First Muslim elected to Congress (Part 7)

Wallbuilders
By David Barton

Signer of the Constitution Richard Dobbs Spaight similarly explained:
As to the subject of religion. . . . [n]o power is given to the general [federal] government to interfere with it at all. . . . No sect is preferred to another. Every man has a right to worship the Supreme Being in the manner he thinks proper. No test is required. All men of equal capacity and integrity are equally eligible to offices. . . . I do not suppose an infidel, or any such person, will ever be chosen to any office unless the people themselves be of the same opinion.

Supreme Court Justice James Iredell (nominated to the Court by President Washington) agreed: But it is objected that the people of America may perhaps choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. . . . But it is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own.

Theophilus Parsons (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts) also affirmed:
No man can wish more ardently than I do that all our public offices may be filled by men who fear God and hate wickedness; but it must remain with the electors to give the government this security.

The scope of Article VI was made clear by the writers and ratifiers of the U. S. Constitution: Muslims could be elected to office – but only if the people of that district desired it. Justice Joseph Story, placed on the Court by James Madison, therefore explained in his famous Commentaries on the Constitution that because of Article VI, on the federal level it was possible that . . .the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Armenian, the Jew and the Infidel [Muslim], may sit down at the common table of the national councils without any inquisition into their faith or mode of worship.

Through the Constitution, the Framers had constrained the federal government; however, they had left the people completely free – that is, the federal government could not apply any religious test, but the voters could. As a court explained in 1837: The distinction is a sound one between a religion preferred by law, and a religion preferred by the people without the coercion of law – between a legal establishment which the present constitution expressly forbids . . . and a religious creed freely chosen by the people for themselves.

Next installment: Part 8 Keith Ellison was selected by the voters