Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 6 Comments

On Bach’s B minor Mass

Here’s a fun article on J.S. Bach’s magnificent Mass in B minor, one of the magisterial and final pinnacles of his oeuvre, and yet in some ways puzzling. What, after all, was a faithful Lutheran doing setting an entire Roman Catholic Mass–a Missa Tota?

And for performances, stay away from the trendy and the faux HIP (Historically Informed Performances). Someday I will write a rancorous essay entitled, “Historically Informed Performances: The Living (and oh so HIP) Originalism of Classical Music.”

Instead savor the magnificently moody and measured performances of Furtwängler and Scherchen. Or, if you can’t get ahold of those, this version conducted by Herbert von Karajan will do.

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Brettschneider: An Expansive Establishment Clause, Too

All this month, we are hosting an online symposium on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty.” In today’s post, Corey Brettschneider (Brown) responds to Muñoz. For other posts in this series, please click here. 

It is my pleasure to reply to Professor Muñoz’s fine article and excellent post. It is also a pleasure to join such a robust conversation about the Founders’ ideas about religious freedom and their implications for contemporary jurisprudence. Muñoz argues that the Founders held a jurisdictional view of religious freedom that divided the divine authority over religious worship and protected it against secular authority. The jurisdictional view would also protect a wide terrain of secular authority from religious intervention. So far, commentators have focused on the implications of Muñoz’s jurisdictional view for the Court’s contemporary Free Exercise jurisprudence. I want to refocus on the implications of Muñoz’s account for Establishment jurisprudence. While Muñoz might be correct that the Founders’ vision pushes toward Smith rather than Sherbert, and thus suggests doctrine on the weaker end of free exercise, I suggest why his account recommends an expansive reading of the Establishment Clause.

In his article, Muñoz argues the Founders understood the Free Exercise Clause to ban the state from regulating worship. It follows that the limits on secular authority in matters of worship provide government a very expansive authority over secular matters. The flip side  of the limited jurisdiction government has in matters of worship is a vast limit on religious influence over secular lawmaking. This limit has important implications for the breadth of the Establishment Clause. I want to push Munoz to think about how the jurisdictional view would address two fundamental jurisprudential problems. The first concerns third party harm and the second concerns the Establishment Clause requirement of secular purpose.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required an exemption to a federal requirement that closely held for-profit corporations provide birth control coverage to their employees even when those corporations object to providing it on religious grounds. Jack Rakove rightly suggests that the notion of third party harm might be directly relevant to the Founders’ view. In the Hobby Lobby case, he argues, the rights of a potential beneficiary of birth control might be violated by the imposition of a religiously-based refusal to provide a benefit by an Read more

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Drakeman: The Free Exercise Clause, State Constitutions, and Natural Rights

All this month, we are hosting an online symposium on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty.” In today’s post, Donald Drakeman (Notre Dame) responds to Muñoz. For other posts in this series, please click here. 

Phillip Muñoz has again brought us back to the Framers in a way that makes us think about First Amendment questions in an important new light. This alone is extremely difficult to do in contemporary church-state scholarship. Better still, he has done so with such a clear and persuasive style, even in the in-depth APSR version, that it deserves to be carefully read and widely discussed.

Since the article has been so clearly summarized, I will move directly to focus on areas where I think Phillip’s arguments will be highly influential, and a couple of points where he might fruitfully expand this line of thinking.

Originalism

The Framers have been the religion clauses’ nearly constant companions ever since Everson, when Justices Black and Rutledge ushered in the modern church-state era with a focus on Madison and Jefferson. But the Framers are no longer in vogue for originalists. Over the last few decades, Justice Scalia inspired a generation of originalist scholars to maintain their focus on the founding era, but to shift constitutional debates away from the Framers themselves. Concerns about Supreme Court justices cherry-picking quotations from their favored Framers, as we can see in Everson, have largely banished the Framers from the search for original meaning. With dozens of members of the First Congress, and many more ratifiers, how can we pretend that they all had the same thing in mind?

