A Official Statement from the ATC

The Aquarian Tabernacle Church, in support of the Pagans, Wiccans, and practitioners of earth-centered, polytheistic, and non-Abrahamic spiritual paths across Tennessee and the United States, issues this formal rebuttal to the recent public statements of Tennessee State Representative and gubernatorial candidate Monty Fritts.

Rep. Fritts has repeatedly declared that, if elected governor, he would seek to ban mosques and what he calls “pagan religions,”. He has further claimed that the First Amendment’s protections do not constrain state governments and that only worship of “Almighty God” as understood in his particular Christian interpretation is safeguarded under the Tennessee Constitution. These positions are not merely offensive, they are a direct repudiation of the constitutional order that defines the United States and the State of Tennessee.

Religious Freedom is not optional. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Through the Fourteenth Amendment, these guarantees apply fully to the states. The free exercise of religion protects the right of every person to believe, practice, gather, and build houses of worship according to the dictates of conscience, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Pagan, atheist, or any other tradition. So long as those practices do not involve force or fraud against others.

Tennessee’s own Constitution, Article I, Section 3, is equally clear:“That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience; that no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship.”

This language does not grant government the power to define which gods are legitimate or which traditions count as “religion.” It protects the rights of conscience of every individual. Courts have consistently rejected attempts to carve particular faiths out of constitutional protection by relabeling them as “political movements” or “pagan.” Such selective exclusion is precisely what the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses forbid.

The Illegality of this proposed course is blatant. Any attempt by a state governor or legislature to ban the construction or operation of mosques, temples, or Pagan places of worship, or to criminalize the peaceful practice of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or contemporary Pagan religions, would be unconstitutional on its face, and in its bones. It would violate both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. It would also violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by discriminating among citizens on the basis of religion.

Rep. Fritts’s assertion that the First Amendment applies only to the federal government is a long-discredited, prejudiced, and abusive reading of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has held for nearly a century that the religion clauses are incorporated against the states. No state official possesses the authority to declare one set of beliefs protected and another set subject to prohibition. Claims that certain religions are inherently incompatible with the Constitution do not create an exception. They simply reveal a desire to substitute personal theology for the rule of law.

We are deeply disappointed by the rise of religious nationalism that treats the machinery of government as an instrument for imposing one iminutive, sectarian, vision on an entire population. The United States was not founded as a theocracy. Its founders, many of them devout though many of them agnostic, deliberately rejected established churches and religious tests for office precisely because they had seen the suffering that follows when the state claims the power to decide whose worship is legitimate.

When a candidate for high office openly aspires to use the power of the state to make non-Christian religions “not exist” in America, and when he frames this aspiration as fidelity to “Godly values,” he abandons the American tradition of ordered liberty. He replaces it with a majoritarian religious test that, aside from being blatantly illegal in the United States, history has repeatedly shown leads to persecution, social fracture, and the erosion of rights for everyone. Including those who may think themselves immune, or currently hold majority status.

Tennessee’s slow slide toward becoming a place where constitutional guarantees of religious liberty are treated as negotiable is profoundly un-American. The American experiment rests on the premise that government exists to protect the rights of the individual, not to enforce a preferred orthodoxy. A state that elevates one religion’s supremacy over the equal citizenship of its non-Christian residents ceases to honor that premise.

The Pagan community does not ask for special privileges. We ask only for the same constitutional protections that every other citizen enjoys: The right to worship, to assemble, to teach our children, and to maintain our sacred spaces without fear that the next election will render those rights contingent on the personal theology of the governor. We stand with our other religious neighbors in insisting that these rights are inalienable and nonnegotiable.

We call upon elected officials, candidates, and citizens of every faith and of no faiths, to publicly and repeatedly reject the politics of religious exclusion. The Constitution is not a suggestion. Religious freedom is not a favor granted by those in power. It is a birthright of every American.

The Aquarian Tabernacle Church and the Pagan community will continue to defend that birthright. We will do so in the courts, in the public square, and at the ballot box, against any attempt to dismantle it.

In defense of conscience and the Constitution of the United States of America,

The Aquarian Tabernacle Churchworking in trust for the Pagan Community