{"id":236,"date":"2011-03-31T12:05:05","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T16:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=236"},"modified":"2011-04-01T06:38:08","modified_gmt":"2011-04-01T10:38:08","slug":"fischer-v-the-right-to-build-mosques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/fischer-v-the-right-to-build-mosques.html","title":{"rendered":"Fischer v. the right to build mosques"},"content":{"rendered":"

Relying on Associate (not Chief) Justice Joseph Story<\/a>‘s recasting of the First Amendment’s approach to religious establishment and free exercise, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is continuing<\/a> to press his case<\/a> that the Framers merely intended the clauses to keep Christian sects from fighting amongst each other, and that therefore Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques.<\/p>\n

Brilliant jurist he may have been, but Story was too much a prisoner of the Pan-Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening to acknowledge the Enlightenment convictions that lie behind the religion clauses. Warren Throckmorton cites<\/a> chapter and verse from the constitutional debates to show how mistaken the Story-Fischer view is. I’d just add these paragraphs from George Washington’s famous letter<\/a> to the Jews of Newport, written in August of 1790, less than a year after Congress submitted the Bill of Rights to the states.<\/p>\n

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy–a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Washington’s point is that the new country established rights of conscience on a precisely equal basis–that this was not a Christian place that was kind enough to let Jews worship as they wished. To be sure, it took a while for this regime to establish itself in the several states. But there can be no doubt that, so far as the Father of His Country was concerned, the Constitution put all worshipers on the same footing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relying on Associate (not Chief) Justice Joseph Story‘s recasting of the First Amendment’s approach to religious establishment and free exercise, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is continuing to press his case that the Framers merely intended the clauses to keep Christian sects from fighting amongst each other, and that therefore Muslims have no First…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nFischer v. the right to build mosques - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/fischer-v-the-right-to-build-mosques.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fischer v. the right to build mosques - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}