North Carolina’s “Official Religion”: The Convoluted History of American States and Established Religions

Last updated on: April 10, 2013 at 5:45 pm by Andre E. Johnson

North Carolina’s “Official Religion”: The Convoluted History of American States and Established Religions 2013-04-10T17:45:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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Last week, in a move that seems more reminiscent of 1783 than 2013, North Carolina legislators proposed a bill declaring their right to establish an official state religion. In doing so, the two GOP lawmakers from Rowan County, who were supported by 14 other Republican members of the House, directly challenged federal and constitutional authority. “The North Carolina General Assembly asserts,” the bill states, “that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

While legislators don’t expect the bill to actually pass or even come to a vote—one of the bill’s authors admitted that this was “more of a demonstration” than anything else—the quixotic move taps into a deeper strain of ideological angst. Even more, it is just another example in a long line of moments in which America’s political tradition is shaped through religious belief, regional identity, and the always contested, if often heralded, notion of separation between church and state.

It is true that the First Amendment only states that an official religion cannot be established from the federal level: it declares that the nation’s “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” which left the door open for individual states to do as they please. But the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, along with the legal and legislative interpretations of that amendment in the following century, has made it unconstitutional to establish any religion at the state level. Thus, the North Carolina bill’s argument is a cafeteria-style reading of the government’s laws and applications. There is historical precedent, however, for such a move at the state level, highlighting America’s tenuous balance of religious freedom and the consistent temptation for an official religious identity.

The American nation was born at a moment of constitutional awakening, an era in which people rejected the notion of divine right in favor of human-made governments. As a result, the framers of federal, state, and local governments believed that constitutions worked best when they embodied the norms of their constituents. Citizens wanted their laws to correspond with their own morals, values, and, more often than is typically acknowledged, religious beliefs.

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