For many “new originalists,” solving this problem requires us to concentrate not on what particular individuals may have thought about a constitutional topic, or on what specific Framers intended it to mean, but on the objective public meaning of the words − what the average, or perhaps well-informed, ratifier would have understood them to mean. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster have thus taken the place of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the search for constitutional meaning.

Yet, looking up “prohibiting,” “free,” “exercise” and “religion” in either dictionary can only take us so far, especially in addressing difficult questions along the lines of whether the Constitution demands religious exemptions. On this point, Phillip’s paper is Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Comparing Traditionalism and Originalism II

Here’s the second of my two posts on traditionalism and originalism in constitutional interpretation. This post discusses the TP BannerNoel Canning decision, and one of its main points concerns the institutional pluralism (legal, political, social, and cultural) of the traditionalist method. A bit:

First, a quick recapitulation of traditionalism in constitutional interpretation. Traditionalist interpretation is concerned with perpetuating and maintaining longstanding legal practices—not only those of the Supreme Court but also of other legal and political institutions (Congress and the Executive, for example) as well as social and cultural institutions (as in the case of legislative prayer). Especially in the many cases of vague constitutional text, traditionalist interpretation takes these practices not as evidence of meaning but as constituents of meaning.

Traditionalist interpretation consequently values the practices of many different sorts of institutions. It is institutionally pluralist in this way, and certainly not focused exclusively on the Supreme Court. In fact, a traditionalist Supreme Court opinion will be deferential to the constitutional views of the coordinate branches where those views have endured for very long periods of time. It will be interested in maintaining and re-cementing those views. There is therefore a democratic component of traditionalist interpretation, though it is the democratic sensibility of the authority of long-standing practice as the accumulated wisdom of the people over time, not that of present majority inclination.

Like originalist interpretation, traditionalism is historically rather than normatively oriented, but it does not focus single-mindedly on the moment of ratification. Institutional practices before, during, and after ratification are significant. Continuity is the crucial feature. The longer those practices have endured, the less likely the Court will be, in the ordinary case, to upset them—indeed, the less likely that the practices may be to be brought before the Court at all.

Noel Canning concerned the meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause in Article II, Section 2, Clause 3, and in specific whether the phrase “during the recess” authorized the President to make appointments within congressional sessions or only between the formal sessions of Congress. The originalist arguments for the latter interpretation were powerful, but in a 5-4 majority opinion authored by Justice Breyer, the Court concluded that the President may make recess appointments while Congress is in session.

The influence of traditional institutional practice on the Court’s decision was massive. Relying on Chief Justice Marshall’s statement in McCulloch v. Maryland that the “longstanding practice of government” must inform the Court’s role to “say what the law is,” the Court emphasized that “long standing and established practice is a consideration of great weight in a proper interpretation of constitutional provisions.” In this, the Court’s first foray into interpreting Recess Appointments Clause in more than 200 years, “we must hesitate to upset the compromises and working arrangements that the elected branches of government themselves have reached”….

But the particular nature of that “broader interpretation” in Noel Canning is of great interest. What makes a practice long-standing? How long and continuous is long and continuous enough? Which political virtues are supported by the traditionalist method? And how does the longstanding practice or traditionalist approach differ from living constitutionalism?

The Court did not answer any of these questions directly. But it did say that “three quarters of a century of settled practice” in which Presidents had overwhelmingly favored the broader construction and the Senate had largely acquiesced in that construction “is long enough to entitle a practice” to “great” interpretive weight. In truth, three quarters of a century does not seem a particularly long period as the traditionalist measures time, particularly when compared, for example, with the duration of the practice of legislative prayer in Town of Greece v. Galloway. Yet what seems to matter is not only temporal duration but also the preponderance or uniformity of the interpretive preference within that span.

