There are times when the religious right tips its hand and reveals that it really wants to turn this country into a Christianized version of Iran or Taliban-era Afghanistan. One of those times came yesterday, when one of the most prominent religious right talk show hosts opined that the First Amendment was only meant to protect the rights of Christians–and all other religions be hanged.
Bryan Fischer is the director of issues analysis at the American Family Association and the host of “Focal Point” on American Family Radio. On Friday’s show, he spoke at length about a Satanist group in Detroit making noises about using the Hobby Lobby decision to challenge a Michigan law requiring every woman going in for an abortion to view state-approved literature about the procedure. The group contends the information is biased to the point of infringing on their religious beliefs, and has offered a form that allows a woman to opt out of receiving the literature, and will sue on behalf of any woman who still gets the literature.
To Fischer’s mind, the Satanists are wasting their time. He argues that under the Constitution, “all religions are not on an equal playing field,” and Christianity is the only religion protected by the First Amendment. He claims that when the Founding Fathers spoke of “religion,” they were referring to the various strains of Christianity. As evidence, he cites Joseph Story, who served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845–longer than any associate justice in the Court’s history. In his work, “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States”–one of the first extensive treatises on the Constitution and constitutional law–Story claimed that the First Amendment was not intended to “countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism (Islam), or Judaism … by prostrating Christianity.” Rather, it was intended to “exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”
Fischer further argued that the Founders intended for the rights of non-Christian religions to be a state matter, and that the First Amendment only bars the federal government from establishing a particular Christian denomination as the established church. While he applauded that the nine original states that had established churches had repealed those laws by the 1830s, he claimed that nothing prevents the states from establishing a church.
Fischer doubled down on this argument in a post on the AFA’s official blog, The Stand. He claimed that the idea that the First Amendment protects all religions is the product of “years of untethered Supreme Court activism,” and that giving non-Christians the same protections risks throwing this country into “spiritual and religious chaos.”
This argument is a pretty common one among religious right bigshots, as it’s the cornerstone of their claim that this country is a Christian nation. However, the facts don’t even come close to backing this up. In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson wrote that when the Virginia General Assembly was debating his landmark statute on religious freedom, one delegate wanted to add a phrase that would have effectively limited its protections to Christians. According to Jefferson, that proposal was “rejected by a great majority,” since they intended to protect all religions, Christian and non-Christian alike. That law made Virginia the second of the original 13 states–after Rhode Island–to grant complete religious freedom.? The other 11 states either had an established church or at the very least required you to be a believer of some sort in order to hold office. Likewise, when a new meeting house was built in Philadelphia in 1739, Benjamin Franklin noted that it wasn’t just intended for Christians, but non-Christians as well.
Moreover, it’s long since been settled law that the First Amendment is binding on the states by way of the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It was on that basis that numerous provisions in state constitutions which barred those who didn’t profess religious belief have been struck down. While some of those provisions are still technically on the books, they cannot be enforced. My state of North Carolina, for instance, has a provision in its constitution that bars people “who deny the being of Almighty God” from holding office. Although it was carried over verbatim from the 1868 constitution to the current one adopted in 1971, it is taken for granted that it would be thrown out if anyone ever tried to enforce it. But then again, it’s more or less an article of faith on the religious right that this is just another example of “untethered Supreme Court activism.” It should also be noted that Story wasn’t really a Founding Father. He was born in 1779, and was all of eight years old when the Constitution was drafted. Indeed, to this day he is the youngest person ever appointed to the Supreme Court.
This is actually the second time in less than a year that Fischer has spewed this. Back in December, he wrung his hands at plans by a Satanist group in Oklahoma to erect a Satanist monument at the Oklahoma State Capitol, alongside a planned Ten Commandments monument. PunditFact, a sister project of PolitiFact, reviewed Fischer’s claim in light of the historical evidence and rated it “Pants on Fire.” That rating is equally legitimate for this latest screed from Fischer. And it only proves that while he and others wring their hands at Christians supposedly being persecuted, they’d like nothing better than to see non-Christians get persecuted.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
