Understanding the First Amendment

‘The First Amendment has erected a wall between Church and State. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” With those lines of fiction, written over three decades ago, Justice Hugo Black ended the first United States Supreme Court opinion which dealt comprehensively with the meaning of the constitutional concept of separation of Church and State. Certainly the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed in the principle of Church-State separation and quickly added it to the organic law of the infant United States of America in 1791. However, those who authored and ratified that constitutional principle were not thereby mandating a complete legal secularization of the American Republic; far from it. In matters of faith, the Founding Fathers, and the American public they represented, are best described by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s characterization of 1952: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

If the foregoing be true, what were the goals of Madison, Jefferson, and the other advocates of a federal constitutional separation of Church and State? Further, what evidence do we have as to their constitutional intentions? The United States Supreme Court, and recognized scholars who have written in the field of Church-State separation, traditionally have looked to American history to answer these inquiries; consequently, so shall I. Our conclusions, however, are vastly dissimilar.

RC

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Robert L. Cord

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‘The First Amendment has erected a wall between Church and State. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” With those lines of fiction, written over three decades ago, Justice Hugo Black ended the first United States Supreme Court opinion which dealt comprehensively with the meaning of the constitutional concept of separation of Church and State. Certainly the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed in the principle of Church-State separation and quickly added it to the organic law of the infant United States of America in 1791. However, those who authored and ratified that constitutional principle were not thereby mandating a complete legal secularization of the American Republic; far from it. In matters of faith, the Founding Fathers, and the American public they represented, are best described by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s characterization of 1952: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

If the foregoing be true, what were the goals of Madison, Jefferson, and the other advocates of a federal constitutional separation of Church and State? Further, what evidence do we have as to their constitutional intentions? The United States Supreme Court, and recognized scholars who have written in the field of Church-State separation, traditionally have looked to American history to answer these inquiries; consequently, so shall I. Our conclusions, however, are vastly dissimilar.