All the Gods of the Heathen

The Christian case against freedom of religion

Christians often say that freedom of religion means the freedom to practice Christianity as conscience leads, and not the freedom to worship Satan. The First Amendment does not say it, its authors did not mean it, and its principle cannot hold the line. A right measured by each man’s conscience protects every god a conscience chooses, and Scripture calls the gods of the nations devils. The line the claim wants can be drawn only by a magistrate who judges worship by God’s law, which is the office freedom of religion took away. This paper traces where freedom of religion came from, what truth it twists, and where it leads, and argues that it is contrary to sound doctrine.

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The question

Bryan Fischer, then director of issues analysis for the American Family Association, made the case in a 2014 column titled “If First Amendment isn’t about Christianity, Satanists have a case.” He wrote, “I have contended for years that the First Amendment, as given by the Founders, provides religious liberty protections for Christianity only.” He saw what was at stake: “if the word ‘religion’ in the First Amendment was intended by the Founders to refer to any belief system in a supernatural power, then the Satanists are absolutely right.” When the Satanic Temple’s statue in the Iowa Capitol was destroyed in December 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis wrote that “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government.” Signing a bill to allow volunteer chaplains in Florida’s public schools in April 2024, he said of Satanists, “That is not a religion.” In the pews the claim comes as one sentence: freedom of religion means freedom to practice Christianity as your conscience leads you, and it does not mean freedom to worship Satan.

The claim is right about Satan and wrong about the First Amendment. It also measures religion by two standards at once. “As your conscience leads you” makes each man’s conscience the measure. “Not Satan” appeals to a measure above conscience, because the Satanist’s conscience leads him too. Both cannot govern. If conscience governs, the Satanist is covered. If something above conscience governs, the freedom of religion the First Amendment protects is gone.

We have argued that left and right measure one axis of political disagreement, and that a second axis explains more of it: whether authority answers to consent. Freedom of religion is consent applied to worship. It holds that no man may be bound in religion except by his own conscience, and it leaves the magistrate no judgment about what is worshiped. This paper argues that the claim’s history is wrong, that its principle cannot hold the line it wants, and that the line can be drawn only on ground the First Amendment gave up. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

What the founders wrote

Fischer’s claim rests on what the founders meant. The men who wrote the religion clauses said otherwise, and they said it to Christians.

James Madison drafted the amendment. Four years earlier he had led Virginia’s fight against a bill to tax its citizens for “Teachers of the Christian Religion,” and his Memorial and Remonstrance (1785) answered the claim before anyone made it: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” He grounded the freedom in the Christian’s own case: “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” When he proposed the amendment to the House in 1789, he asked that the rights of conscience not be infringed “in any manner, or on any pretext.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia statute the Remonstrance helped pass in 1786. In his Autobiography he recorded that the legislature refused to add the name of Jesus Christ to its preamble, “in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” George Washington told the Hebrew congregation at Newport in 1790 that the new government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Christians asked for more and were refused. In 1789 Presbyterian ministers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire told Washington they wished the Constitution contained an explicit acknowledgment of “the only true God and Jesus Christ.” He answered that the omission was deliberate: “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of our country.” John Leland, the Baptist preacher, stated the principle in its plainest form the year the amendment was ratified.

The text follows its authors. It says religion, not Christianity: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution it amends had already provided that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

The claim has sources of its own, and they are real. Fischer rests his case on Joseph Story, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the standard early commentary on the Constitution, held in 1833 that “the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state,” and that the amendment’s real object was “to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects.” Maryland’s Declaration of Rights of 1776 extended its protection to “all persons, professing the Christian religion.” New York’s highest court upheld a conviction for blasphemy in 1811 because “we are a christian people” (People v. Ruggles). The Supreme Court defined religion in 1890 by a man’s relation to “his Creator” (Davis v. Beason), and in 1892 it said, “this is a Christian nation” (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States).