It was also critical to the majority’s approach that though the founding-era view was not directly probative of the Court’s broader interpretation of the clause, the Court found it to be consistent with that interpretation. That finding permitted the incorporation of founding-era understandings to support the longstanding practice on which the majority relied (again, this was a point vigorously and acutely disputed by Justice Scalia). Finally, institutional dynamics and historical patterns also figure prominently in the majority opinion. It was the enduring practices of the coordinate political and more directly democratically accountable branches, not those of the Court, that demanded acknowledgment and deference.

As for the differences between traditionalism and living constitutionalism, one of the most significant is that for the former, long-standing and continuous practice fixes meaning. And it fixes it with a durable presumption, refusing to deviate from it unless there are overwhelmingly good reasons for doing so. Living constitutionalism is committed to no such thing. It prizes the evolution of meaning. A practice’s endurance or traditionalism is never a reason to perpetuate it. To the contrary: it is if anything a reason to change it.

I should add that the DC Circuit’s opinion draws a much sharper divide between founding-era practice and subsequent practice. In some ways, this makes the Supreme Court’s opinion even more interesting from a traditionalist perspective: Justice Breyer’s opinion did not acknowledge this division. It worked the difference into a continuity. I suppose one could be cynical about this and say that traditionalist methods are manipulable. But Breyer could not have incorporated the founding period into the tradition if there had been a more marked divergence from later practice (thanks to Adam White for help in thinking through some of this).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Comparing Traditionalism and Originalism

I have the first of two posts up at the Liberty Law blog comparing originalism and traditionalism in constitutional TP Bannerinterpretation. The first post uses Town of Greece v. Galloway while in the second I’ll talk about the NLRB v. Noel Canning. The point of the posts is not to defend these decisions, but merely to distinguish them as traditionalist in interpretive method. Here’s a bit from the end:

How is [traditionalism] different from originalism? Here things quickly become complicated because of the broad variety of originalist interpretive approaches. Shortly after the decision [in Town of Greece] was issued, Professor Michael Ramsey had an excellent and useful post on the degree to which Kennedy’s opinion was originalist, in which Ramsey concluded that it reflected a species of original expected applications originalism:

It’s not (typically for Kennedy) an exclusively originalist opinion, but there is a strong originalist element….Kennedy’s principal contention (following Marsh) is that the people who proposed the First Amendment also authorized sectarian legislative prayer, so the Amendment must permit it.

In academic terms, this is a version of “original expected application” – that is, how did the framers of a provision anticipate it affecting existing practices? It is fashionable in academic circles to look down on original expected applications. Under original meaning originalism, the question is: what did the text mean? It’s not, what did some people at the time think it would mean (or, worse, how did some people at the time apply it in practice once it was enacted)? If that’s right, Kennedy is looking in the wrong place – it shouldn’t matter what people thought would happen to legislative prayer, but rather what the text actually meant for legislative prayer.

And yet for the traditionalist it should and does matter that many people, including the drafters (but certainly not only they), did not believe there to be any inconsistency between the practice of legislative prayer and the meaning of disestablishment in the First Amendment. It furthermore matters for the traditionalist (as it does not for many originalists) that the practice was widely accepted in the colonial period as well as for long periods after the ratification of the Establishment Clause. That is because the traditionalist is more focused on practices than meanings when it comes to constitutional interpretation. Or perhaps it is better to say that the traditionalist believes that the meaning of text—particularly as to text that is itself abstract—is far better determined and understood by recourse to concrete practices than by recourse to still other abstract principles.

