The preposition war

The First Amendment might have been worded more clearly. While it emphatically guarantees freedom from religion (its first clause is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), it unfortunately fails to use that preposition, and its second clause does use the preposition of (albeit in the lawyerly relative "thereof"): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." [emphasis mine].

This unfortunate fact has given fuel not only to religionists, but also to politicians, to claim that the First Amendment is all about freedom of religion (that is, not in the least about freedom from).

The religionists, of course, don't need much fuel to start a fire, given that hellfire, they love to point out, is already right there in scripture.

I don't know whether the man who (to paraphrase Al Gore) used to be the next Vice President of the United States¹ got his fuel from scripture (the Torah in his case) or from preposition-parsing, but in an article in the February 19, 2001 issue of The Nation, on how politicians pander to the religious in campaigning, Ellen Willis wrote:

Lieberman was even bolder [than Gore, who had divulged that he was "born-again"]: He responded to what he called the "miracle" of his nomination with repeated public professions of faith in God, along with declarations that religion is the basis of morality and that the Constitution provides "freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." [my emphasis]

Irresponsible, inflammatory political rhetoric doesn't help our enlightenment when it misinterprets the Constitution and proclaims falsehoods about the basis of morality, which is evolutionary, not religious.
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1. Gore's running mate, you may remember, was Joseph I. Lieberman, U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He was, by the way, a member of my baccalaureate class at Yale.