Every one of these is state law or Christian consensus, and none of it is the First Amendment. Fischer is right about this much, and he grants that a state could recognize Satanism if it chose. The amendment bound Congress alone, and the Court said so in 1845: “The Constitution makes no provision for protecting the citizens of the respective states in their religious liberties; this is left to the state constitutions and laws” (Permoli v. New Orleans). Connecticut kept its tax-supported churches until 1818 and Massachusetts until 1833. Justice Clarence Thomas has argued that the Establishment Clause “is best understood as a federalism provision” that “protects state establishments from federal interference” (Elk Grove v. Newdow, 2004). If he is right, the clause of 1791 left the Christian order of the states standing, and that order is what the claim remembers. Even Story kept the line between support and coercion. The duty of supporting Christianity, he wrote, “is very different from the right to force the consciences of other men, or to punish them for worshipping God in the manner, which, they believe, their accountability to him requires.”

Then the Court applied the amendment to the states. In 1940 it held that the Fourteenth Amendment “has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress” to make such laws (Cantwell v. Connecticut). In 1947 it ruled that neither a state nor the federal government may “pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another” (Everson v. Board of Education). In 1961 it struck down Maryland’s requirement that officeholders declare their belief in God, and it listed among the religions of the country some that do not teach belief in God at all: “Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others” (Torcaso v. Watkins). The claim remembers the Christian order of the states and credits it to the amendment. The amendment never contained that order. When the courts carried it into the states, it took the order down.

Where it came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Freedom of religion did not begin with deists. It began with Christians who believed the creed and wanted the church free of the king’s sword, and our paper From the Covenant to Consent traces how the Reformed churches themselves completed the change in Britain and America. The steps this argument needs are these.

The line runs one way. Helwys and Williams wanted the magistrate out of the church, and they took him out of worship altogether. Locke took religion out of the ends of the commonwealth, and Virginia measured the law by harm to men alone. American Presbyterians rewrote their own confession to fit the new order, and the Court finished the work in the states. Each step kept the word conscience and changed who judges it.

The line begins with Baptists, and we say so plainly. Helwys died in Newgate prison, Obadiah Holmes was whipped in Boston, and Williams was banished from Massachusetts. Their suffering was real and their premise was wrong. Our paper Baptist Theology: A Free Church in a Free State traces that premise and answers it at length.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and freedom of religion is built from three.

Faith cannot be compelled. Christ sent his apostles to preach, not to conscript. Paul “persuaded the Jews and the Greeks” (Acts 18:4) and wrote, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). Thomas Aquinas taught that those who have never received the faith “are by no means to be compelled to the faith, in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will.” Freedom of religion turned that truth into another claim, that no man may be restrained from worshiping a false god in public. The first protects the inward act of belief, which no magistrate can reach. The second protects the outward act of worship, which every magistrate can see. A magistrate who removes an idol from a public square has compelled no one’s faith.

God alone is Lord of the conscience. The Westminster Confession says so in those words, and it says why: God “hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his Word” (20.2). The conscience is free from men because it is bound to God. The same chapter says that men who publish opinions “contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity” may be “proceeded against by the censures of the Church, and by the power of the Civil Magistrate” (20.4). The divines held both, because the first says who rules the conscience and the second says what the magistrate does when a man acts against God in public. Paul knew his own conscience did not have the last word: “For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord” (1 Cor. 4:4). Freedom of religion kept the confession’s words and removed its Lord. The conscience that God judges became the conscience that judges God.

The offices are distinct. The magistrate does not preach or administer the sacraments. When King Uzziah burned incense in the temple, the priests withstood him: “It is not for thee, Ozias, to burn incense to the Lord, but only for the priests” (2 Chron. 26:18). The Westminster divines wrote the same limit into the paragraph that gave the magistrate his duty toward religion: he “may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and Sacraments” (23.3). Freedom of religion turned distinct offices into a magistrate with no office toward God at all. Scripture separates the king from the altar. It never separates the king from God.

Beneath all three lies the word liberty. Peter tells Christians to live “as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God” (1 Pet. 2:16). Christian liberty is freedom to serve God. Freedom of religion is freedom to serve any god, or none, and the serpent made the first offer of that kind: “ye would be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

Where it leads

Freedom of religion goes two places, and both are visible now.

