1789, ten of the thirteen States had placed the demonic notion of government religion on a fast track back to little horn. Ten States claimed no religious authority they were interested in preserving and would not have been motivated, in the area of religion, by the desire to preserve a State's Right.