Here there may be some further overlap between traditionalism and those sub-varieties of public meaning originalism that are receptive to discerning meaning from practices and customs. Professors John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport have written favorably about this interpretive approach in this paper. Professor Ramsey puts the point well from the originalist perspective: “If a very broad consensus at the time of enactment (or shortly after) thought that provision X did not ban activity Y, that is surely strong evidence that the original public meaning of X did not ban activity Y.” For the traditionalist, practices (not principles) are not “merely evidence” or “some evidence” or even “strong evidence” of meaning. Meaning is constituted by practices. The endurance of those practices and the degree of their social acceptance—before, during, and after textual ratification—are also constituents of meaning. None of this implies that these are the only constituents. Neither does it imply that new practices cannot be enfolded into existing meanings. That the founders did not know about email or the Internet, for example, does not mean, on the traditionalist view, that the Fourth Amendment cannot apply to those new media today. But practices that were familiar; widespread; continuous before, during and after the founding; and constitutionally unobjectionable offer more than “evidence” of the meaning of the Establishment Clause. For the traditionalist, they are themselves part of that meaning.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 3 Comments

“It is by obeying the judgments of our predecessors that we are empowered to make judgments of our own.”

At perhaps one click removed from law and religion proper, but still deeply relevant, is Joel Alicea’s superb essay on originalism and “the rule of the dead” (from which I have drawn the title quote) in the latest issue of National Affairs. Alicea’s piece is particularly useful on the necessary connection of obedience to the will of the dead and the concept of written law (and the disconnection between the concept of written law and obedience to the will of the living). A bit more:

By obeying the dead, the living can demand obedience. As Judge Frank Easterbrook once remarked, “Decisions of yesterday’s legislatures…are enforced…because affirming the force of old laws is essential if sitting legislatures are to enjoy the power to make new ones.” That is, “[p]eople accept old contracts and old laws because they know that this is the only way to ensure that promises to them are kept.” We, the living, accept the binding force of laws passed before our time so that our laws will be obeyed, both in our own time and beyond.

This dynamic between the living and the dead not only undergirds written law; it is foundational to a proper conception of popular sovereignty under the Constitution. Indeed, it is at the heart of what Whittington has called the dualist conception of democratic theory. Under this framework, “the people” exist in their sovereign capacity only when they engage in higher lawmaking — the making and amending of the Constitution. This lawmaking is of a higher order, as it sets the rules by which all other laws can be made and sets the limits of what those laws can do. At all other times and for all other lawmaking, ordinary politics is the norm, and in such circumstances, the people do not act as the sovereign — though they retain the power to reassert their sovereignty at any moment through the process of constitutional amendment. This is not to deny, of course, that the people remain the ultimate source of authority in a polity during a time of ordinary politics; it is simply to say that they and their representatives are acting under or subordinate to the rules that the people established in their sovereign capacity.

This conception of popular sovereignty stems from the same kinds of considerations that uphold written law. In the same way that the dead-hand argument is hostile to any form of written law, saying that the people act in their sovereign capacity in everyday politics is hostile to a written constitution. A constitution is meant to guide and limit ordinary politics, and if ordinary politics were the domain of the people acting as sovereign, then every statute would be the equivalent of a constitutional amendment, and the idea of a written constitution would become meaningless.

….

These philosophical assumptions underlying written law are the essence of originalism. We must submit to the commands of the dead in order to govern ourselves, and in order to submit, we must understand those commands according to their original meaning. It would be farcical to claim that we are being obedient to a rule if we arrogated to ourselves the power to change the meaning of that rule. It would be tantamount to telling past generations: “We will obey your laws — so long as they mean what we say they mean.” The rejection of the dead-hand argument is therefore not just about defending the validity of written law in general; it is about defending originalism’s core philosophical assumptions.

Similarly, we see that the argument over the dead-hand of the past is about far more than the viability of originalism. At stake is the idea of written law, of popular sovereignty, and of society as an intergenerational partnership between the living and the dead.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

We the People: What the Public Thinks About Originalism

The following is a post by Center friend and supporter Don Drakeman.

