Thanks again for the comments on my discussion of my piece on the Religious Test Clause. Let me offer some responses, divided broadly into comments about history and comments about my broader normative argument in favor of a narrow but deep reading of the Religious Test Clause.

History: First, Jon Rowe, who had many valuable comments, asks a basic question: What was Rhode Island's religious test during the Founding era? Let me quote from Gerard Bradley, whose article I cited in my first post: "Rhode Island, as in many church-state matters, was a special case: the Protestant monopoly there flowed from an exclusion of Catholics and Jews from citizenship, and not, precisely, from political office." Mr. Rowe also makes a series of broader points, arguing that we should draw some significance for our historical reading from the assertion that a number of key framers were not orthodox Christians. I don't dispute that assertion, but would say two things. First, those admittedly central individuals are not the only or even the authoritative figures here. In thinking about the historical understanding of the Clause, their views must be counted alongside the views of those whom they sought to convince — the other framers and the ratifiers of the Constitution. I have no algorithm to apply here in weighting their respective views; but my holistic reading of the history surrounding the debate over the Clause suggests to me, at least, that we should not read the Clause too broadly in light of these standout examples, especially in light of the real historical evils the Clause appeared fairly clearly to address. Second, as Mr. Rowe notes, although unorthodox, those key framers, and certainly many other framers, did not think virtue and character were irrelevant to political office; for most framers and ratifiers, religion (however broadly defined) was certainly a vital aspect of one's character. Finally, another commenter asks why the framers didn't use the word "oath" rather than "test." This is a fair question, but I will answer with the words of another commenter: "Porkchop," who points out that the word "test" did have a fairly clear meaning taken in historical context, and that most religious tests were in fact oath-centered, or otherwise closely related to the imposition of formal requirements of religious belief or conduct for putative office-holders. It is no answer to say, Justice Black-like, "'no test'" means 'no test,'" unless we understand something about the language used, taken in context.

Normative arguments: I got a number of interesting comments on this broader subject. A variety of commenters offered some variation on the view that my reading of the Clause leaves too much that is threatening and worrisome up for grabs: it "would mean there is no bar at all to open and wanton religious discrimination in granting public jobs [more precisely, public offices or trusts]." Another (Mark Field) writes that there is no principled difference between a formal religious test and an individual senator "asking each candidate to express that same sentiment [contained in the formal test] prior to giving 'advice and consent.' The test clause should preclude both, as well as more subtle efforts to circumvent it. The government simply has no business inquiring into religious opinion." Another commenter writes that character can always be a factor in a decision to nominate or affirm, but that "the Founding Fathers were pretty clear on the concept: No religious test, period." In short, a number of commenters think the Clause itself, or broader values we find in the Clause, preclude "government" from considering religion. Remember Prof. Tribe, suggesting that the Clause effectively secularizes the public order.

My general response is to suggest that the Religious Test Clause is revolutionary enough if understood on its own terms, and that the kind of larger "value" it is said to represent, one in which public decisions and debates (including decisions made and positions taken by office-holders) are largely stripped of religious terms, runs beyond what I understand our constitutional "values" to hold with respect to the role of religion in public debate and action. I agree that "government" is officially barred from taking particular official steps in particular areas, including a prohibition against formally erecting religious barriers to office. But I think there is a substantial difference between those formal tests and the possibility of religion playing a "more subtle" role in nominations and confirmations. To disable government from erecting religious barriers to public office is one thing; to say that religion must be presumptively and absolutely irrelevant to considerations of public office, I think, goes too far. Religion may be relevant in the way that a number of commenters were willing to recognize: indirectly, in its effects on how one would conduct oneself in office. But I think it can, for some decision-makers, be relevant in an even more direct way, in the sense that a decision-maker may believe, rightly or wrongly, that a candidate's views and beliefs display a character (or lack of character) that simply does not deserve to occupy a "public trust."

I agree that such a view is rife with potential for abuse. I also believe, however, that the penalties that are to be exacted for such abuse are fundamentally political in nature: and as the Miers example may demonstrate, those political remedies are by no means ineffective. (One commenter suggests that politicians can then simply conceal their religious motivations. Of course they can, under any regime. But information has a way of getting out, and in any event a politician who wants to support or oppose a nominee for religious reasons without saying so may either supply adequate public reasons, or the public reasons she supplies may be found so wanting that a voter can fairly conclude she is really acting for religious reasons and act accordingly. Better, in my view, to be candid about one's religious motives, and to be judged accordingly; but, of course, politicians may have both public and religious reasons for a particular decision, and can always offer both.)

