Well, I’m all for clarity, so let me be clear here about the problem I see in these recitations of the “no religious test” clause: By its terms, it doesn’t apply to the decisions of voters at all. Like every other passive-voiced prohibition in the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights (e.g., “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed,” or “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”), the “no religious test” clause is a constraint on the legal authority of the national government. It means that Congress may not enact any statute that disables someone from holding office on religious grounds. The letter of the clause has simply nothing to say to voters, who remain free to make their own judgments on whatever grounds they please, religious or otherwise.
The ban on religious tests certainly bars the national government from proscribing religious tests on those running for office, and the spirit of the ban would certainly indicate that in the public square, we should see each other as equal citizens. But it does not follow that all religious speech and deliberation be banned as well.
It is odd that certain conservatives who answered Rev. Jeffress' words with pointing to the ban of religious tests have inadvertently agreed with the rulings of the Supreme Court in matters dealing with the Religion Clause of the Constitution. Those rulings have gradually been working towards scraping the public square clean of religious symbols and any acknowledgment of religion whatsoever (except the new religion that has taken the place of traditional religions: diversity). As James Madison argued in Federalist 10, there are two ways to combat faction: take away liberty or control the effects of faction itself. The argument of the certain conservatives described above takes away the liberty at the sake of trying to solve the problem. As Madison said, "It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy that it is worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires."
Franck ends by noting that far from banning any speech touching on religion, we should embrace and have open inquiry and discussion about these very important matters:
But precisely in connection with these common threads in the social fabric of conservative religious folks, we would be better off talking about the right use, and the misuse, of our religious freedom, rather than taking misleading shortcuts through the “no religious test” clause. All of us in the coalition really do want to apply one kind of “religious test” or another, after all. Even Abe Lincoln had his own version of such a test. When he was running for Congress in 1846, his opponent, a local Illinois pastor, put it about that Lincoln was a Deist and no good Christian should vote for him. Lincoln replied in a handbill he published in the district: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.”Lincoln shows us that there still exists a standard by which we should test or judge all things, and that this standard is really nothing more than the use of our reason with which we all endowed. Denying reason and the standards by which to judge things right or wrong, good or bad, does much damage to both religious and civil liberty.
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