Freedom of religion in the United States doesn’t mean you may believe in anything or nothing. It only means that you’re free to choose between Christian denominations.

Bryan Fischer tells us so.

[T]he purpose of the First Amendment, as Justice Joseph Story declares in his monumental history of the Constitution, was only to protect the free exercise of the Christian faith and to prevent the selection and designation of one Christian denomination as the official church of the United States.

In other words, you can be any religion you want, as long as it’s Christianity. More importantly, the government may promote one faith over all others (three guesses which one they supposedly picked).

I looked up that Joseph Story quote, by the way, and found that it ends like this:

[T]he 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.

Huh. That somehow doesn’t sound like the ravings of a rectitudinous Christianist. That sounds like the opinion of a halfway tolerant man and inclusive thinker. You’d never know it from Fischer’s words.

Fischer continues:

But because low-information educators have so mangled our history, and activist judges have so mangled our Constitution, most Americans, even educated ones, do not understand this basic fact about the First Amendment: that by the word “religion” in the First Amendment, the Founders meant only the various expressions of Christianity.

Translation: Fuck you, Jews! You too, Muslims! And you most of all, atheists!

No federal Supreme Court in the last 200-odd years has interpreted the First Amendment the way Fischer does (I guess they were all filled with “activist judges”). His take is just a slightly more verbose way of stating the same inanity this commenter at Charisma News did the other week, when I remarked that the vast body of Supreme Court justices’ opinions don’t agree with her view of America as a country where Christians have the legal upper hand:

Their opinions don’t make it the law.

Other than facepalming yourself until you’re black and blue, how can you even respond?

(Image via Shutterstock)



