Conversion (law)

“ At bottom, plaintiffs have asked this Court to sanction the imposition of tort liability for religious conversion practices and for the effects of adhering to a religious way of life. Only under the most extreme conditions--conditions not remotely present in this case--should a court accede to such a request. Had the legal standards plaintiffs advocate been applied to an emergent Christianity, the creeds by which most Americans abide might never have grown to fruition. ”

“ The laws, indeed, respecting the church, made a very prominent figure during the first fifty years of the colonial legislation. The first law allowing toleration to protestant dissenters was in the year 1699, and merely adopts that of the statute of the 1st of William and Mary. ”

“ The state here is bound by its own constitution to respect and protect the rights of the citizen. Among these rights, the most precious is the right of conscience—the right to the free exercise of my religion. This right does not decide what the civil law shall be, but it does decide what it shall not be. Any law abridging my right of conscience—that is, the freedom of my church—is unconstitutional, and, so far, null and void. This, which is my right, is equally the right of every other citizen, whether his conscience—that is, his church—agrees with mine or not. ”

“ The utter falsehood of those definitions of conversion which we have denied, becomes apparent from this description of what conversion is. There is no inherent impossibility that a pure Protestant, exercising to the fullest extent the right of private judgment, should arrive at doctrines identical with those which the church teaches, and should, as a result of this identity, accept even her formularies as expressive of his faith. ”

“ But the change was brought about by the conviction, which has steadily deepened among us, that oppression of those of a different faith from our own, either by direct severities or by the withholding of civil rights, is a singularly poor weapon of conversion, and that the adversaries of Christianity are more likely to be conciliated by being dealt with in a Christlike spirit; further, that religious opinion may not be treated as a crime, without violation of God's justice. ”

“ Such alterations or modifications as have, practically, been made and accepted by the Church and Realm, have been effected by enactments external to the Prayer-book. Injunctions, canons, statutes, judicial decisions, have from time to time been allowed, nemine contradicente, to interpret or even contravene particular provisions of the Book. And, not least of all, custom itself has, in not a few particulars, acquired the force of law, and though not as yet engrossed in any legal document, has long been, in practice, part and parcel of our ecclesiastical polity. ”

“ No one is obliged to divulge his or her religious convictions before any authority whatsoever, and the right of an authority to inquire into the sect to which one belongs may not be exercised except as one’s rights and duties depend upon this, as, for example, in the matter of church tithes or in the matter of guardianship or instruction; or where it is necessary for the gathering of statistics ordered by law. No one may be forced to attend any Church ceremony or to take part in any religious exercise. ”

“ On April 24, Germany could be Christian; on April 26, to be Christian is a crime against the state; to obey the dictates of conscience is a crime; to establish a school in the name of God is a crime; to establish a college for the education of God’s ministry is a crime; to obey the pastors, the priests, and bishops of God’s church, whom to obey hitherto was a virtue, is now a crime; to acknowledge the Pope as the head of the universal church, a crime; in a word, to be anything but German, body and soul, mind and heart and thought, is a crime, to be punished by all the rigor of the law! ”

“ There can be little doubt, that the authority of the Roman code, combining with the religious notions of former times, coutributed in no small decree to engraft the principles of that law respecting charities into the common law. ”

“ If the reformation of religion be founded upon rebellion against the King, without whose consent, by the nature of our constitution, no law can pass. If this reformation be introduced by only one of the three estates, I mean the Commons, and not by one half even of those Commons ”

“ By the Constitution of England, every liege subject is entitled, not merely to the protection of the laws, but is admissable to all the franchises and all the privileges of the State. For the argument I have now to deal with is this: "That by some principle of the Constitution, independent of the positive law, the Roman Catholic is necessarily excluded." What, then, is this principle of exclusion? ”

“ The Protestant, reduced to the sacred text, even supposing he has the genuine and authentic text, and his private judgment, would be reduced to the condition of the lawyer who should undertake to explain the statutes of any one of our states, in total ignorance of the Common Law, or without the least reference to it or the decisions of the common-law courts. ”

“ Quitting the national church or returning from it to a church that had been left before, is visited by severe penalties, and children of mixed marriages, where one parent belongs to the national orthodox church, are claimed by law for that church. ”

“ At the same time, the secularization of them was deemed too bold a step; nor could laymen, with any shadow of consistency, or by a valid title, hold benefices which the law declared to be ecclesiastical. ”

“ Power is given to any three commissioners, of whom one must be a bishop, to punish all persons absent from church, according to the Act of Uniformity, or to visit and reform heresies and schisms according to law; to deprive all beneficed persons holding any doctrine contrary to the thirty-nine articles; to punish incests, adulteries, and all offences of the kind; to examine all suspected persons on their oaths, and to punish all who should refuse to appear or to obey their orders, by spiritual censure or by discretionary fine or imprisonment ”

“ It would be a bold thing to say that, had Christianity never gained its predominance, that spirit of natural right would not have continued to animate the course of legislation, and to evoke, as years progressed, most of those amendments in the law of the family and the law of succession that were amongst the most valuable contributions of the imperial constitutions to the private law. ”