Moreover, despite the potential for abuse, I think the cost of saying that religion is somehow a forbidden ground of discussion or decision for public decision-makers or citizens — and many who raised the Religious Test Clause argument during the recent nominations not only said it applied to politicians, but effectively treated it as disabling religion from entering into broader public debate — is greater than the benefit. It treats religion as the one and only set of values prohibited from entering into debate and decision on momentous public issues, and because so many citizens and officials clearly do think in religious terms about their decisions and will continue to do so under any regime, it robs us of a valuable degree of candor in public debate. Whatever broader values undergird our national understanding, then or now, I don't think they run to this kind of exclusion of religion from public deliberation, discussion, and decision, although obviously this is part of a larger running debate.

To say that religion may sometimes be relevant to public discussion and decision on nominees and other matters, and that the Religious Test Clause doesn't bar the use of religion in this way, although it does bar certain formal barriers to public office, is of course not the end of the story. We are then left to deliberate together about how and when (if ever) religion should enter into the public debate, or into the decisions of public officials. Although I clearly disagree with those who have answered "never," I also think we can invoke religion more or less wisely and carefully, and have said something about what that might entail. Jon Rowe concluded his comment yesterday by saying, "Personally, I'd rather live under a system of 'etiquette' where one's religion or lack thereof — whether one be a fundamentalist Christian or an atheist — is viewed as simply not related to one's fitness for public office." Taken at that broad level of generality, I can sympathize; but it is a short step from that principle to a public square that is denuded of useful, meaningful discussion. It also removes, one should acknowledge, much of what might be shallow and provocative sniping and religious bigotry — but that language, too, is the price of open debate, and knowing of that risk should remind us all the more of our own responsibility to enter into these discussions, and use both our votes and our voices, with some kind of sense of underlying principle and integrity that I've simply labeled "constitutional etiquette." Better, in my view, to have a system of etiquette where we can openly acknowledge and discuss religion, while remembering that it can never be a formal bar to public office — and in which we can add our own voices to the debate in pointing out that the mere labels "fundamentalist Christian" or "atheist" (or "Muslim") are far from descriptively complete, that they say very little about how particular individuals will carry out their offices, and that on such a broad level, they may not even say much about character.

As the always valuable Mr. Rowe commented, my reading of the Religious Test Clause can cut both ways politically. More on that tomorrow, with some concluding remarks on the differing reactions I've received to this article, and what they may suggest.

I've been very grateful for the comments so far on my posts on my paper discussing the Religious Test Clause and judicial nominations. They've been very thoughtful and useful. (I'd like to hear from more of you. Perhaps I should write about the Test Clause and the Second Amendment!) I'll have much more to say about them tomorrow.

So far I've offered a "narrow but deep" interpretation of the Religious Test Clause, on both descriptive and normative grounds. My conclusion has been that, "[h]owever treacherous the waters we must navigate when we invoke religion in the course of judicial nominations, the Religious Test Clause offers us no beacon." With the Constitution put to one side, so to speak, today I want to turn to the task of "crafting non-constitutional rules -- albeit rules that are crafted in the shadow of the Constitution -- that might guide and constrain the conduct of public dialogue on religion in the context of nominations." Borrowing a term from Alan Brownstein, I call this "constitutional etiquette."

Such a project has at least two related problems. First, such suggestions tend to be a little loosey-goosey: we can come up with reasonable standards, but they are likely to be vague and there will naturally be disagreement both on the standards and on their application. Second, they may be a little idealistic. Of course I don't believe everyone will follow these standards in every case, and I'm not sure they always should. Sometimes debate should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and we shouldn't expect every public dialogue to be as well-reasoned and careful as, say, a university faculty meeting. (For those not currently in the academy or who are not Canadian, that would be an example of wry humor.) But this part of the project is important to me. Many public debates at the intersection between law and politics seem to me to start in medias res. Before we can usefully hold such discussions, we ought first to think about the standards guiding that debate, so that we can thoughtfully evaluate not only the merits of the arguments made by public actors, but the consistency and integrity of those arguments. If, as I believe, the Constitution resolves relatively few issues and leaves primary responsibility for many questions in the hands of We the People, then all conscientious citizens -- voters and lawmakers alike -- can fulfill that role best if we have benchmarks against which to evaluate our own conduct and that of other citizens, including public officials. So here's one stab at some standards.

