Foreordained Failure

Book excerpt: Ever since the Supreme Court began enforcing the First Amendment's religion clauses in the 1940s, courts and scholars have tried to distill the meaning of those clauses into a useable principle of religious freedom. In Foreordained Failure, Smith argues that efforts to find a principle of religious freedom in the "original meaning" are futile, but not because the original meaning is irrecoverable. The difficulty is that the religion clauses were not originally intended to approve any principle or right of religious freedom. Rather, the clauses were purely jurisdictional in nature; they were intended to do nothing more than confirm that authority over questions of religion remained with the states. This work will be of great interest to law scholars, lawyers, judges, and other readers concerned with the subject of religious freedom.