It has no brake of its own. A principle that makes each man’s conscience the measure of religion has nothing inside it to stop a conscience. New York’s constitution of 1777 granted the free exercise of religion “to all mankind,” and it barred only “acts of licentiousness” and “practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this State.” Within two generations New York, and above all its western counties, gave the country new religions in quick succession. Joseph Smith organized his church in April 1830. The followers of William Miller waited for Christ’s return on October 22, 1844. The Fox sisters reported spirit rappings at Hydesville in 1848, the year John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community. We cannot show that New York’s constitution produced these movements, so we do not claim it. We claim that it had nothing to say to them.

When one of those consciences reached the law, the courts had to borrow a standard the principle could not supply. Smith’s church taught plural marriage, and the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Mormon polygamist in 1879. To excuse his practice because of his belief, the Court wrote, “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself” (Reynolds v. United States). Eleven years later it named the standard it had borrowed: “Bigamy and polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christian countries” (Davis v. Beason). The line held because the Court reached outside the principle to Christendom. Scripture had already described a people with no standard above itself: “And in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own sight” (Judg. 21:25).

It ends at Satan’s door, and it stood there from the start. The claim draws its line at Satan. Scripture draws it at every god but the Lord.

The Hebrew text of the psalm calls the gods of the nations idols, and the Greek of the Septuagint calls them devils. Moses said the same of Israel’s apostasy: “They sacrificed to devils, and not to God; to gods whom they knew not” (Deut. 32:17). Paul applied the words to the altars of Corinth: “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20). He said it of idols he had just called nothing (1 Cor. 8:4), so the worshiper’s opinion of his god does not decide what he serves. Jefferson’s Hindoo and Leland’s twenty gods were devils already in Scripture’s terms. The First Amendment protected the worship of devils from the day it was ratified, under other names.

The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, dropped the other names. It does not worship Satan, it says, “nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.” It calls him “a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds,” and its third tenet reads, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” That is Genesis 3:5 stated as a creed. The Internal Revenue Service recognized the Temple as a church in 2019.

Its creed is a sentence the Supreme Court wrote in 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). The Court overruled Casey in 2022 and said that “appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much” (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). The Temple kept the sentence and gave it the name Paul gives the rebel: “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Satanist is not the exception to freedom of religion. He is its plainest believer.

Every order has an establishment

The claim draws a line, and a line needs someone with the right to draw it. Noah Webster defined toleration in 1828: “toleration implies a right in the sovereign to control men in their opinions and worship…. Where no power exists or none is assumed to establish a creed and a mode of worship, there can be no toleration in the strict sense of the word.” A man who says freedom of religion does not cover Satan is claiming that power for the magistrate. He is an establishmentarian who has not named his church.

Every order tolerates from inside an establishment, named or unnamed. Locke, the philosopher of toleration, drew his own line: “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.” The Court of 1890 drew its line at polygamy by “the general consent of the Christian world.” The Court of 1992 found its first principle in the self that defines its own existence. The order never stopped establishing. It changed what it established, and each change moved the line of what it would bear. Our paper Baptist Theology: A Free Church in a Free State names the creed that took the place of the church.

The question is not whether a nation will have an established religion but which one. The claim wants the Christian answer and the First Amendment’s neutrality at once, and it cannot have both. If the line at Satan is to hold, it will hold because the magistrate judges worship by a standard above conscience, and that standard has a name.

What Scripture gives the magistrate

Paul defines the magistrate by what God gave him to do: “he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4). The question is whether evil includes what is done against God. Paul’s account of what God’s law is for answers it. The law is made “for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers” (1 Tim. 1:9). The ungodly and the profane stand on the same list as murderers. The evil the magistrate punishes is evil as God’s law defines it, and that law begins with the first commandment.

The psalm speaks to rulers in their office: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling” (Ps. 2:10–11). Kings are told to serve the Lord as kings, and John calls Christ “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5).