In my paper, I offer five standards that might guide public debate in this area. Not surprisingly, they are potentially of wider application than the judicial nomination dialogue alone, and may well be broader than the question of religion in politics itself. First, we may ask, does the dialogue meet standards of transparency. If religion is to factor into public officials' deliberations on nominations, they ought to be willing to say so publicly, offering the public a chance to mete out whatever political rewards or punishments they think appropriate in the circumstances. So, for instance, if the Bush administration wished to use Harriet Miers' religion in selling her to particular influential religious supporters such as James Dobson, it ought to have been willing to say much the same thing publicly. It's not clear that it was: it appears to have offered one set of justifications for the nominee privately and another set publicly. This is not a partisan accusation: a Democratic senator who voted against a religious candidate on that basis but dressed up the vote in other public justifications would fail the same test. One thing we might observe about the first example, though, is that it should be taken as odd and unfortunate if a public official who believes and argues that religion should be welcome in the arena of public debate, as I think is true of the President, then conceals religious reasons for particular decisions. (Let me say this point raises controverted factual questions. You're welcome to argue with them. My paper assumes the truth of certain public reports about the Miers case, but doesn't assert them as an absolute certainty.)

A related principle is that of consistency. An argument for or against the use of religion in the context of a particular judicial nomination ought to apply consisently in the case of later nominations. This principle is hardly unique to nominations, or even to the issue of religion in politics: it is nothing more than a suggestion that integrity and consistency in argument are important benchmarks for judging political decision-makers. In my view, many of the voices in the recent judicial nomination passed this test: they argued that the Test Clause barred certain questions about "deeply held beliefs" raised against nominee Roberts, and also argued that it barred President Bush from raising religion in support of nominee Miers. I happen to think they were consistently wrong: the Clause bars neither of these things. But they were consistent. A few groups loudly protested the use of religion in the Roberts case, but were conspicuously silent in the case of Miers.

A third principle we should keep in mind is an appreciation for nuance. Although religious faith plays a profoundly important role in people's lives, that role cashes out in complicated ways. It is difficult enough to figure out what a religion requires for its adherents: for instance, whether the obligations of decision-makers who are Catholic differ depending on whether they are making the law, interpreting and enforcing the law, and so on. It is still more difficult because various individuals take different views of what those obligations mean to them, personally or in an official capacity. So one may hope that we will approach these issues with a sense of caution and nuance. I'm not sure public officials often pass this test. Doubting questions aimed at Catholic nominees often seem to miss these complexities; conversely, the extent to which supporters of a nominee like Miers assume that nominee will judge a particular way because of her religious views can be similarly shallow. I might add that one commenter yesterday wrote that we are entitled to view Muslim candidates or nominees as "inherently trustworthy" on a blanket basis. I strongly disagree with this view as a general matter. But I would also point out that the variation in views held by various Muslim individuals, and the still greater variation in individual views about the relationship between one's faith (Muslim or otherwise) and one's conduct in office, raise serious questions about whether such a view is simply blind to the nuanced role of religion -- any religion -- in the real world, in the lives of actual people of any and every faith.

The fourth principle I call one of genuine respect. That is, we ought to be genuinely respectful of the vital role of religion in many people's lives, and of their entitlement to engage in public dialogue, often in explicitly religious terms. But genuine respect means taking religion seriously, not just as something anodyne or trivial. It means that just as we are entitled to make religious arguments or praise religious views, or commend someone religious as a fine and moral nominee, we are entitled to criticize those views in equally clear terms where we disagree with them. During the Roberts nomination, one group wrote an open letter saying that "[r]eligion, like ethnicity or race, is a natural part of one's background and may be referred to as naturally -- and as respectfully -- as those other things are." I may be overreading this sentence, but it seems to me to suggest that it's OK to discuss religion in politics only in positive and anodyne terms. But religion is not only like race or ethnicity: it can also involve a set of deeply held and controversial views. As with such views, religious views should be entitled to figure in political debate, but they are as subject to praise and criticism as any other views. Of course, some of this debate may be divisive or intemperate. But at least it will involve real dialogue, and I think that is far preferable to a more neutered form of public debate.

