officeholders to swear oaths that included declarations of religious tenets or beliefs. Persons unwilling to swear the oath were barred from the office. See, e.g., Sanford H. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America 299-300 (Burt Franklin 1970) (1902) (New Hampshire), 337 (New York), 398 (Maryland), 444-50, 503 (Pennsylvania), 502-03 (New Jersey).25 In drafting the Constitution, the Framers included a specific prohibition on such test oaths under the new national government. This provision amended the clause in Article VI requiring that all Members of Congress, state legislators, and federal and state executive and judicial officers be bound by
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written into the Constitution (e.g. "due process," "equal protection of the laws," "just compensation"), and the division of power as between States and Nation. Such questions, by their very nature, allow a relatively wide play for individual legal judgment. The other class gives no such scope. For this second class of constitutional issue derives from very specific provisions of the Constitution. These had their source in definite grievances and led the Fathers to proscribe against recurrence of their experience. These specific grievances and the safeguards against their recurrence were not defined by the Constitution. They were defined by history. Their meaning was so settled by history that definition was superfluous. Judicial enforcement of the Constitution must respect these historic limits.
United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303, 321 (1946) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). The Religious Test Clause is just such a specific prohibition that must be understood from the historical grievance it sought to prevent.
25 An example of a religious test oath was the requirement in New York in the late 1600's that "all office holders [take]... the oath of allegiance and supremacy, partaking the sacrament 'according to the rites of the Church of England,' and signing a declaration against the Roman doctrine oftransubstantiation." S. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America at 337.
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