The First Amendment is part of what is known as the Bill of Rights, the set of ten amendments which were added to the Constitution as a means to assuage the fears of the Anti-Federalists that the proposed new government did not adequately protect individual liberty and state sovereignty. The Religion Clauses sustained a number of draft revisions before the final version was ratified: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
No shortage of controversy has ensued over the precise meaning of these dual clauses, whether the disagreement is over the original meaning of the text, the Founding Fathers’ own divergent views of the relationship between church and state, or modern SCOTUS interpretation. For the present purposes, we will (1) briefly consider some of the major ideological currents which converged at the Constitutional Convention and together informed and shaped the religion clauses; (2) trace the Court’s evolving application of the disestablishment clause, particularly from 1947 to present; (3) trace the development and perhaps retrograded application of the free exercise clause from 1879 to the present; (4) examine the 2004 Locke v Davey case as a looking glass into the current interpretive model whereby the Court has essentially embraced a standard of neutrality and federalism.
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