The United States Constitution's articulation of religious free exercise, embodied in the First Amendment, suggests that religious minorities have the same freedoms to practice religion as the dominant culture. However, since the Constitution serves not only as a blueprint for American society but as its highest authority, it embodies both a Protestant religious sensibility and a transcending identity of the American constitutional order. Religious minorities face a dilemma when their own sources of authority are not aligned with those of the dominant culture, and must therefore either establish a separate peace with the constitutional order, come to accept the ultimacy of the constitutional order, or face the possibility of constant conflict with it. An examination of the political and litigational encounters of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Native Americans with the American constitutional order reveal these three options. They also suggest that the parameters of the encounter may be determined not only by the minority religious community's proximity to mainstream Protestant Christianity, but they may also be directly related to that community's physical claims of territoriality and its theological ability to accept the dominance of the American government in the current physical (earthly) realm even while acknowledging its lack of total dominance in another (heavenly) realm.
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