As part of a lively debate about originalism and same-sex marriage (at the Volokh Conspiracy site between Orin Kerr and Ilya Somin), Larry Solum has suggested that there is “no good empirical data on public beliefs about originalism.”  I can’t add to the substantive debate, but I have some empirical data about what the public believes about originalism.  Readers can decide whether it is good or not.

In 2012, I commissioned a YOUGOV survey of 1000 Americans specifically on the topic of originalism.  Most surveys have simply asked voters to choose between the Constitution’s original meaning and a more modern, living Constitution approach. Over time, the public has generally split about 50-50 on that point, with a majority periodically flipping from  one side to the other.  In my Originalism 2012 Survey, 60% chose the understanding of the Constitution at the time it was originally written, with 40% picking “what the Constitution means in current times.”

But here’s the interesting part. I asked the “current times” respondents what the Supreme Court should do with evidence of the original meaning.”  I expected that most would say that it should be either irrelevant or, or merely historical background.  Yet, only 3% said that the Court should ignore it, 18% opted for it to be used only as historical background, and an impressive 79% said that the Supreme Court should “consider it as one of the various factors that should be considered in making the decision.”  So, all in, over 90% of Americans think that the original meaning is at least relevant to the Supreme Court’s decision, with half or more considering it determinative.

That strikes me is as a pretty powerful reason for us to think hard about what the original meaning really is. Many of the debates among originalists center on exactly where we should be looking for that meaning.  I asked the public that question. Offered a series of possible sources, a majority of the public said “yes” or “maybe” to all of these four possibilities: Dictionary definitions; how average voters at the time of ratification understood it; how hypothetical, well-informed ratifiers would have understood it; and the understanding of the framers.  When asked which of these is the most important in the event of a conflict, 66% picked “what the Constitution’s framers intended it to mean.”

Whether the public’s views are important is an interesting question for debate. (For what it’s worth, I believe that they are.) For today, however, I simply wanted to point out that we do have some empirical data, and it speaks pretty clearly.

Details of the Originalism 2012 Survey (along with why I think it is important) can be found here:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2448431

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Originalist Fusionism

Here’s something not right down the law and religion fairway, but certainly somewhere in the first cut. The success of original meaning in displacing original intent as the basis for originalist jurisprudence is well known. Original meaning is widely thought to avoid some of the methodological difficulties associated with original intention. And several theorists believe that original meaning is both more politically legitimate and truer to the activity of legal interpretation than original intention.

Yet recently, something of an intentionalist revival has come on the scene. Note that the revival is almost always inclusive of original meaning: the claim is not the mirror image of the new originalist claim–i.e., that original meaning should displace original intention completely. Instead, it is that the exclusion of original intention entirely either leaves originalism incomplete or has had some other ill effects on originalism. The new intentionalism therefore could be plausibly described as a fusionist project–bringing together considerations of original meaning and original intent as both relevant.

Exhibit A: Donald Drakeman’s and Joel Alicea’s work on the limits of the new originalism. What happens when originalist materials point to two or more equally persuasive original public meanings?  The authors discuss a case from 1796 — Hylton v. United States — which involved the constitutionality of a federal tax on carriages. The tax was resisted by Hylton, a Virginia businessman, and other Southerners who believed that it was inequitable because of the greater prevalence of carriages in the South. The case pitted Hamilton against Madison (who had argued against the tax’s constitutionality) and the issue was whether this new tax should be characterized as a direct tax or an excise tax, and “what to do when the best evidence of contemporary usage points in two directions.”  The arguments advanced by lawyers for and against the government proceed through all of the accepted new originalist sources — dictionaries, ordinary or customary usage before the framing of the Constitution (of many sorts), resistance to the “foreign Lexicons” of “consolidated” as opposed to “confederated” governments, commentaries, poems, ratification materials, congressional debates, and so on. Hamilton won the day, arguing that Adam Smith’s definition of a tax in The Wealth of Nations “was probably contemplated . . . by [the] Convention.”  The authors note this as an example of original intentions, and they also emphasize that the three opinions in the case all focused to varying degrees on framers’ intentions.  The reason for this focus is best summarized by Justice Paterson: “the natural and common, or technical and appropriate, meaning of the words, duty or excise, is not easy to ascertain.”  And the authors go on to argue that recourse to original intent is a perfectly reasonable move when original meaning yields equally plausible but conflicting understandings.  The authors call it original intent as tiebreaker: “when the meaning must be sought outside the corners of the constitutional text, why not opt for answering the question ‘What were the framers actually trying to accomplish in using this language?’ rather than letting Samuel Johnson . . . or Hans-Georg Gadamer . . . make the final determination?” And it might be quite common that originalist materials would point to two or more plausible meanings of a particular clause. See, for example, the Establishment Clause.

