Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
Publication Information
21 Tex. Rev. L. Pol. 341 (2017).
Abstract
From the Introduction
Many people say that religious liberty in our country is now under attack more than ever before. That's true as far as it goes, and in what follows I shall supply some reasons why I think so. But the chief aim of this Article is not to try to establish that religious liberty is in its most parlous state ever, as if some common threat-level metric is higher today than it was, say, a hundred or fifty years ago. As a matter of fact, Mormons and Native Americans in the late-nineteenth century faced government actions more hostile to their religious beliefs and practices than anything confronting believers today. United States' "Indian" policy then included a concerted effort to wean Native Americans altogether of their inherited religious beliefs. Uncle Sam literally scattered the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) to secure the Mormons' renunciation of plural marriage. Even America's Catholics, especially when the bulk of them were recent immigrants or children thereof, have been perennial targets of discrimination on religious grounds, chiefly because a large percentage of their fellow Americans held that being a Catholic was simply incompatible with being an American. Government policies from the founding all the way down to Supreme Court Establishment Clause cases in the 1970s reflected this mistaken belief.
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
Today's Challenges to Religious Liberty in Historical Perspective,
21 Tex. Rev. L. Pol. 341 (2017)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1875
Comments
Portions of this article appear in Gerard V. Bradley, New Challenges to Religious Liberty, IRISH ROVER (Mar. 18, 2016), https://irishrover.net/2016/03/new-challenges-to-religious-liberty/ [https://perma.cc/N2Y5-GYHW].