Scripture praises the kings who removed false worship from their lands. Asa “removed Ana his mother from being queen, forasmuch as she gathered a meeting in her grove” (3 Kingdoms 15:13). Hezekiah “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord,” and “removed the high places, and broke in pieces the pillars, and utterly destroyed the groves” (4 Kingdoms 18:3–4). Josiah “removed the sorcerers, and the wizards, and the theraphin, and the idols, and all the abominations that had been set up in the land” (4 Kingdoms 23:24), and Scripture says of him, “There was no king like him before him” (4 Kingdoms 23:25).

The duty was not Israel’s alone. After the furnace Nebuchadnezzar decreed that “Every people, tribe, or language, that shall speak reproachfully against the God of Sedrach, Misach, and Abdenago, shall be destroyed” (Dan. 3:96). Artaxerxes commanded that “whosoever shall not do the law of God, and the law of the king readily, judgment shall be taken upon him” (2 Esdras 7:26). Scripture records both decrees of heathen kings without rebuke.

The churches of the Reformation confessed the same duty. The Westminster Confession of 1647 gave the magistrate “authority, and it is his duty to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed” (23.3). Its Larger Catechism counts “tolerating a false religion” among the sins forbidden in the second commandment (Q. 109). The Belgic Confession gives the magistrate the protection of the sacred ministry, “and thus may remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship” (Art. 36). Calvin taught that civil government exists so “that no idolatry, no blasphemy against the name of God, no calumnies against his truth, nor other offences to religion, break out and be disseminated among the people,” and that the magistrate’s office “extends to both tables of the law” (Institutes IV.xx.3, 9).

Each of these was later revised. American Presbyterians rewrote the Westminster paragraph in 1788, struck the civil magistrate from 20.4, and deleted “tolerating a false religion” from the catechism. The Christian Reformed Church cut the idolatry clause from the Belgic article in 1938, “agreeing with the 1910 Synod as to the unbiblical character of the teaching referred to.” The Baptists had dropped the paragraph from their confession in 1677 and dropped piety with it, so that their magistrate is to “maintain justice and peace” (Second London Confession 24.2) where Westminster’s is to “maintain piety, justice, and peace” (23.2). Each revision came after the liberal order was built, and each brought a confession into line with it. Scripture did not change in between.

The duty has limits, and the confessions name them. The magistrate does not preach or administer the sacraments. He does not compel belief, which no sword can reach. He restrains public acts: the public worship of false gods, blasphemy, and the public teaching of error. Calvin stated the limit himself. He did not allow men “at pleasure to enact laws concerning religion and the worship of God,” and he approved civil order directed “to prevent the true religion, which is contained in the law of God, from being with impunity openly violated and polluted by public blasphemy” (Institutes IV.xx.3). The duty is the magistrate’s, and prudence governs how and when he discharges it. What he may not do is treat the worship of devils as a right.

John heard the end of the matter announced in heaven: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15). The magistrate’s duty is to serve that King.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers. The argument comes down to these.

He keeps the two liberties apart. He holds the liberty of a Christian, a conscience bound to God and free from the commandments of men, and he stops calling the First Amendment by that name. When the law protects him, he pleads it the way Paul pleaded his Roman citizenship: “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” (Acts 22:25). Paul used Rome’s law without confessing Rome’s gods.

He teaches his house. He teaches his children the first commandment as a law for nations as well as hearts, and the second psalm as a word to rulers. He teaches them why the line at Satan is drawn by God and not by a constitution, before the Satanic Temple teaches them otherwise.

He asks his church. He asks his elders what the church confesses about the magistrate: the Westminster text of 1647 or the revision of 1788, the Belgic article before 1938 or after, and why. He asks whether the pulpit will say plainly what the psalm says about the gods of the nations.

He speaks to rulers. He tells rulers, by speech and petition, that blasphemy and public idolatry are evils they are charged to restrain, and that a Satanic display in a capitol is a failure of their office and not a duty of it. Our paper None Gives What He Has Not explains why we do this by speaking to rulers rather than by electing them.

Seven objections

Our paper Baptist Theology: A Free Church in a Free State answers three objections we do not repeat here: that the apostles asked for no Christian magistrate, that religious liberty protects the church now, and that the order we describe would jail Baptists again. Seven more belong to this paper.

