First Amendment

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Aug 31, 2016 at 09:48

Some of this goes all the way back to Church of the Holy Trinity v. US in the 1890's, in which a church in NY sued to allow the call of an English minister. This was refused on the grounds of a recent law which prohibited the import of foreign labor. In the Court's decision finding for the Church of the Holy Trinity, Chief Justice Brewer argued that the law intended to ban cheaper labor rather than the import of professionals, noted that the USA was a "Christian country" in the sense that its laws presupposed the Christian religion, and that nothing should be construed to prevent a church from calling a foreign-born minister (or a synagogue from importing a foreign-born rabbi). This has been extended in recent times to allow the immigration of numbers of Theravada Buddhist monks from SE Asia and, apparently, of imams from Muslim-majority countries.

I am not so sure that the First Amendment was adopted to ensure a kind of French "laicite" or secularism as much as it was adopted to keep the national government out of religious affairs and protect freedom of conscience for the citizen. This is an important consideration in an age in which we see both the importation of Sharia into American law on the one hand and a growing demand that all celebrate sexual preferences abhorrent to them on the other.

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