Exhibit B: Steve Smith’s new post at the Liberty Law blog on the shortcomings of the new originalism. Smith focuses on the new originalism’s complete dissociation of original meaning and original expected applications, which he argues has had the effect of depriving originalism of some of its central political virtue. He writes:

At bottom, after all, the basic idea was, and is—or should be—that “We the People” are entitled to govern ourselves. And for that to happen, we need a process in which we can intelligently decide whether or not to enact a constitutional provision on the basis of an understanding of what the provision will and will not do—of what its consequences will be. To be sure, the People can’t reasonably expect to foresee every little contingency and every specific application of our enactments. But if a constitutional provision ends up having far-reaching consequences that its enactors never intended—that they might have found shocking, that if foreseen might have led them not to enact the provision at all—then not only democracy but also basic rationality are thereby betrayed.

We are then being governed, in the name of the Constitution, by something that “We the People” didn’t think we were approving and perhaps never would have approved. Adopting a constitutional provision becomes less like intelligent, rational self-governance and more like throwing darts in the dark: we adopt a constitutional provision, but it’s anybody’s guess what the provision may turn out to mean.

Smith suggests at the end of the piece that it might be good for “some new movement to emerge devoted to the true criterion for constitutional interpretation,” and he refers to an unpublished paper of his dealing with a “maker-meaning nexus.” I haven’t read the piece, but it sounds very much like a kind of originalist fusionism. One might even say that something like original expected applications (drawn from intentionalist sources) could be used as a side-constraint on original meaning. That side-constraint could operate only in cases of ambiguity (a la Alicea/Drakeman) or as a general restraint on it.

I could list other exhibits, and there are other important intentionalist champions out there, probably none more interesting that Richard Ekins (though my tentative sense, subject I hope to reader correction, is that Professor Ekins’s writing has not taken a position on intentionalism in the originalism debates). But I wonder whether originalist fusionism (or originalist fusionisms of various kinds) might be on the way.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Drakeman, “What’s the Point of Originalism?”

A very interesting new piece by Don Drakeman here. One of its interesting features is a recent survey of public attitudes about originalism–three of the key questions concerning (1) how many favor original understanding (to encompass original meaning and original intention) as compared with non-originalist methods of interpretation; (2) of those that do not favor original understanding, how many nevertheless believe that original understanding should be a factor that is considered in constitutional interpretation; and (3) how many prefer original intention as compared with original meaning (the questions are put with greater nuance than I am conveying here).

While the survey is interesting, there are three other contributions that the piece makes that I found pretty neat.

First, the titular question. The idea here is that “the point”–or at least one point–of originalism is to persuade the public of the court’s decisions, and more generally of the court’s legitimacy in rendering those decisions. The point is a purely pragmatic one. But it may be the fundamental point.

Second, the historical claim about the writing of majority opinions. We are accustomed to judicial opinions. Indeed, around this time of year, we are fixated on them, as if the opinions themselves had some sort of independent constitutional power. But they don’t. Opinions are not constitutionally mandated. The Constitution speaks in terms of “the judicial power” and judicial “offices.” But there is no constitutional reason that the court could not exercise its power and fulfill its office simply by rendering judgment. And so it did before the Marshall Court. Drakeman notes that opinion-writing for the court is really a Marshall-era innovation–devised in order to give rhetorical efficacy and (further) legitimacy to the court. Majority opinions are vehicles for the court to exercise its power as an institution (opinion writing generally is a different issue).

