Religious freedom requires eternal vigilance |
Religious freedom, Congress unanimously declared in 1998, “undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States.” Presidents of both parties have called it a “fundamental human right,” a “critical foundation of our Nation’s liberty,” and “essential to our well-being.” And yet today, on Religious Freedom Day, this inalienable right is on shaky ground.
The story of religious freedom in America began long before the nation was born. A group of dissenters from the Church of England founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620, followed a decade later by John Winthrop and a group of Puritans who escaped King Charles I’s persecution and settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Maryland Colony enacted the Act Concerning Religion in 1649, providing that no person would be “troubled … in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof.”
In 2015, the late Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) delivered a remarkable series of eight speeches covering this long religious freedom arc. As he outlined, religious freedom in America has three important features:
First, it includes not only religious belief and worship, but also the exercise of faith. The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights echoed the Maryland statute in asserting the “free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
Second, the right to exercise religion is not only a natural and fundamental right but also, as the Declaration of Independence affirms, an “inalienable” right.” It is, professor Michael McConnell explains, “a special case” that the Supreme Court has repeatedly said is in a “preferred position.” In fact, future President........