Religious liberty is a core pillar of the American framework. While the founders envisioned religion as essential to a healthy republic, they saw it as something that should flourish free from state intervention, wrote Steven Waldman in “Founding Faith.” They believed God gave every human the right to practice religion freely, Waldman wrote. He called their vision of religious liberty “a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.”
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, freedom of religion – enshrined in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution – remains an essential part of the fabric of our democracy. A new report, “Religious Liberty for All: Celebrating this Founding Freedom at America 250” celebrates the religious diversity in America through the stories of faith leaders, elected officials, scholars, theologians and experts. Their voices provide a modern perspective on what the ideal of religious freedom the founders envisioned looks like in practice today.
“Religious liberty, to me, means that every person should be able to live in dignity and safety with their deepest beliefs intact—whether they are religious, spiritual, questioning, or nonreligious,” wrote Sunita Viswanath, executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, in the report. “It is not the right of the powerful to impose their worldview on everyone else. It is the protection of conscience. It is the promise that in a truly plural democracy, we do not have to become the same to belong.”
The report is presented jointly by the American Humanist Association, the Center for American Progress, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Interfaith Alliance. It “intentionally features a range of experiences of religious freedom, from voices that include diverse religious traditions as well as non-religious traditions,” said the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, the CEO of Interfaith Alliance, at an event marking the launch of the report June 16. “Religious freedom for all recognizes how religious freedom can benefit all the people when it is applied equally and fairly.”
The report is a response to the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, which critics say promotes a narrow view of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, reports the AP. On June 26, the commission released a 224-page draft report that suggests building bridges between church and state, according to the AP, challenging longstanding American legal concept of separation between the two.
Leaders given voice in “Religious Liberty for All: Celebrating this Founding Freedom at America 250,” – the report released by Raushenbush’s Interfaith Alliance and partner groups – describe diversity and freedom in faith as a cornerstone of American society.
“The life-giving power of faith is not limited to the Roman Catholic tradition,” wrote Sister Simone Campbell, former executive director of the NETWORK lobby for Catholic social justice, in the “Religious Liberty for All” report. “I see the same grounding at the heart of Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, and all branches of Christianity. This shared spiritual foundation is one of the cornerstones of our nation: the freedom for every individual to enter their faith and draw strength for the journey of life. Faith frees us from fear of others and gives us the courage to learn from the journeys of those whose experiences differ from our own.”
The Constitutionally-protected requirement for governments to remain neutral in matters of faith has allowed diverse religions to flourish in America, wrote Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) in the “Religious Liberty for All” report.
“I’ve seen the benefits personally. My mother was a devout Protestant, my brothers are agnostic, my sister is an Orthodox Jew, my wife of 30 years is Catholic,” Huffman wrote. “After leaving the Christian faith of my youth, I eventually embraced Humanism. That kind of freedom and pluralism is possible in America because our government does not take sides in matters of religion.”
Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both understood that “genuine religious liberty requires both freedom of religion and freedom from religion,” Huffman wrote – meaning governments should neither impose any particular religious practice on residents nor bar them from practicing the religion they choose. He cited Jefferson’s landmark law, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a crucial precursor to the protections for religious freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities,” the legislation declared.
Jefferson considered the statute one of his three most important accomplishments, according to Monticello.org, along with authoring the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia. The three achievements were written on his grave marker. He believed freedom of religion to be crucial to unite a nascent republic of diverse religious beliefs, and without a “wall of separation” between church and state, he feared the threat of aristocracy by “kings, nobles and priests.”
Jefferson was an avid reader known to study a variety of religious perspectives. He owned a translation of the Quran, Islam’s most sacred text, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Founder John Adams also owned the Quran, which is preserved at the Boston Public Library. Though not often reported, the texts show the presence and power of the Islamic faith in America at the time of its founding, PBS reports.
Jefferson’s Quran informed his ideas about religious pluralism in the U.S., Denise Spellberg, author of Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, told NPR.
“For him to include Muslims meant to include everyone of every faith – Jews, Catholics, and all others,” Spellberg said. “To exclude Muslims meant there would be no universal principle of civil rights for all believers in America.”
But the founders’ ideals of religious freedoms stood in stark contrast to the freedom denied to the hundreds of thousands of people who were enslaved in the country at the time of its founding. Jefferson, who himself enslaved hundreds of people, was envisioning religious freedoms for Muslims even though thousands of the people enslaved in the country at the time were Muslim, Spellberg said.
The protections afforded for religious liberty in the First Amendment, while marking a departure from older political models of state-sanctioned religion, “coexisted with profound social and civic exclusions of enslavement, settler dispossession, and a Protestant cultural dominance that intimately shaped the early republic,” wrote the Rev. Dr. Corey D.B. Walker, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of Humanities, and Director of the Program in African American Studies, in the “Religious Liberty for All” report. “Religious freedom, like American democracy, has never been a settled achievement. It has been and remains a site of struggle over which the very meaning of freedom has been contested and expanded.”
Religious freedom, Walker wrote, isn’t “the right of the powerful to impose their beliefs, nor a license for the majority to secure cultural and political dominance.”
“It is, rather, a civic and political commitment to protect the freedom of belief, practice, and nonbelief on equal terms within a pluralistic society,” Walker wrote. “It is rooted in the recognition that human dignity exceeds any single tradition. In this sense, religious freedom is not only a constitutional arrangement; it is a moral discipline that requires restraint, reciprocity, and a willingness to truly host human difference.”