Examining religion and the Constitution  "Spirit of the Law"
book jacket  The opening words of the First Amendment —“Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”—have long protected the
public from federal religious infringement, but it wasn’t until
the 1940s that the protection was applied to the states.  Sarah
Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional
Law in Penn’s Law School and a history professor in the School
of Arts and Sciences, says that while the religious clauses
ratified with the Bill of Rights in 1791 were always popular
with the American people, prior to the 1930s, the clauses didn’t
affect everyday life.  It was in the ’30s, she says, that legal
questions regarding the practices of religions such as Jehovah’s
Witnesses and public tolerance for dissenting political and
religious views began to emerge. The Supreme Court took up the
issues in the 1940s, which started a rush to court among
religious believers a