The First Amendment: America's Radical Bet on Religious Freedom

The sixteen words that changed the history of religion read like this:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Two clauses. The Establishment Clause: the government cannot create an official religion. The Free Exercise Clause: the government cannot stop you from practicing your faith. Together, ratified as part of the First Amendment in 1791, they created something genuinely unprecedented in the history of human civilization.

Every major society before America had an official faith. The Roman Empire had its gods, then Christianity. England had the Church of England. France had the Catholic Church. The Ottoman Empire had Islam. Even the most tolerant European states — the Dutch Republic, William Penn's Pennsylvania — offered tolerance at the discretion of the state, which could revoke it.

America made the state structurally incapable of choosing.

Why They Did It

The Founders were not, as is sometimes assumed, a uniformly secular group who distrusted religion. Nor were they, as others claim, Christian nation builders who wanted Christianity to dominate while tolerating others.

They were something more complicated: a diverse group of men who had watched religious establishment cause suffering in Europe for centuries, who had experienced religious coercion in the colonies, and who had reached different but overlapping conclusions about what the new republic should do.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the primary architects of the religious clauses, were driven by a conviction that state religion corrupted both government and faith. Jefferson had seen the Anglican establishment in Virginia compel taxes to support a church many Virginians did not attend. He believed — and history broadly confirms — that religion flourishes when it must compete on its own merits rather than relying on state coercion.

Roger Williams, the 17th-century founder of Rhode Island who had been banished from Massachusetts for his views, had argued a century earlier that a "wall of separation" between church and state was necessary to protect the church from the corrupting influence of political power. Jefferson borrowed Williams's metaphor in an 1802 letter, and it has defined the debate ever since.

Evangelical Protestant leaders, meanwhile, supported the religious freedom clauses for a different reason: they had been minorities, persecuted by established churches, and they wanted protection. Baptist minister John Leland, who lobbied vigorously for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that preceded the First Amendment, understood that disestablishment served his community's interests.

The coalition that produced the First Amendment was thus a coalition of people who wanted religious freedom for entirely different reasons. It worked anyway.

What It Created

The result of the First Amendment's religious freedom guarantee is a religious landscape unlike any in the world.

America is simultaneously one of the most religious wealthy nations on earth and one of the most religiously diverse. More than 300 distinct religious denominations operate in the United States. The country has produced entirely new religious traditions — Mormonism, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostalism — that have spread globally. It has absorbed waves of Catholic immigration, Jewish immigration, and more recently Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh communities, all operating under the same constitutional protection.

This diversity is not incidental to the First Amendment. It is its direct product. When the state cannot choose a winner among religious traditions, all traditions must compete for voluntary adherents. The result is religious vitality and variety that no state-sponsored church system has ever produced.

The Ongoing Argument

The two clauses of the religious freedom provision have been in tension since the day they were written, and the argument has never stopped.

When does the government accommodating religion become the government establishing religion? When does the government regulating conduct that happens to be religious become prohibiting free exercise? These questions have generated more Supreme Court litigation than almost any other constitutional provision.

School prayer. Creationism in public schools. Religious symbols on government property. Exemptions from generally applicable laws for religious objectors. Contraception mandates. The cases keep coming because the underlying tension — between a government that cannot favor religion and a government that cannot burden it — is genuine and unresolvable by any simple formula.

What is not in tension is the result. The Faiths of the Founding Fathers documents the extraordinary variety of what the men who wrote and ratified the First Amendment actually believed — deists, evangelicals, Anglicans, skeptics — and makes the argument that the clause worked precisely because it did not require agreement.

Two hundred and thirty-five years later, the experiment continues. It is imperfect, contested, and unfinished. It is also, by every comparative measure, the most successful attempt in human history to organize a pluralistic society around the idea that what you believe about God is none of the government's business.

That is worth celebrating on America's 250th birthday — whatever you believe, or don't.