The Big Lies about Religion and Immigration in American History

"The magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of people [...] more easily fall victim to a big lie than a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big." [1]

This all too brief article is a synopsis of the legal history of religion and immigration in the United States. It is written as a promised follow up to the Pope's recent address on Christian Nationalism.

In the near future, this site will be leaving the realm of diagnosis in order to focus on a cure. But as any physician will tell you, the kind of treatment that will cure depends on accurate diagnosis.

The proponents of atheism and what can fairly be called "the demographic revolution" have spent decades fabricating an enormity of lies about religion and immigration in America. The following is all you really need to know to recognize these lies for what they are.

Religion and the "Separation of Church and State":

One big lie is that America was founded upon the "Separation of Church and State."

The founding legal document of the United States, the 1776 Declaration of Independence, appeals to God on four separate occasions. In 1789, the States ratified the United States Constitution.

Please read the United States Constitution. The original Constitution is three pages long. Its prologue states that it was ordained to "secure the Blessings of Liberty".

The United States Constitution is our highest form of law. It is law because representatives of the original Thirteen States of the United States voted it into law.

What the Constitution says about religion is this and this only: "Amendment 1: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]".

Note that the words "separation of Church and State" do not appear in the Constitution, or for that matter, any other law of the United States.

At the time the Constitution was ratified, many European nations had established "official" churches such as the Anglican Church in Britain, the Roman Catholic Church is France or the Lutheran Church in Sweden. The First Amendment provides that the United States Congress cannot establish an "official" religion.

While the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits Congress from establishing a religion, it did not prohibit the States from doing the same thing. At the time of the American Revolution, nine of the original thirteen colonies had established religions, e.g., the Anglican Church in Virginia and the Congregational Church in Massachusetts [2]. "During the Revolution, the Anglican Church was disestablished, but in New England where the vast majority of the population was Congregationalist, that Church continued to enjoy State support, in New Hampshire until 1817, Connecticut until 1818 and Massachusetts until 1833." [3] The Constitution and its Bill of Rights, ratified in 1789, left up to each State government the degree to which any church or religion would be official.

This state of the law about religion remained intact from 1776 to 1947, a period of 171 years. The text of the Constitution about religion never changed because the People and their representatives never voted to change it. But, in 1947, the United States Supreme Court decided that the Constitution meant something other that the written words it contained.

In 1947, in a case named Everson v. Board of Education [4], the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed almost a hundred years before in 1868, prohibited State and local governments from establishing a religion. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment that supposedly imposed this prohibition was "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law;"

Since the text of the Fourteenth Amendment did not refer to religion or churches, the Supreme Court had to invent a concept to accomplish this prohibition. They called it the "incorporation doctrine."

The words "incorporation doctrine", just like "the separation of Church and State", "the right to privacy", "the right to abortion" and other lies, do not appear in the Constitution. The Judges of the Supreme Court agreed that the First Amendment's prohibition of Congress from establishing a religion was incorporated into the "due process of law" requirements made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment. They decided this notwithstanding that the First Amendment by its terms applied only to "Congress" and that most States had established churches at the time the Constitution was ratified.

The Supreme Court Justices who decided this case, Everson v. Board of Education, committed a revolutionary act against the Constitution of the United States, the chief law in our government of laws. Their decision required that Christianity, or any other theistic belief, be purged from government property or government funded activity. It required that prayer be banished from public schools, that nativity scenes be banished from public property, that the words "under God" be banished from the pledge of allegiance. It will eventually require that "Christmas" not be a public holiday and that our calendar not measure time from the birth of Jesus Christ, e.g. "in the Year of our Lord" [5] ,"B.C." and "A.D.". Contrary to the terms of the Constitution, it in effect mandated that all levels of governmental and taxpayer funded activities be ATHEISTIC.

Immigration and "America is a Nation of Immigrants":

The big lie about America and immigration is that "America is a Nation of Immigrants". This is supposed to mean that Americans do not have any particular ethnic or religious identity.

The law and history of immigration is not as clear as that of religion, in part because the Constitution does not deal with immigration substantively. The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish a uniform "Rule of Naturalization" (Article 1, Section 8). The Constitution denies Congress the power to prohibit prior to the year 1808 "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" (Article 1, Section 9). The Constitution by its terms does not prohibit immigration or require it. It gives Congress the power to grant citizenship to immigrants according to rule uniform across the States, and prohibits Congress from interfering with State immigration decisions until at least 1808. Early Constitutional and legal attitudes towards immigration could be reasonably described as "laissez-faire."

Congress's passed its first substantive immigration laws in 1819. The pattern of congressional laws after that was to gradually increase restrictions on certain types of immigrants, e.g. convicts, prostitutes, political radicals, polygamists, physical or mental defectives, alcoholics, stowaways [6].

Notwithstanding this "laissez-faire" attitude towards immigration, historians have described our nation as having a "relatively homogenous" population" during its formative years [7]. "Large scale" immigration actually occurred during a relatively narrow time eighty-year time frame from 1841 to 1921. During this time, the nation's geographic area more than doubled. Civil War casualties resulted in a shortage of manpower and labor. The demand for labor was great due to industrialization and railroad expansion.

But even during the heyday of large-scale immigration, non-European Christian immigration was strictly controlled. The first significant nationality restrictions on immigration were the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s. The United States Supreme Court upheld these laws against various challenges, writing in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893):

"Every nation has the right to refuse to admit a foreigner into the country, when he cannot enter without putting the nation in evident danger, or doing it a manifest injury. What it owes to itself, the care of its own safety, gives it this right; and, in virtue of its natural liberty, it belongs to the nation to judge whether its circumstances will or will not justify the admission of the foreigner.' 'Thus, also, it has a right to send them elsewhere, if it has just cause to fear that they will corrupt the manners of the citizens; that they will create religious disturbances, or occasion any other disorder, contrary to the public safety. In a word, it has a right, and is even obliged, in this respect, to follow the rules which prudence dictates."
        (Citing Vatt. Law Nat. lib. 1, c. 19, §§ 230, 231)

Luke Exilarch
January 8, 2003