Seven pages for the reader who wants to see whether the argument holds.
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The claim is not a metaphor and it is not a mood. It is stated in the form a court can take, and it can be checked.
It runs in two legs. The first is that what governs American public life is not a neutral floor but an establishment of religion, installed without any establishing act and maintained since, and that the Establishment Clause reaches it. The second is that refusing to perform under it is religious exercise, and that the Free Exercise Clause protects the refusing.
The first leg is evidentiary before it is doctrinal, which is why the lineage matters more than the argument. A free exercise claim requires a religion with a documented tradition, and there is one: four centuries, with dates and hands, from a shoemaker's bench in Görlitz through the Behmenists and the Friends and Penn to the Religion Clauses themselves. That is the part a hostile reader should attack first, and it is set out so she can.
These are the seven, and each one stands on its own.
History and Tradition is the lineage with its dates, and it is the evidence the whole claim rests on. Not a new religion. The older one, and the one the clauses were drafted to keep unestablished.
The Establishment Clause is the instrument that supplies the word. It forbids laws respecting an establishment, and no establishing act was ever required.
Free Exercise Claim is the claim itself, stated with its adverse authority named rather than avoided.
Religious Test is the one that never announces itself: secularized, privatized, and extended to every worker in forty-nine states.
Home Rule for the Soul is the jurisdictional doctrine, that the soul has inherent jurisdiction over the territory of its own expression, prior and not granted.
Wallach v. Town of Dryden is the proof that this can be won. An industry told New York towns the drilling was coming either way, more than a hundred and seventy of them said no using the same zoning authority that decides where a quarry goes, and on 30 June 2014 the Court of Appeals affirmed, five to two, that they could. Over two hundred municipalities followed, and New York has not had fracking since.
The Privilege of Conscientious Refusal is the instrument, because a privilege earned at the door is a grant, and a grant is what the Establishment issues.
[See HISTORY AND TRADITION · THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE · FREE EXERCISE CLAIM · RELIGIOUS TEST · HOME RULE FOR THE SOUL · WALLACH v. TOWN OF DRYDEN · PRIVILEGE OF CONSCIENTIOUS REFUSAL]
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
