Freedom of Religion
Although some New England States continued to use tax money to fund local Congregational churches into the 1830s, the United States was the first nation to have no official state-endorsed religion.
Modeling the provisions concerning religion within the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the framers of the Constitution rejected any religious test for office, and the First Amendment specifically denied the federal government any power to enact any law respecting either an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise, thus protecting any religious organization, institution, or denomination from government interference. The decision was mainly influenced by European Rationalist and Protestant ideals, but was also a consequence of the pragmatic concerns of minority religious groups and small states that did not want to be under the power or influence of a national religion that did not represent them.
Read more about this topic: Religion In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words freedom of, freedom and/or religion:
“The real stumbling-block of totalitarian régimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.”
—Christopher Hill (b. 1912)
“Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)