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[4] For a detailed analysis of the Founders’ intent in writing the 1st Amendment, see the dissent that Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the 1985 Supreme Court case (Wallace v, Jaffree). Available online at: http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Wallace/Rehnquist.html.

Wallace v. Jaffree, 1984: A bill becomes unconstitutional even though the wording may be constitutionally acceptable, if the legislator who introduced the bill had a religious activity in his mind when he authored it.

[WhiteyAppleseed]

As historian David Barton explains, the Founders were all religious Christians, but they did not oppose pluralism, “as long as the beliefs of other religions did not threaten the stability of civil society.[44] In fact, the Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity,”[45] uniquely different from European Christianity and based on what we now term the Judeo-Christian Ethic.[46]

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in a speech to a Philadelphia conference on religion in public life, in May of 1991: “Protecting religious freedoms may be more important in the late twentieth century than it was when the Bill of Rights was ratified. We live in a pluralistic society, with people of widely divergent religious backgrounds or with none at all. Government cannot endorse beliefs of one group without sending a clear message to non-adherents that they are outsiders.”