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Full-Text Articles in Religion Law
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …
Historical Foundations And Enduring Fundamentals Of American Religious Freedom, John Witte Jr.
Historical Foundations And Enduring Fundamentals Of American Religious Freedom, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
For all of their failures and shortcomings, the eighteenth-century founders did indeed begin on the right “path” toward a free society, and today, Americans enjoy a good deal of religious, civil, and political freedom as a consequence. American principles of religious freedom have had a profound influence around the globe, and they now figure prominently in a number of national constitutions and international human rights instruments issued by political and religious bodies.
To be sure, as Adams predicted, there has always been a “glorious uncertainty of the law” of religious liberty and a noble diversity of understandings of its details. …
How To Govern A City On A Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution To American Constitutionalism, John Witte Jr.
How To Govern A City On A Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution To American Constitutionalism, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
This Article explores briefly the constitutional ideas and institutions of seventeenth-century Puritan New England. It analyzes the constitutional ideas that the Puritans derived from their theological doctrines of covenant, church and state, and sin, and it examines the forms and functions of political and ecclesiastical government they devised in implementation of these ideas.