“The founders meant the worship of God, so the line still falls at Satan.” This is the claim in its strongest form. Madison grounded religious liberty in “the duty which we owe to our Creator,” and Washington told the Baptists that every good citizen “ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.” On this reading freedom of religion covers every worship of the Creator and stops at the worship of his enemy. The founders did not draw that line. Jefferson’s statute covered the “infidel of every denomination,” Leland protected the man with “no God,” and Madison’s equal freedom belonged to men “whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence.” Scripture does not allow the line either. The gods of the nations are not the Creator under other names. They are devils (Ps. 95:5). A line drawn around belief in a god protects every devil worshiped under another name and turns back only the one worshiped under his own.

“Satanism can be stopped where it does harm.” Then the line is harm, not religion, and the claim has given up its own ground. Jefferson stated the harm test for religion: the law reaches “such acts only as are injurious to others,” and a neighbor’s twenty gods “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” By that test a Satanic invocation injures no one, and neither does a statue of Baphomet beside a nativity scene. The harm principle reaches the Satanist’s crimes and protects his worship, which is the line the First Amendment draws and the claim rejects. The claim objects to the worship itself, and only a standard above conscience can object to that.

“Religious liberty made America the most Christian nation on earth.” Roger Finke and Rodney Stark estimate that the share of Americans who were church adherents rose from 17 percent in 1776 to 34 percent in 1850, and they credit the open market in religion (The Churching of America). We grant the numbers. They measure adherence, and the same open market that filled the Methodist churches founded the Mormon one. They also come from the decades when the states still kept their Christian laws, the order section 02 credits to the states and the claim credits to the amendment. A law is not judged by attendance. It is judged by whether it calls good what God calls evil, and freedom of religion calls the worship of devils a right.

“Establishment did not stop heresy.” It did not, and we do not claim that it would. Unitarianism took Harvard’s chair of divinity in 1805, while Massachusetts still taxed its people for the support of public worship. But Massachusetts had built its establishment on consent. Its constitution of 1780 gave the towns and parishes “the exclusive right of electing their public teachers,” and the parish of Dedham used that right to settle a Unitarian minister over the objection of most of the church’s members. When they withdrew, the state’s high court held that “the remaining members continue to be the identical church,” so the church’s records, silver and funds stayed with the minority that stayed with the parish. Chief Justice Parker told the losers what they had kept: “an inconvenience of this sort will never be felt, when a case of conscience is in question” (Baker v. Fales, 1820). In Dedham, heresy won by the vote of the parish. An establishment built on consent is the error our paper None Gives What He Has Not opposes. It is not the magistrate’s duty to keep the truth “pure and entire.” When the magistrate rules doctrine, as the Arian emperors did, one office has done another’s work (The Sound of the Cornet, section 09). The remedy for a magistrate who serves error is a magistrate who serves the truth, not a magistrate who serves nothing.

“Every persecuting magistrate believed he served the truth.” Virginia’s magistrates jailed Baptist preachers before the Revolution, and Madison called persecution a “diabolical Hell conceived principle” (1774). The objection proves too much. Magistrates have hanged innocent men for murder, and no one concludes that the magistrate may not judge murder. Fallibility is a reason for the magistrate to judge by God’s law and answer to God for it, not a reason to stop judging. The liberal magistrate judges too. In 1890 he judged that polygamy was a crime because the Christian world said so, and since 1961 he has counted religions with no god among the religions of the country. The objection does not remove the judge. It changes the law he judges by.

“Aquinas himself allowed rulers to tolerate the rites of unbelievers.” He did, and the difference is the whole question. “Though unbelievers sin in their rites,” he wrote, “they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided.” Rulers, he said, “rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred” (II-II q.10 a.11). That is toleration in Webster’s sense: a ruler judges a thing to be evil and decides, for a reason, to bear it. The First Amendment does not bear the worship of false gods as an evil. It protects that worship as a right and forbids the ruler to judge it at all. A Christian ruler may tolerate much for prudence’s sake. He may not confess that the worship of devils is a right of man.