Finally, a dash of humility is called for. We all "see through a glass, darkly," as Corinthians puts it, and we ought to be suitably humble both about our own views as we discuss such contentious issues, and about those of others. While I think this is especially important in an area as contentious and potentially divisive as the intersection of religion and politics, it is, of course, a general virtue, of which we could all use more in our private and public lives.

Again, there's an idealized quality to these principles of constitutional etiquette, and I don't expect them to be followed or applied in any rigid fashion. But again, for those of us who want to live appropriately as citizens under the Constitution, but who believe that the Constitution does not settle every issue and leaves us to make our own way as best we can, it's important for us to think about how to exercise the discretion we are given within the public and political realm, and about how to evaluate the public officials who serve us, in ways that partake of an integrity that is larger than any single controversy. I don't think the Religious Test Clause ultimately tells us much about whether various Senators, the President, and other public and political actors behaved appropriately in the case of Roberts and Miers. But given that those cases are unlikely to be the last time that religion figures in a judicial or other nomination, it is never too early for us to think about how we ought to govern ourselves in such circumstances, in light of whatever constitutional "values" and rules for public dialogue we think best reflect a properly functioning society. These standards are a start. Of course, I welcome your views, and perhaps other candidates for a rule of "constitutional etiquette."

Yesterday I laid out a more or less historically based argument about the relatively small scope of the Religious Test Clause. "Narrow" to modern eyes, anyway; I don't think the generation that framed it would have described it that way. Some of the comments have naturally asked, what is my normative view of this conclusion? So, unlike yesterday, let me cut to the chase. I think the reading I have offered is also normatively sound and even attractive, notwithstanding — indeed, in some ways because of rather than in spite of — the parade of horribles I offered at the end of yesterday's post. That normative conclusion is important to me because, although I think history is an important interpretive tool and constraining force in constitutional interpretation, I don't think it is absolutely determinative.

I think the narrow approach I counseled is sound for a number of reasons, which should be attractive to readers from a fairly wide cross-section of constitutional and/or political views. First, it resists the urge to overinterpret the Constitution to solve every "problem." A broad reading of the Clause, by constitutionalizing a vast swath of conduct with respect to judicial and other nominations, narrows the realm of political accountability for such conduct rather than place the enforcement power where it should mostly rest — in the hands of citizens. Indeed, to me one of the peculiarities of the broad reading of the Test Clause taken by many commentators during the Roberts/Miers nominations was that it seemed to run contrary to their general inclination not to expand the meaning of (some) other constitutional provisions beyond their historical scope.

This approach is also sound because, as some commentators have recognized and as Eugene wrote here some time ago, of course religion may be relevant to a nominee's fitness for public office. As the framers and ratifiers recognized, and as Eugene wrote somewhat more recently, "beliefs on contested moral issues are an important and necessary part of the President's decisions about whom to appoint." To take Eugene's example, the President may quite reasonably refuse to appoint as Attorney General someone whose religious beliefs cause him or her generally to oppose the death penalty.

Eugene's example is based on the ways in which religious belief can affect public conduct, and this supports another point made in my article and elsewhere: that the line between religious beliefs and religiously derived beliefs that are highly relevant to a nominee's fitness for office is sufficently blurred that we should resist a reading of the Test Clause that ignores the distinction. But the framers believed more generally that personal character (of which religion was one important aspect) was relevant to public office. I think they were right, and so I think the point can be extended beyond the easy cases. To take a somewhat unlikely example, imagine that the President nominates a Satanist to judicial office, and that this individual's beliefs take the form of advocating and working toward the triumph of evil over good in the universe. OK, not a great pick politically speaking, although we may be missing an untapped constituency. Now, surely the nominee could not be required to formally renounce Satan and all his works as a condition of entry into office. But is it really the case that a Senator could not validly be concerned that such a worldview is inconsistent with judicial office? If the nominee protested that his religious beliefs would not intersect with his judicial office, could a Senator not similarly be concerned that anyone who believes in working for the triumph of evil over good should not be taken at his word? Could not the fact of the nominee's Satanism be an inherent bar for some Senators faced with a decision whether to confirm? Despite the obvious risks attendant upon such an approach — after all, the likely victims of such a vote are unlikely to be Satanists — I think it is still a far sounder and more attractive reading of the Religious Test Clause than one that treats any such concerns as irrelevant and/or forbidden entirely.

