Skip to main content

No Religious Test, Ever, for Citizenship


"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

That is Article 1 of the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.  Congress may not establish any religion, nor prohibit people from practicing religion.  We are guaranteed free speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble peaceably, and to howl at the government, if we want to.  

That is what the guarantee of freedom of religion means in the United State.  The government may not establish any religion as an official religion.  Government may not deny us the right to practice our religion.  

We are not a Christian nation.  We are not a Jewish nation, nor a Buddhist nation, or a Greek Orthodox nation.  We are a nation defined by our Constitution, and our Constitution, in the first article of the Bill of Rights, says very clearly that Government may not pass any law establishing a religion.  But if you want to, you can be religious, yourself.  You have that right.  

We are not founded on a religion.  We are founded on a Constitution.  

Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution specifically states that there will be no religious requirement for holding office:  "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

We are pledged to support the Constitution, but no religious test, or membership, is required.  

Enough, enough!  Muslims and Rastafarians are not going to take over this nation!  And neither are fundamentalist Christians or Jews or Catholics or Latter Day Saints.  Not unless we throw out the Constitution.  

The claim that we are a Christian nation can only mean that culturally, most Americans have been shaped by Christian history and ethos.  In the same way, I am a Scandinavian, because I have been shaped by much of my experience as a second and third generation Norwegian.  My father was born in Norway, and so were my maternal grandparents, and I love cod fish.  To that extent, I am a Scandinavian.  But I am, hopelessly, happily, obviously, an American who believes in the right to howl at our own government if I want to.  So I do, from time to time.  

More and more of us hyphenate ourselves:  Scandinavian-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans.  We have a right to wear Norwegian sweaters and to speak Spanish and to believe that God is an old man with a bad track record regarding sexual equality, if we want to.  We don't have to, and we certainly have no right to demand that everyone else believes what we do.  

What we have in common, what takes precedence over anything else we believe, is that we will all uphold the Constitution.  And if our goofy religious beliefs contradict the Constitution, we will uphold the Constitution.  Period!  

Who is going to try to explain that to The Church Lady from Minnesota, or to the Anti-Birth Control Guy from Pennsylvania?  It doesn't matter what the Pope thinks, or what Focus on the Family thinks!  We have a Constitution!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more