Chaplain. Indeed, as the Senate recognized in the 1850's when Congress itself held hearings to consider the constitutionality of the House and Senate Chaplains, the Chaplain is not restricted to any particular faith or religious affiliation, nor subjected to any other such religious qualification.
The chaplain is an officer of the house which chooses him, and nothing more. He owes his place not to his belonging to a particular religious society, or holding a particular faith, but of the voluntary choice of the members of the house, and stands, in this respect, on the same footing with any other officer so elected.
S. Rep. No. 376,32d Cong., 2d Sess. (1853) (quoted in Murray v. Buchanan, 720 F.2d at 697).
Plaintiff asserts, nonetheless, that violation of the religious test prohibition can be inferred implicitly by the fact that the Senate and House Chaplains always have been members of Christian faiths, Compl. ^51 -52, and that theirprayers always involve supplication to a Supreme Being. Id. ^ 53; see also id. ^ 54, 63, 65. Such an argument, which is nothing more than a strained attempt to expand the Religious Test Clause to become a wide-ranging protection against perceived religious discrimination, must be rejected.
As a review of the history and context behind the adoption of the Religious Test Clause demonstrates, that prohibition was a specific restriction on the oath and affirmation that me Constitution required of Members of Congress, state legislators, and federal and state executive and judicial officers.24 Before the American Revolution, many of the colonies required
24 An understanding of specific prohibitions found in the Constitution must be grounded on the historical context in which they arose and the specific historical ills they sought to prevent. As Justice Frankfurter explained in discussing the scope of the Constitution's prohibition against Bills of Attainder:
Broadly speaking, two types of constitutional claims come before this Court. Most constitutional issues derive from the broad standards of fairness
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