Religious Freedom, Church Autonomy, and Constitutionalism

Our topic at this symposium is religion, the state, and constitutionalism -not the Constitution, or the First Amendment, but constitutionalism. Countless conferences, cases, books, and articles have wrestled with one version or another of the question, how does our Constitution, with its First Amendment and its religion clauses, promote, protect, or perhaps restrain religion? We are considering, it seems to me, a question that is different, and that is different in interesting and important ways: What are connections between religion and religious freedom, on the one hand, and constitutionalism, on the other