>>>>Please tell us what rules or principles of Constitutional interpretation were applied to the text of the First Amendment's religious clauses, to arrive at the conclusion that, "The purpose of the religious clauses of the 1st Amendment was...to ensure that the federal government did not support one Christian denomination over another?"<<<
In addition to wording of the 1st Amendment itself that ensured (or tried to ensure) the free exercise of religion in a dominant Christian nation, and from the historical fact that there was not the slightest bit of suspicion that Washington, Jefferson, and other early leaders who invoked Christianity in ceremonies, holidays, and religious practices within the seat of the federal government were doing anything contrary to the constitution; the words of the founders and early justices support that claim.
For example, Oliver Ellsworth, a Connecticut delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, in explaining to the people the clause that prohibits a religious test for public office, stated, "A test in favor of any one denomination of Christians would be to the last degree absurd in the United States. If it were in favor of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, or Quakers, it would incapacitate more than three-fourths of the American citizens for any public office and thus degrade them from the rank of freemen."
Of course, anyone doing objective research on the subject will quickly find that one of the first moves of the new Congress was to establish a Christian chaplain to perform Christian prayer for the new Congress.
And then, there is the following by Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution of 1833:
"The real object of the [first] amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. . . .
The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;— these never can be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community. . . .
Now, there will probably be found few persons in this, or any other Christian country, who would deliberately contend, that it was unreasonable, or unjust to foster and encourage the Christian religion generally, as a matter of sound policy, as well as of revealed truth. In fact, every American colony, from its foundation down to the revolution, . . . did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, support and sustain, in some form, the Christian religion; and almost invariably gave a peculiar sanction to some of its fundamental doctrines. And this has continued to be the case in some of the states down to the present period, without the slightest suspicion, that it was against the principles of public law, or republican liberty."
Story added, "... the whole power over the subject matter of religion is left exclusively to the State governments to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice and the State constitutions."
There is also this one by Story: "Probably at the time of the adoption of the constitution, and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation. . . "
Now to Thomas Jefferson...
"I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority." (from a letter to Rev Samuel Miller, 1808)
Two days after Jefferson sent the letter to Danbury (with the Separation of Church and State clause) he attended public worship services in the U. S. Capital building. During his presidency he also authorized the use of the War Office and Treasury building for church services; he provided, at the government's expense, Christian missionaries to the Indians; he put chaplains on the government payroll; he provided for the punishment of irreverent soldiers; and he sent Congress an Indian treaty that provided funding for a priest's salary and for the construction of a church.
Regarding state and local support of Christianity, in 1822 Jefferson wrote: "In our village of Charlottesville, there is a good degree of religion, with a small spice only of fanaticism. We have four sects, but without either church or meeting-house. The court-house is the common temple, one Sunday in the month to each. Here, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist, meet together, join in hymning their Maker, listen with attention and devotion to each others' preachers, and all mix in society with perfect harmony."
Also in 1822: ""In our annual report to the legislature, after stating the constitutional reasons against a public establishment of any religious instruction, we suggest the expediency of encouraging the different religious sects to establish, each for itself, a professorship of their own tenets, on the confines of the university, so near as that their students may attend the lectures there, and have the free use of our library, and every other accommodation we can give them; preserving, however, their independence of us and of each other."
And back to 1800: "The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest & best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, & united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, & a very unexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."
And, finally, this one: "But I am in hopes their good sense will dictate to them, that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find their interest in acquiescing in the liberty and science of their country, and that the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind."
That doesn't sound like a man hell-bent on "separation of church and state" in the manner left-wing extremists like the ACLU have been espousing.
And finally there is this quote from the 1st Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Jay:
"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers. And it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers." (Jay in a letter to Jedidiah Morse February 28, 1797)
And this one from the 2nd Chief Justice, John Marshall:
"The American population is entirely Christian, and with us Christianity and Religion are identified. It would be strange indeed, if with such a people, our institutions did not presuppose Christianity, and did not often refer to it, and exhibit relations with it." (Marshall in a letter to Jasper Adams, May 9, 1833)
"The American population is entirely Christian, and with us Christianity and Religion are identified. It would be strange indeed, if with such a people, our institutions did not presuppose Christianity, and did not often refer to it, and exhibit relations with it." (Marshall in a letter to Jasper Adams, May 9, 1833)But why did Virginia legislators give up the opportunity to write Jesus' name into law decades earlier?
The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." -- Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography 1821Actually, you included a reference that probably explains why Jesus' name wasn't written into law. The reference reinforces my suspicion that early American Christians were actually on their guard against each other with respect to any one Christian denomination gaining control of the law.
"The real object of the [first] amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. . . ." --Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution of 1833