Why the 1st Amendment Protects Religion but Not Satanism
Social media erupted over the weekend when an image of a satanic display at the Iowa Capitol began circulating.
Republican state Rep. Jon Dunwell of Iowa, for instance, received considerable attention and substantial criticism for his explanation of why Iowans must allow the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s evil display to stand.
“My observation as an Iowan and a State Representative, I don’t want the state evaluating and making determinations about religions,” Dunwell wrote Friday as part of a lengthy explanation on the social media platform X. “I am guided by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.”
Dunwell, an ordained pastor, also expressed disgust at the “objectionable” display and described himself as a “follower of Christ.”
As of Monday, his post had more than 4 million views — a gargantuan number for a state representative.
Still, the “First Amendment of the US Constitution” must prevail, Dunwell said.
As many of you have become aware, last week a display was erected at the Iowa Capitol by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. As I have responded to concerns from Iowans about the display, I wanted to share with you how the display came to be and my response.
How did it happen?
• The… pic.twitter.com/8ODJXCxu9Y— Rep. Jon Dunwell (@jdunwell) December 8, 2023
If public officials understood that much-celebrated amendment, they would not make such confused arguments.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So reads the relevant portion of the First Amendment.
Nearly all modern confusion surrounding “freedom of religion” stems from a total misunderstanding of the word “establishment.” After all, no one seriously contends that the government should restrict religion’s “free exercise.”
To “establish” religion does not mean to take cognizance of it or even to give preference to one faith. It means to support a particular church through taxation.
At the time of the American Revolution, nearly all states featured one established church. In Virginia and South Carolina, for instance, the Anglican Church enjoyed tax-supported status. The Puritan-descended citizens of Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the other hand, gave public money to the Congregational Church.
Needless to say, tax-supported ministers of faith did not always place matters spiritual before matters temporal. In political affairs, for instance, state-supported preachers — surprise, surprise — generally supported the state.
For American revolutionaries committed to the doctrine of natural rights, therefore, separation from the British empire meant putting an end to both civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. The church must never again serve as handmaiden to the state, or vice versa.
Thus, the principles of the First Amendment are the principles of disestablishment.
For the clearest statements of those principles, we may look to the famous authors of disestablishment in Virginia, the first state to separate civil from ecclesiastical.
On June 18, 1779, as part of an enormous body of proposed revisions to Virginia law, Thomas Jefferson presented “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.”
“Almighty God hath created the mind free,” Jefferson wrote.
Thus, he said, “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do.”
Six years later, with Jefferson serving as U.S. minister to France, his friend and ally James Madison helped shepherd the bill through the Virginia legislature.
As part of that effort, in 1785, Madison anonymously drafted a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.”
Religion, Madison wrote, depended not on the “force or violence” of church-state coercion but on “conviction and conscience.”
Significantly, the spiritual took precedence over the temporal.
“Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe,” Madison wrote.
And the same man who wrote those words also wrote the First Amendment. In 1791, Madison drafted the Bill of Rights.
Thus, the author of the First Amendment made subjection to the “Governour of the Universe” a precondition to membership in “Civil Society.” Would that man have agreed that “Civil Society” must accommodate worshipers of Satan on equal terms with worshipers of God?
But we still have the Constitution and the rest of that tricky First Amendment, which protects not only the free exercise of religion but also freedom of speech in general.
For the solution to that quandary, we may turn to another Founding Father, the second president of the United States.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” John Adams wrote in 1798.
Ironically, therefore, Dunwell and many others who rightly revere the First Amendment also do not fully understand it. They seem to think that “Civil Society” requires us to subordinate our obligation to the “Governour of the Universe,” or to pretend that the Constitution has no connection to the “moral and religious” purposes of the “People” who made it.
Of all the social media responses to Dunwell, that of author Andrew Klavan struck precisely the right chord.
“This is nonsense. The state can’t choose among religions — the ways in which people worship God — but it can certainly choose between religion and satanism, a cult of devil worship,” Klavan said in a post on X.
“To my mind, it can also choose between religion and atheism. It can’t forbid atheism or satanism but it doesn’t have to give them equal display space or deny God’s role in the making of our state and culture,” he added.
This is nonsense. The state can’t choose among religions – the ways in which people worship God – but it can certainly choose between religion and satanism, a cult of devil worship. To my mind, it can also choose between religion and atheism. It can’t forbid atheism or satanism… https://t.co/ydJGLbLniE
— Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) December 11, 2023
Jefferson, Madison and Adams would have agreed.
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