Finally, I think my narrow reading is sound because it honors a broader principle: that religious beliefs should not generally be disqualified from full inclusion in any aspect of public discussion and deliberation. The Establishment Clause, at least in my view, disables government from doing certain things respecting religion, but it does not secularize public deliberation, and it should not. As Martha Minow has written, "religiously inflected arguments and perspectives bring critical and prophetic insight and energy to politics and public affairs." We should be loath to exclude those benefits to our public polity, just as we should be loath to forbid individuals, citizens and lawmakers alike, who wish to speak in a distinctly religious voice within that polity. Many who agree with this general principle tend, I think, to treat it as rather a one-way ratchet: treat religion well in the public square, but anything that exposes religious individuals to risks in public deliberation should be verboten. But I think the narrow reading of the Religious Test Clause actually best honors this principle, by saying that religion is potentially as relevant and important a factor in considering nominees as other factors might be, and equally entitled to be a subject of discussion.

Three final notes for today. First, all of the above is still subject to the fundamental rule of the Religious Test Clause: even the Satanist cannot be made to swear to or renounce particular religious beliefs as a condition of entry into a federal office. Senators and Presidents may or may not consider religion when making individual decisions about fitness for office, but no one can be oath-bound to adopt or renounce a religious faith or tenet. Second, although I wrote that such considerations may be relevant and are not constitutionally forbidden, I also emphasize that such votes or inquiries may also be politically costly — as the President discovered, at least, during the Miers nomination, although I resist the way in which his critics treated his conduct as a constitutional violation. That example suggests that politics can, in fact, be an important constraint on the misuse of religion in the nomination context, although surely it is an imperfect one.

Finally, just because I think the Constitution doesn't ultimately say much to foreclose the kind of rhetoric we saw at work during the nominations of Pryor, Roberts, Miers, and others, that doesn't mean we can't have a useful discussion, derived from "constitutional values" and our broader values as a nation, about what sorts of standards ought to govern the use of religion in this and other public debates. Call it a sort of "constitutional etiquette," to use the term I advance in my article. I'll write about that tomorrow. In the meantime, aside from the usual (and valuable!) "you're crazy" or "you're obviously right, hence uninteresting" comments, I hope some commenters will offer their own take on what sorts of rules or values should govern when citizens and lawmakers invoke religion in public debate, around nominees or other issues.

Thanks for much to Eugene and the gang for inviting me to discuss my recent paper, Religious Tests in the Mirror: The Constitutional Law and Constitutional Etiquette of Religion in Judicial Nominations. (The link is to the SSRN version; the final version is available on the usual law review databases.) I've already benefited immensely from the comments to Eugene's introduction, and hope I can enjoy further discussion with the vast universe of VC readers out there. I might add that this project started out as a series of posts on my usual place of bloggage, Prawfsblawg.

It might be appropriately modest to start with what a commenter has already observed: "I never cease to be amazed at how big legal-academic reputations can be built on restating the obvious." Well, I'm honored to be counted -- for the first time, I'm pretty sure -- as having a "big legal-academic reputation." (I thought I was just known as that puckish, handsome devil with a one-day win record on Jeopardy!) But of course the commenter has said something perfectly true about much legal scholarship; indeed, I'd be remiss if I didn't add that my own article builds on a superb piece by my current Notre Dame colleague, Gerard Bradley, whose article (at 37 Case W. L. Rev. 647 (1986-87)) is essential reading. I, too, think there is a touch of the obvious to the historical aspect of my discussion, although I hope I've extended the discussion beyond that in useful ways. But assuming the obviousness of my conclusions for the sake of argument, two interesting questions arise: 1) If my conclusions are "obvious," why did so many intelligent people reach the opposite conclusion in the course of debates over a variety of recent judicial nominations, including those of Judge Pryor and Chief Justice Roberts and the abortive nomination of Harriet Miers? 2) Why does my conclusion continue to provoke such fierce reactions, from both sides of the usual left-right or religious-secular divides? Why is the "obvious," if that's what it is, so threatening?

