From the original post: "Our nation's history is replete with governmental acknowledgment and in some cases, accommodation of religion."
From Cicero: "And at the time it was written, established meant exactly that--that there should be no official, established national church like the Church of England."
It went far beyond accomodation of religion. The emphasis should be on the word *national,* found in your post. A number of states had established state religions at the time of ratification, and continued to keep those official state religions for many decades after the ratification of the Constitution. This alone makes it clear that the only thing that the states intended when they ratified the Constitution was that there be no *national* religion.
It was understood that the states were perfectly free to have established religions, but that the federal government could not override the individual established religion of a given state, or require one of a state that chose to have no state religion.
The idea of a religionless society or a "wall of separation" was of course the individual idea of a very few back then, and was not what was ratified.
Exactly. I was questioned several times about that post, and in the end wrote pretty much what you did. The Constitution is entirely neutral about what the states decide to do about religion. Several of them, notably Massachusetts, had what amounted to rule by church elders. Massacusetts had more blue laws than any other state, and they were still around until the late 1950s, when they began repealing them.
If you didn't like it, you could move to Connecticut or Rhode Island like Anne Hutchinson.
And the thought that you couldn't teach religion, the Bible, and morality in the schools would have been inconceivable until some time around the middle of the twentieth century. One of the major purposes of education was to teach kids the moral rules. Now all you are allowed to tell them is, "Be nice. Don't be judgmental. Tolerate everything."
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