Elon Law School professor discusses how religion factors into NC's constitution - WGHP FOX8 Greensboro
(WGHP) — Sometimes our law is a funny thing.
If you look at North Carolina’s constitution–all the way down to Article VI, section 8–you’ll see a passage about what disqualifies anyone from holding public office. And, right there, the first thing mentioned is that if you don’t affirm that there is a God, you can’t hold office. Essentially, atheists or agnostics need not apply when it comes to official state duties.
“It obviously made sense to the people who passed it,” said Elon Law School Professor Steve Friedland.
And not just people in North Carolina: 8 states have something like this on the books. But, Friedland says, times change.
“Really, the constitution is just an outline, and the Supreme Court has been the major interpreter of what it means over the past two centuries,” Friedland said. “So when the founders came here, of course, they wanted freedom of religion. And over time, that meant different things in different states.”
Take Maryland, for example. King Charles I of England granted that land to George Calvert, who held the English title Baron of Baltimore in the north of England.
The colony he founded was to be a haven for England’s Roman Catholic – something English nobility often suspected Charles favored as he did convert to Catholicism on his deathbed.
But it was the place of religion in Maryland’s constitution that lead to a court fight.
“It went to the US Supreme Court,” Friedland said. “In Maryland, the courts there upheld this (must affirm a belief in God) clause. And in 1961, the US Supreme Court took it up in a case called Torcaso v. Watkins and said, ‘This violates the establishment clause (of the First Amendment). We have precedent already that says this is no good, and we basically want the rest of the country to know that we will not be upholding such clauses.’”
It’s not, Friedland says, a way to get rid of religion. It’s just that, “The state cannot favor a religion, and it cannot favor religion over non-religion, and that’s what this clause does.”
Friedland says if you look all around you, though, you’ll see religion in public life.
“If you look at the dollar bill, it says, ‘In God We Trust.’ So it’s not that the religious references have been secluded from the public and from government…it’s just that the Supreme Court says there must be a line drawn between accommodating and promoting religion,” he said.
See more on this phenomenon in this edition of the Buckley Report.
source: https://myfox8.com/buckley-report/elon-law-school-professor-discusses-how-religion-factors-into-ncs-constitution/
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