Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic, but know-nothings keep repeating that it is, such as "the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason".
No, they did not.
The original First Amendment to the US Constitution involved representation, not religion. The original Second Amendment in its turn addressed representation's remuneration, not religion. Not until the original Third Amendment did religious liberty come up, and guns in turn in the Fourth, and so on through what is now our Tenth Amendment. The original First and Second Amendments were the first two of twelve, but failed of ratification.
The supposed primacy of religion because it was a subject of the First Amendment is a myth, recently repeated again
here by one Josh Hammer:
Religious liberty, defined perhaps as the ability of the religious to freely and unobtrusively practice their faiths and worship and obey the Almighty in accordance with the idiosyncratic dictates of one’s own conscience, is the cornerstone of the American republic. Numerically, the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are the first enumerated provisions of the very first ratified constitutional amendment. That is no mere coincident — the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason.
This is nonsense. The original First Amendment, Article the First below, was about a formula for regularizing representation. That was the matter of first importance at the founding of the country. It is first in all the bills of rights which passed the Congress in 1789. Because it and its companion amendment were not ratifed at the founding, however, the Third Amendment became the First only by accident. While Article the First should have been ratified in view of what the Congress later did because the article wasn't ratified, as we'll see below, Article the Second was at least eventually ratified in the 27th Amendment ... in 1992.
Ratification of Article the First remains the great unfinished task from the Revolutionary era. If Article the Second could live on and be ratified in 1992, so can Article the First still be ratified today, or something close to it.
If the Revolution was sparked by a central animating outrage, it was taxation without representation. More than anything else it drove the first Americans to revolt against their English countrymen, with whom they otherwise shared the most intimate bonds of religious feeling, language, law, history, blood and custom. But religion or no, a distant parliament across the sea thought it could pick their fellow countrymen's pockets without their input or consent.
Americans today face a similar situation with the US Congress, even if they can't quite put it into words. The US president today may be greatly disapproved, but even he routinely far outscores the 535 men and women of an insular Congress in far away Washington, DC, who do not and cannot represent the 329 million people sprawled across this continent. The members of Congress go on and on wildly spending money which they no longer even collect sufficient taxes to cover but instead just borrow, in the people's name. This has been the default position of both parties in the wake of tax reform since the 1980s: "If you won't let us tax you to pay for it, we'll just borrow it instead", they seem to say. There is no brake on the spending, and in truth many don't want there to be.
We've seen this default behavior before.
Never too terribly bright in the first place, it finally dawned on the Congress back in the 1920s that it could fix the number in the US House at 435 because the founding generation had never settled the issue in Article the First. With the Senate becoming a "super House" by virtue of the change to popular election, the House found it expedient to protect its own power by stopping itself from growing. Every new member, after all, dilutes the power of those already there and adds a vote for or against something current membership is already for or against. At the same time burgeoning immigration meant there were many new Germans, Irish and Italians in America which a WASPy Congress would rather not sit next to in the Capitol. The time was ripe to end the growth of representation.
The people, no longer reliably connected to the well springs of the founding, were none the wiser. They still aren't. Yet that act was the biggest power grab in the history of the Republic, second only to Abraham Lincoln's violation of the sovereign rights of the States. Each member of Congress since that time has accrued more and more power as a simple consequence of the country growing in population. Each one wields authority over ever larger legions of nameless faces in congressional districts now bloated to an average of 756,000 souls each in 2019. This subversion of the growth of representation with population was as sure a violation of the original intent of the constitution as was the Executive's War On the States. From the point of view of self-government, the one was as much an expression of tyranny as the other.
The results haven't been pretty. We now have a Congress the election of whose members routinely costs $10 million for a representative on average, $20 million for a Senator, none of whom know your name or care what you think. They pay more attention to the 11,586 registered lobbyists in 2018 than they do to us. There are nearly 27 lobbyists per member of the US House, and nearly one lobbyist for every 30,000 Americans, which ironically is the ratio for initial representation which Article the First originally had in mind. We have the best government which special interest money can buy. But just imagine: The founding generation fought bitterly over representation ratios of 1:30,000 vs. 1:50,000 and couldn't agree about them, but we sit idly by and let grifters domineer over ever growing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans. The founding generation would not recognize us as a free people.
As a consequence of this concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands in the US House and Senate, the leaders of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell also loom much larger in importance than they ever should have, as have the political parties they represent. Minority voices get no hearing and gain no traction. A stultifying degeneration to the lowest common denominator prevails, purple in hue, mostly. Mediocrity spreads everywhere. Millions feel disaffected, to the extent that ex-patriation has become a thing in the last refuge for freedom on earth.
A US House today of 6,580 under Article the First, on the other hand, would indeed be more cumbersome and inefficient than the Speaker of the House having to whip just 218 votes to spend us blind, but that's kind of THE WHOLE IDEA. It's much harder to rack up a national debt of $22.829 trillion when you have to herd 3,291 cats to do it instead of 218, but that's exactly what passing the Reapportionment Act of 1929 was designed to forestall. The 1920s was about nothing if not about revolutionizing America in the interests of power concentrated in a large, professional and centralized government controlled by specialists, answering only to an elite of 535 zeroes which has gone on to bequeath to us a debt of $23 with twelve zeroes after it.
Meanwhile religious people today still have their
choice of roughly 345,000 congregations in the US where 151 million worship as they please, and the rest don't. We are not suffering under the dim pall of an Established Religion of Rome, Wittenberg, Jerusalem or Mecca. Yet somehow all this religious activity has done absolutely nothing to prevent all this profligacy and debt slavery. Some would even go so far as to say that religion has more than contributed to this sorry state of affairs.
The inescapable truth is that WE ALL are indeed in servitude. WE ALL are on the hook for those trillions upon trillions of dollars, with no end in sight. Not individually perhaps, but when countries can no longer pay their bills, they tend not to last too long, and the innocent end up paying the same price as the spendthrifts, usually involuntarily through social decay, disease, famine and war.
We really ought to fix this while we still can. Representation is the cornerstone of the Republic, not religion, and it's high time we had some of the former again.
Article the First:
"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."
Article the Second:
"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."