“The Satanic Temple does not believe in Satan, so this is not about worship.” The Temple says so, and the law counts it a religion anyway. Since 1961 the Supreme Court has listed religions that teach no god among the religions of the country, and the Temple’s object of devotion is the self, under the name of the rebel against God. Scripture does not require a worshiper to believe in the devil he serves. Paul called the idol nothing (1 Cor. 8:4) and still said that the sacrifice offered to it goes to devils (1 Cor. 10:20). He named the object, not the worshiper’s opinion of it.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not defend compelling belief. No magistrate can make a man believe, and none should try. The argument concerns public acts, not the inward act of faith (section 04).

It does not counsel resistance or offer a program. The American government is the power that is, and the Christian owes it obedience, taxes, and honor. Nothing here asks him to change who holds power. It asks him to tell rulers what God requires (None Gives What He Has Not, sections 09 and 11).

It does not tell Christians to refuse the law’s protection. Paul pleaded his citizenship before the Roman captain and appealed to Caesar (Acts 22:25, 25:11). A Christian may plead the First Amendment in a courtroom without confessing it in a creed.

It does not license private men to do the magistrate’s work. Scripture gives the sword to the magistrate and withholds it from the private man: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves” (Rom. 12:19). A Christian who destroys an idol in a public building takes an office God did not give him, however right he is about the idol.

It does not claim that freedom of religion produced the cults. Section 05 claims only that the principle had nothing to say to them.

It does not judge the faith of Christians who defend religious liberty. Most were taught the First Amendment as Christian liberty and were never shown the difference.

It stands or falls on one premise. If the evil the magistrate punishes excludes what is done against God, the conclusion fails, and the claim’s own line at Satan fails with it. Section 07 answers that premise with Romans 13, Psalm 2, the kings who removed the high places, and the confessions. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

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Texts and editions

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612).

Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), ed. Edward Bean Underhill (London: Hanserd Knollys Society, 1848).

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 20.2, 20.4, 23.2, 23.3, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York, 1877), and the American revision (1788). The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 109.

The Belgic Confession (1561), Art. 36, in Schaff, vol. 3. Christian Reformed Church, Acts of Synod 1938, Art. 34.

The Second London Baptist Confession (1677, adopted 1689), 24.2.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.xx.3, 9, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1845).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.10 aa.8, 11, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920).

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple.

Massachusetts Constitution (1780), Declaration of Rights, Art. III. Maryland Constitution (1776), Declaration of Rights, Art. XXXIII. New York Constitution (1777), Art. XXXVIII.

James Madison to William Bradford, 24 January 1774. Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785). Speech in the House of Representatives, 8 June 1789.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Query XVII. Autobiography (1821).

Constitution of the United States (1787), Art. VI. First Amendment (1791).

George Washington to the Presbyterian Ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 2 November 1789, and to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, 18 August 1790, Founders Online.

John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (New London, 1791).

Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), “Toleration.”

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), §§1868–1871.

People v. Ruggles, 8 Johns. 290 (N.Y. 1811).

Baker v. Fales, 16 Mass. 488 (1820).

Permoli v. Municipality No. 1, 44 U.S. (3 How.) 589 (1845).

Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).

Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890).

Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).

Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940).

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961).

Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (2004), Thomas, J., concurring.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Bryan Fischer, “If First Amendment isn’t about Christianity, Satanists have a case,” RenewAmerica, 2 August 2014.

Ron DeSantis, post on X, 15 December 2023. Remarks signing HB 931, Kissimmee, Florida, 18 April 2024, as reported by the Florida Phoenix.

The Satanic Temple, “Frequently Asked Questions” and “The Seven Tenets,” thesatanictemple.com, accessed 18 October 2026.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005), fig. 1.2.

None Gives What He Has Not

The Sound of the Cornet

Baptist Theology: A Free Church in a Free State

From the Covenant to Consent

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering (King James Psalm 96 is Psalm 95, 1 and 2 Kings are 3 and 4 Kingdoms, Ezra is 2 Esdras, and Daniel 3:29 is 3:96). New Testament from the King James Version. The Westminster Confession is quoted from Schaff’s text of 1647, Helwys in his original spelling, and court opinions from the United States Reports. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com