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The letters, in general, personalize the First Amendment and interpret it in support of each writer’s own religious or anti-religious beliefs, and this in turn creates ongoing controversy.
To understand the meaning of the First Amendment, it is necessary to attempt to see what the framers intended and why.
First, the framers were highly intelligent and for the most part well educated. From a religious standpoint they were not all Christians. In fact, some of the more influential framers were deists and not theists. However, they all knew and understood England’s and Europe’s tragic history resulting from the mixing of political power with one or the other organized religions.
Following the adoption of the Constitution, some of its framers, among them James Madison, realized that the Constitution failed to protect its citizens’ “natural,” individual freedoms from government interference.
Thus, in 1791 Madison and others introduced the Bill of Rights, which is based on political philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment dating back as early as 1215, the date of the Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights is based on Madison’s concept that man has certain inalienable natural rights with which a government may not interfere nor abrogate.
Interestingly, the first and most basic of these rights appears in the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...”
Historically, Americans interpreted the amendment as granting us freedom of religion. Recent interpreters read the clause to mean freedom from religion. The framers, however, intending to protect a natural inalienable freedom, meant just what the clause says. Congress can’t establish a religion nor can it prohibit an individual’s freedom to exercise his religion. Instead of calling this a freedom of religion clause, it would be more accurate to call it a mutual protection clause. It both protects the government from interference by a religious organization and protects an individual’s absolute right to practice his own faith. The clause requires absolute tolerance of one for the other by government and citizen without interference of one from the other.
Does this mean that the government itself should not recognize a higher power or the existence of a God? Not at all! From the earliest beginnings of our government, Congress opened with a prayer. Our currency even uses the phrase “In God We Trust.” Our Pledge of Allegiance states that we are one nation “under God.” The First Amendment is not, nor was it ever, intended to make our government anti-religion or anti-faith in God.
Political libertarians and atheists would like to put their own twist on the First Amendment and inject their own anti-religion bias to its meaning. But the amendment simply means what it says. It recognizes freedom of belief without establishing a religion.
So! What about the Holmen Cross? In my opinion, by placing the cross on public ground, Holmen did not make a law respecting an establishment of religion and it certainly did not prohibit anyone’s free exercise of their own religious beliefs.
It is time for those with anti-religious beliefs to exercise tolerance of the free exercise of religion just as religious people must give them the freedom to believe that there is no God.
John McDonald is a lawyer.