Third, I appreciated the idea of the distinction between a theory of constitutional interpretation and a theory of constitutional explication. What Drakeman is doing is explaining why originalism does matter as an approach to giving meaning to the Constitution: it keeps the Supreme Court in business. He is not arguing that originalism is the correct intepretive approach or that it ought to matter (or that the public is right to believe that it matters). Put another way, the paper is a positive account of originalism’s value. I think that sort of account of originalism’s worth might be very appealing, or at least very interesting indeed, from a Catholic perspective.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Justice Thomas’s Concurrence in Town of Greece

One last expository post on Town of Greece v. Galloway, this one on Justice Thomas’s concurrence, which was joined by Justice Scalia as to Part II alone. There has already been a fair quantity of commentary on the case, but little of it has focused on Justice Thomas’s concurrence.

The Thomas concurrence is divided into two sections. The first part restates and develops Justice Thomas’s view, first expressed in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, that the Establishment Clause should not be incorporated against the states because the Establishment Clause represents a protection for the states against interference by the federal government in matters of religion. Like the Tenth Amendment, the Establishment Clause is not a protection for individual rights. The clause’s incorporation was simply assumed, wrongly and without argument, in the Everson case.

Some discomfited attention is being paid to Justice Thomas’s statement that “[a]s an initial matter, the Clause probably prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion.” How could he only say “probably”? But there is an explanation. The citation for this statement is the excellent book, Church, State, and Original Intent, by religious historian (and Center for Law and Religion board member and former Forum guest) Donald Drakeman. Here is Don at 260 of the book:

The strongest evidence from the constitutional ratifying conventions, the amendment proposals, the records of the congressional debates, and the ratification of the Bill of Rights points consistently in one direction: that Congress should be prohibited from establishing a “national religion.” The First Amendment thus succeeded in turning the hotly contested subject of church-state relations–which had already caused legislative battles in the states and would continue to do so virtually in perpetuity–into a “milk and water” amendment by focusing on the one thing no one wanted and everyone could unite against: a “Church of the United States.” There was no need for the various participants to agree on what that meant, and, indeed, interpretive disagreements arose as early as the first few decades, but, for this review of the understanding of the clause at the time it was adopted, there is no body of evidence that supports any more detailed sense of what the language meant to the people who voted for it or to the American public who received it.

There is therefore enormous uncertainty as to what the clause meant as an original matter (this is one reason that original expected applications originalism is so useful as to the Establishment Clause)–uncertainty that is reflected in the very spare historical record that reveals next to nothing about the clause’s historical meaning. Church-state arrangements in the early republic were, as they are now, deeply unsettled and contested, and the Establishment Clause was not intended to settle them. If the clause is read as Justice Thomas reads it–as a federalism provision–then one must make the inference (and it is an inference) that a national church was prohibited, since a national church would present a major obstacle to the freedom of states to decide on their own church-state arrangements. 

Part II of the concurrence assumes that the clause had been incorporated and then argues that what the clause proscribes is “coercion of religious orthodoxy and of financial support by force of law and threat of penalty.” Note that here there is a kind of unity with Justice Scalia’s view of the scope of protection afforded by the Free Exercise Clause. This “actual legal coercion” test–which the Justices distinguish from a “subtle coercive pressures” test (see Lee v. Weisman) involves the exercise of government power “in order to exact financial support of the church, compel religious observance, or control religious doctrine.” It is therefore unsurprising that Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia did not join Part II(B) of Justice Kennedy’s opinion dealing with the type of coercion required to make out an Establishment Clause challenge (assuming its incorporation against the states).