Six of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution ran established churches. It is a historical fact that the First Amendment was written not to suppress those state churches but to protect them. Those six states would have never signed the Constitution otherwise. They insisted on the language, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” to make clear that the federal government had no right to establish its own religion and disestablish theirs. The wall of separation in the Constitution is not between government and religion but between the federal government and the states’ religious activities.
The notion that the First Amendment requires individual states to treat all religious believers equally was invented out of thin air by judicial activists. For decades after the Constitution was written, several states baldly preferred one religion over another. As author M. Stanton Evans has written, “there remained a network of religious requirements for public office — typically, that one be a professing Christian of orthodox persuasion. Such requirements existed in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas. For example, the state of Vermont, one of the more liberal states of the era (admitted to the Union in 1791) required the following oath of office: "I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration and own and profess the Protestant religion.”
