Re:What Happens After Prisoners Learn to Code?
by rayiner on Saturday December 14, 2019 @08:14PM
(#21793713)
The opposite is true. It is ahistorical to look at the Constitution as protecting only an individualistic form of religious liberty, merely individual freedom of conscience. At the time of the founding, America was comprised of communities practicing different religions (mainly different forms of Christianity). But within each community, there was a strong, very public religious framework. Indeed, several states had established churches into the 1800s. The First Amendment was designed to protect that status quo. Not to eliminate public religion, but to keep the federal government from erasing those diverse communities by establishing a national church.
The “freedom from religion” reading of the first amendment is, besides being atextual, utterly non-sensical. It reads the Framers to have banned, sub silentio, practices with respect to public religion that were utterly routine at the time the amendment was adopted.
The founders who wrote the First Amendment clearly disagreed with that.