Religious Liberty at the Founding and Today
June 3, 2026
One word separated two entirely different theories of government. In May 1776, as Virginia’s delegates drafted a Declaration of Rights for their newly independent commonwealth, the original text declared that citizens would be “tolerated” in their religious beliefs. A 25-year-old delegate named James Madison objected, and in doing so, drew one of the most consequential lines in American constitutional history.
Toleration, Madison argued, was the wrong word because it implied the wrong relationship. When a government tolerates something, it exercises authority over it. The tolerated party exists at the pleasure of the tolerating power, which retains the right to withdraw its permission at any time. A parent who tolerates a teenager’s behavior disapproves of it and has the authority to stop it. A government that tolerates religious practice has claimed jurisdiction over the soul; and that, Madison insisted, was precisely the kind of authority the new American republic could never possess.
Madison’s amendment replaced “toleration” with “free exercise” — a phrase that would eventually become part of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The change was not merely semantic. It reflected a foundational principle: that religious liberty is a natural right, inherent in every person by virtue of their humanity, not a privilege extended by the state.
A Right Before Government, Not From It
This distinction between a natural right and a granted privilege runs through the entire founding generation’s approach to religion. Eight of the twelve states that adopted new constitutions after independence included declarations of rights, and every one of them framed religious liberty in natural-rights terms. The agreement was nearly universal across regions and denominations: government simply does not have authority over individual religious conscience.
What this meant in practice was a decisive break from the colonial model. In colonial America, established churches were the norm. Governments determined the preferred religion, taxed citizens to support it, and exercised control over how congregations selected their ministers and conducted their worship. Religious establishment was not merely a matter of theological preference; it was a formal legal arrangement of privilege and control, with the state granting benefits to an official church in exchange for the authority to regulate it. Disestablishment meant severing that relationship entirely.
The founding generation was clear, if sometimes inconsistent, about the reasoning. Government is not constituted to lead citizens to salvation. Its proper purpose is to protect liberty. Religious authority belongs to individuals and to their churches — not to the state. When Madison and Jefferson spoke of separating church and state, they were not expressing hostility to religion. They were expressing a deep concern that state entanglement would corrupt religion by making it dependent on political favor, and that it would corrupt politics by giving organized religion a claim on civil power. The protection was designed to run in both directions, but the founders were especially worried about what government would do to faith — a dimension that tends to get lost in contemporary debates about the First Amendment.
Where the Founders Disagreed
The natural-rights consensus, however, did not resolve every practical question — and here the founders diverged in significant and instructive ways.
George Washington, and the tradition reflected in the Northwest Ordinance, held that government could legitimately support religion for civic reasons. Republican self-government requires citizens of good moral character, and moral character requires the formation that religion provides. On this view, public support for religious education was not a theological endorsement but a civic investment. Washington was not arguing that one religion was better than another — only that religion as a general matter served the republic’s need for virtuous citizens.
Madison disagreed, not with the premise but with the solution. He accepted that republican government depended on moral character. He was not willing, however, to make religion financially dependent on the state. Taxpayer support of religion would, over time, corrupt both institutions — religion by making it a client of government, and government by entangling it in theological disputes it had no business adjudicating. The disagreement was not about whether America needed religious citizens. It was about whether government subsidy was an appropriate or wise way to cultivate them.
This debate has never been fully resolved. It resurfaces every generation in arguments about school vouchers, faith-based social services, and the conditions under which religious organizations can participate in publicly funded programs.
Religious Minorities and the Principle’s Reach
The natural-rights framework had implications that not every American was willing to accept. When Anti-Federalists objected to the federal Constitution’s prohibition on religious tests for office, they argued that some religious requirement was necessary to ensure the moral fitness of officeholders. The response from Madison and others was principled and direct: if a religious minority could win the favor of their fellow citizens in a free election, they should be permitted to serve. Civil rights could not be conditioned on religious affiliation.
George Washington made this argument in one of the most remarkable letters in American history. Writing in August 1790 to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, Washington told the Jewish community that they were not merely tolerated members of American society — they were equal members of it. He was not writing only to that congregation. He was writing to the country, and to history, explaining who the American experiment was for. The answer was everyone who embraced its principles.
The Ongoing Work of a Founding Principle
The history of religious liberty in America is not a story of smooth, linear progress. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran deep through the 19th century and well into the 20th, when a Catholic presidential candidate still had to publicly assure Protestant voters that his allegiance to the Constitution exceeded any loyalty to Rome. Nativism repeatedly tested the principle that religious identity would carry no civil penalty. And the Supreme Court spent decades applying Establishment Clause doctrine in ways that, critics persuasively argued, expressed hostility toward religion rather than neutrality toward it.
Recent years have seen a significant shift in how the Court interprets both religion clauses of the First Amendment. The Court has moved toward a framework that treats religious individuals and institutions as entitled to equal standing in civic life — not special privileges, but the same access to public programs and the same freedom from discriminatory exclusion that any other group would expect.
The deeper question, though, is not what the courts will do next. It is whether the country retains the philosophical foundation to reason clearly about religious freedom at all. As religious practice becomes an increasingly reliable predictor of partisan identity, the risk grows that religious liberty will be treated as one side’s issue rather than everyone’s principle. That would be a serious misreading of the founding. Religious liberty was designed to protect the non-religious as much as the devout. The government that cannot compel you to attend church is the same government that cannot penalize you for staying home. That guarantee belongs to all Americans — and understanding where it came from is the first step toward keeping it.