Constitutional authority and prospects for social justice for high-tension religious communities

By regulating religious practice, the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment challenges the authority of religious communities who may not have adopted American pluralism in favor of their own religious particularism. While the power of the Constitution is manifested in physical modes, its historic symbolic and socially constructed meaning elevates it as a competing transcending authority that challenges religious communities. Often labeled American civil religion, this authority either coerces non-mainstream religious communities to adopt modes of religious expression that mirror those of the dominant culture, or requires them to adopt a strategy for coping with its overwhelming social and political power. The Constitution's mechanism for guaranteeing religious free exercise thus serves as a method to limit religious particularism by coercing limited cultural orthodoxy through legal orthopraxy.Teach the [Constitution's] principles, teach them to your children, speak of them when sitting in your home, speak of them when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up, write them upon the doorplate of your home and upon your gates. John Quincy AdamsRepeated by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger (Franklin, 1987). The passage is a slight alteration of Deuteronomy 6:7–9.