Crooked Justices legislating a special-interest, anti-religous expression agenda from the bench twisted the honest interpretation of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment in the Cantwell opinion as much as they twisted the honest interpretation of the establishment clause in the Everson opinion.
The smoking gun with respect to the Court's dirty work in the Cantwell and Everson opinions is to note that neither of these opinions reference the 10th Amendment power of the states to legislate religion in any way. Justices who evidently didn't take their oaths to defend the Constitution seriously seemingly regarded the religious powers aspect of the 10th Amendment as too much of a loose canon to bring attention to in these opinions with respect to pushing their unconstitutional agenda of absolute c&s separation.
Cantwell v. State of Connecticut 1940
http://tinyurl.com/bvoc3
Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing TP 1947
http://tinyurl.com/8q3d8
Once it was forgotten that the intent of the 14th Amendment was pretty narrow: namely the protection of the rights of Africian-Americans, the courts began to invest the language with all sorts of other meanins. For instance, the restriction of the power of the states to regulate corporations by regarding them as "persons." Then with the Great War came the process of "nationalizing" the Bill of Rights and applying them to the States, even though most States, if not all, already had such bills. Logically, the hold of the states over relgious bodies ought to have been loosened, except that the intent of the courts became the restriction of religious freedom, since that freedom was regarded as dangerous as political dissent. I find it ironical that many American liberals regard Christianity, at least in its traditional form, as seditious as the Chinese government does. If they could they would establish a federal agency to govern the several churches and, in a sense, the IRS serves that function.