“ If Congress has passed, or should pass, any law which, fairly construed, has in any degree introduced, or should attempt to introduce, in favor of any church, or ecclesiastical association, or system of religious faith, all or any one of these obnoxious particulars -- endowment at the public expense, peculiar privileges to its members, or disadvantages or penalties upon those who should reject its doctrines or belong to other communions -- such law would be a 'law respecting an establishment of religion,' and, therefore, in violation of the constitution. ”

“ Of course, under our Constitutional system, men could not be excluded from the practice of law, or indeed from following any other calling, simply because they belong to any of our religious groups, whether Protestant, Catholic, Quaker or Jewish, assuming it conceivable that any state of the Union would draw such a religious line. ”

“ If they are, then those who do not make polygamy a part of their religious belief may be found guilty and punished, while those who do, must be acquitted and go free. This would be introducing a new element into criminal law. Laws are made for the government of actions, and, while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? ”

“ Declaration of the rights of man and of citizenship, 1791, article 10: No penalty should attach to the holding of religious opinions. The right of every man to practise the religious cult to which he is attached is guaranteed by clause 1 of the Constitution of 1791. ”

“ The jurisdiction of this consistory was nominally confined to morals, and the regulation of Church matters. It could only punish by penance, and by exclusion from the Sacrament, but as it was the duty of the secular authority to enforce its decisions, every sin became a crime, punished with the utmost severity. All were forced by law to attend public worship, and partake of the Lord’s Supper. To wear clothes of a forbidden stuff, to dance at a wedding, to laugh at Calvin’s sermons, became an offence punishable at law. ”

“ Crime, Religion.—The law prohibiting any person who is a polygamist or bigamist, or who teaches, advises, counsels, or encourages the same, from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit, is constitutional; and a crime is none the less so, nor less odious, because it is sanctioned by what any particular sect may designate as religion. ”

“ It might be possible to deal adequately with the growth of that system of theology and yet never touch either the Roman or the civil law, even to leave out of our view the canon law itself. In Europe the State may rule the Church, or the Church may rule the State ”

“ A sacerdotal body, whose class-privileges of wrong-doing were so tenderly guarded, was not likely to prove itself a desirable element of society; and when the orderly enforcement of law gradually established itself throughout Christendom, the courts of justice found in the immunity of the ecclesiastic a more formidable enemy to order than in the pretensions of the feudal seigniory. ”

“ Even these, in such circumstances, and under such domination, are commanded to treat their masters with all honor and respect, that the name of God, by which they were called, and the doctrine of God, Christianity, which they had professed, might not be blasphemed - might not be evilly spoken of in consequence of their improper conduct. Civil rights are never abolished by any communications from God's Spirit. The civil state in which a man was before his conversion is not altered by that conversion ”

“ Property would be rendered not less, but more secure, if, in every instance in which a regularly-organized congregation of any denomination of Christians to which the law of toleration itself extended, made application for ground on which to erect a place of worship, the application would be backed and made effectual, in virtue of an enacted law, by the authority of the Constitution. ”

“ No person shall be forced to do, or leave undone, anything whatever, except by virtue of law. § 2. Before the law all persons are equal. The Republic does not recognize privileges of birth, or titles of nobility, and abolishes all existing honorary orders, with all their prerogatives and decorations, as well as all hereditary and conciliar titles. {524} § 3. All persons and religious professions may exercise, publicly and freely, the right of worship, and may associate themselves for that purpose, acquire property, observance being had to the provisions of the common law. ”

“ The law knows no heresy, and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect. The right to organize voluntary religious associations to assist in the expression and dissemination of any religious doctrine, and to create tribunals for the decision of controverted questions of faith within the association, and for the ecclesiastical government of all the individual members, congregations, and officers within the general association, is unquestioned. ”

“ The common law of England, which is only common reason or usage, knows of no prosecution for mere opinions." "Nonconformity is no sin at the common law." See Harrison v. Evans, 3 Bro. Parl. Cases, 470. It is to legislative enactments that all the persecutions in the English church are to be traced. Apostasy, heresy, nonconformity, and all of the class of offences against the established church, are the creatures of express legislation and exist only on the statute book. ”

“ If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. ”

“ Laws that we are accustomed to regard as almost sacred would assuredly be abrogated; with us, perhaps, it might happen that a reformer who taught a new law would abolish only our civil laws, the official code, our administrative customs, without touching what we consider as our divine laws, although it is difficult to believe that such could be the case. ”

“ Against a natural or divine law, no custom or desuetude can avail for the cessation of obligation. From a merely ecclesiastical law either custom or desuetude may withdraw the obligation, wherever they may properly imply the assent of the lawmaking power in the Church. ”

“ But it is not necessary, it would seem, to resort to external evidence to prove that the Declaration is based on the doctrine of the Reformation. In several places it seems to expressly declare that the rights claimed by America are claimed under the law of nature and of nations based on divine revelation and on human reason. ”

“ My church, the Catholic Church, is, by virtue of my citizenship and my right of conscience, the law of the state so far as her own freedom is concerned, and as is necessary to protect and defend her in the free and full enjoyment of her rights. ”