Recent Restrictions upon Religious Liberty

Within the last five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has added decisions of greater importance to the case law of religious freedom than had been accumulated in all the years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The importance of two of these recent decisions rests upon the subordination of freedom of action based on sectarian beliefs to the restrictions of society as a whole. In one of the two cases, the law of society was a board of education order that school children participate in the flag salute exercise on pain of expulsion from the public schools; in the other, it was peddlers' license tax ordinances. Because neither of these decisions has been accepted as a firmly rooted precedent, it will be well to examine them in the light of the history of the federally secured right of religious freedom and in the light of the immediate public reactions to them.A considerable proportion of the early emigration to the thirteen original colonies was undoubtedly due to a desire to escape religious persecution in England and on the Continent. Those colonists, however, were as insistent that their own particular form of religion be adhered to as their oppressors had been. The story of Roger Williams, who was expelled from the colony of Massachusetts because of his non-conformist views and who established the colony of Rhode Island as a sanctuary of religious tolerance, and that of Ann Hutchinson, who also was exiled from the Bay Colony for a like reason, are monuments to the intolerance of the Puritans.