Repeated Attempts to Reverse the Framers' Intention Have Failed
In the following decades, various attempts were made to breach the wall of separation and gain some official recognition and status for Christianity. Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore, in their excellent book, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness (W.W. Norton, 1997), describe two such efforts in considerable detail.
Sunday Mail. In 1829, after religious leaders had attempted to force the mail service to stop all activity, including the moving of mail, on Sundays, the Senate issued a formal report stating that Congress is "a civil institution, wholly destitute of religious authority" and that Legislators have no power to "define God or point out to the citizen one religious duty” or "to coerce the religious homage of anything," including the Sabbath. "The line cannot be too strongly drawn between church and state," the report said, and prohbiting Sunday mail is "legislating upon a religious subject and therefore unconstitutional."
A Christian Amendment. As they had since the ratification debates, many Christians continued to lament the dissociation between religion and government, particularly in times of crisis. During perhaps the greatest of all national crises, the Civil War, a group of prominent churchmen calling themselves the National Reform Association began pushing for a Constitutional amendment that would amount to rewriting the preamble “acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, The Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the Nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government....etc.” A delegation of prominent members of the association visited President Lincoln in 1864 and asked him to support it in Congress. Lincoln said he needed to study the matter further, but never got around to it. Congress ignored the proposed amendment in 1864 and again in 1869. Major, but losing, efforts to insert Christ into the Constitution were made in 1894 and 1910; in 1947 and 1954, the National Association of Evangelicals campaigned for such a measure. All such efforts have failed, so far.
As Kramnick and Moore point out, it is a gross distortion of history to contend that the Constitution was designed to produce a Christian nation and that secularists have worked to erode that sacred character. The pressure has come from the other direction.
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Originalism -- the idea that court decisions should be controlled by the beliefs of the Founders -- has completely destroyed objectivity in the study of the Founders' beliefs. As the result of originalism, the Founders have been portrayed as everything from a bunch of bible-pounding holy-rolling fundies to a bunch of godless blasphemous atheists. Probably the worst example of originalism in regard to the establishment clause is Judge John E. Jones III's Dickinson College commencement speech in which he showed extreme prejudice against Intelligent Design and the Dover school board defendants -- regardless of whether or not ID is a religious concept -- by saying that his Kitzmiller v. Dover decision was based upon his cockamamie notion that the Founders based the establishment clause upon a belief that organized religions are not "true" religions -- he said:
". . .it was my liberal arts education, achieved right here at Dickinson College that provided me with the best ability to handle the rather monumental task of deciding the Dover case . . . .
". . . Ironically, but perhaps fittingly for my purposes today, we see the Founders' ideals quite clearly, among many places, in the Establishment Clause within the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This of course was the clause that I determined the school board had violated in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. While legal scholars will continue to debate the appropriate application of that clause to particular facts in individual cases, this much is very clear. The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free, rational inquiry. At bottom then, this core set of beliefs led the Founders, who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state."
Contrary to his above statement, that "true religion" idea did not come from his undergraduate education but was a plagiarized quote mine from a book that was published long after he graduated. Judge Jones claims to be a big stickler for judicial precedent but his above interpretation of the establishment clause has no judicial precedent and is in fact contrary to judicial precedent. Judge Jones was required to be neutral towards organized religions but his above statement shows extreme hostility towards them. Judge Jones now defends his Dover decision on the grounds of "judicial independence" and "the rule of law."
The Founders probably did not want the establishment clause to be misused to attack scientific or pseudoscientific ideas that some people don't like, so if we are going to follow the Founders' wishes, we should follow that one.