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Alabama Senate GOP frontrunner: Constitution was written to "foster Christianity"
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/26/16365774/judge-roy-moore-us-constitutionJudge Roy Moore, the leading candidate in an Alabama Senate Republican primary held on Tuesday, pulled a laminated copy of Joseph Story’s 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution out of his dusty maroon briefcase.
...“The answer is right here,” Moore told me in an interview in August, quoting Story’s explanation for the role of religion in American public life, as much from memory as the words in front of him. “‘It was the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America that Christianity ought to be favored by the State,’” Moore said.
...
“There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country,” Moore told me at a meeting of BamaCarry Inc., Alabama’s “only no compromise gun group,” at Mr. Fang’s Chinese restaurant here in Alabama this August. “Oklahoma tried passing a law restricting Sharia law, and it failed. Do you know about that?”
As PolitiFact pointed out, the claim that American communities live under Shariah law is a “pants-on-fire” falsehood. But given that the latest polls have Moore leading by as many as 8 to 10 points, it’s worth understanding what belief set he’d bring to the Senate.
...“The answer is right here,” Moore told me in an interview in August, quoting Story’s explanation for the role of religion in American public life, as much from memory as the words in front of him. “‘It was the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America that Christianity ought to be favored by the State,’” Moore said.
...
“There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country,” Moore told me at a meeting of BamaCarry Inc., Alabama’s “only no compromise gun group,” at Mr. Fang’s Chinese restaurant here in Alabama this August. “Oklahoma tried passing a law restricting Sharia law, and it failed. Do you know about that?”
As PolitiFact pointed out, the claim that American communities live under Shariah law is a “pants-on-fire” falsehood. But given that the latest polls have Moore leading by as many as 8 to 10 points, it’s worth understanding what belief set he’d bring to the Senate.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn't mention the rest of what Story wrote (though he was indeed quite pro-Christian):
§ 990. But the duty of supporting religion, and especially the Christian religion, is very different from the right to force the consciences of other men, or to punish them for worshipping God in the manner, which, they believe, their accountability to him requires. It has been truly said, that "religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be dictated only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." Mr. Locke himself, who did not doubt the right of government to interfere in matters of religion, and especially to encourage Christianity, has at the same time expressed his opinion of the right of private judgment, and liberty of conscience, in a manner becoming his character, as a sincere friend of civil and religious liberty. "No man, or society of men," says he, "have any authority to impose their opinions or interpretations on any other, the meanest Christian; since, in matters of religion, every man must know, and believe, and give an account for himself." The rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the just reach of any human power. They are given by God, and cannot be encroached upon by human authority, without a criminal disobedience of the precepts of natural, as well as of revealed religion.
§ 991. The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but 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. It thus sought to cut off the means of religious persecution, (the vice and pest of former ages,) and the power of subverting the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age. The history of the parent country had afforded the most solemn warnings and melancholy instructions on this head; and even New-England, the land of the persecuted puritans, as well as other colonies, where the Church of England had maintained its superiority, had furnished a chapter, as full of dark bigotry and intolerance, as any, which could be found to disgrace the pages of foreign annals. Apostacy, heresy, and nonconformity have been standard crimes for public appeals, to kindle the flames of persecution, and apologize for the most atrocious triumphs over innocence and virtue.
§ 992. It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects, thus exemplified in our domestic, as well as in foreign annals, that it was deemed advisable to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject. The situation, too, of the different states equally proclaimed the policy, as well as the necessity, of such an exclusion. In some of the states, episcopalians constituted the predominant sect; in others, presbyterians; in others, congregationalists; in others, quakers; and in others again, there was a close numerical rivalry among contending sects. It was impossible, that there should not arise perpetual strife and perpetual jealousy on the subject of ecclesiastical ascendancy, if the national government were left free to create a religious establishment. The only security was in extirpating the power. But this alone would have been an imperfect security, if it had not been followed up by a declaration of the right of the free exercise of religion, and a prohibition (as we have seen) of all religious tests. Thus, the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments, to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice, and the state constitutions; and the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.
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