That's what I hope eventually to discuss this week. Today, I'll simply offer some introductory (and lengthy; forgive me) remarks on my conclusions about the history and meaning of the Religious Test Clause. Subsequently, I'll argue that broader reasons support this conclusion as well; and, having concluded that the Constitution leaves us with relatively few restrictions in this area, I'll offer some ways we might construct our own standards for judging public rhetoric involving religion in the course of debating judicial nominations -- and perhaps far beyond that. In the course of responding to comments, I hope to also offer some thoughts on the implications of these questions for the treatment of religion in public debate, and more broadly on the ways in which the Constitution is used and misused in public dialogue.

So let me offer a bite-sized version of my historical conclusions. The Religious Test Clause is a part of Article VI of the Constitution. After requiring all state and federal office-holders to take an "Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution," it adds: "but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (Note that the Test Clause, unlike the Oath Clause, appears to apply only to federal office-holders.) What does this clause mean? Especially in light of the recent judicial nomination controversies, what does it forbid and what does it allow?

In looking at the history, I've drawn on what I consider four central elements of that history. The first is that the framers and ratifiers of the Religious Test Clause had a specific historical evil in mind when they crafted the Clause: that set of formally imposed oaths and very closely allied practices that were used to restrict office-holders in England to those willing to follow the doctrines of the established church. Second, we must consider the enforcement device by which these tests were imposed: the swearing of an oath, a device by which an individual risked his eternal soul or earthly honor should he swear falsely. The importance with which the members of the founding generation took oaths and the importance of their honor cannot be overstated. Well, okay, technically it can; but it shouldn't be lightly understated. The fact that our own generation may take such things as oaths and honor less seriously may point to the relatively reduced importance of the Test Clause today, but it should not obscure the very different perception that earlier generations would have had about the importance of such matters.

Third, and as some commenters have already noted, despite the framers' and ratifiers' willingness to ban religious tests at the federal level, such tests were rife at the state level, before, during, and after the ratification of the Religious Test Clause. We might read that fact as having purely jurisdictional significance: the ratifiers were willing to see such a test at the federal level but not the state level. But I think it also adds to our understanding of the federal clause. It makes us understand just how revolutionary the federal clause was (a point several commenters have already recognized), and that may lead us to favor a somewhat narrow meaning for the clause. We might be more inclined to read the Clause as focusing more specifically and narrowly on the kinds of historical evils it was aimed against, rather than lightly assuming that, to quote Laurence Tribe, the framers and ratifiers were moving to "prioritize[] the secular over the religious in the [federal] public realm." Finally and relatedly, I point to the fact that, as the historical record makes clear, notwithstanding the Clause, the founding generation widely agreed that moral character was highly relevant to the holding of federal public office -- and for many or most of these individuals, moral character was largely synonymous with religious character. Whatever else they may have meant by the Clause, it is not likely they thought that those who nominated and approved such office-holders were required to treat religion as a forbidden or irrelevant factor.

What conclusion do I draw from all these factors, read together as holistically and as reasonably as I can? It is that the Religious Test Clause is, to use a phrase of Cass Sunstein's, "deep but narrow." It bars the formal imposition of formal test oaths (and, perhaps, some other formal tests) that would restrict putative federal office-holders on the basis of their religion. And it does nothing more -- although to put it that way may lead readers today to ignore just how important and radical even this step was.

So, to end today's post on what I hope is a provocative note, the Religious Test Clause imposes virtually no restrictions on the kind of conduct we saw during the recent debates over particular judicial nominees -- or, what is perhaps more important, on the kind of conduct we will likely see with respect to future nominees. On a constitutional level, the individual members of the Senate were free, if they chose, to question Bill Pryor, John Roberts, and others on their "deeply held views" -- and would have been equally entitled to question them directly, and hostilely (or approvingly), on their religious views. They would similarly have been entitled to vote against these nominees if they were concerned about the relationship between their religious views and their future conduct in judicial office -- or, indeed, to vote against them (or for them!) more directly on the basis of their religious views. And if President Bush promoted Harriet Miers on the basis of her religion -- indeed, if he chose her precisely because of her religion, and perforce disqualified other nominees because of theirs -- then he did nothing wrong, constitutionally speaking. I am not saying any of this conduct would be morally or politically right, although it is not clear to me that all of this conduct would necessarily be wrong. I am saying it was utterly constitutional, at least as far as Article VI. The writ of the Religious Test Clause simply does not run this far.