Topic 4 Outline

Part II | Outline

Category A | Frameworks

Topic 4 | First freedom

Religious freedom is often called our “first freedom,” not only because it appears at the beginning of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment but also because it is foundational for other freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association and assembly.

History of the concept of religious freedom. The history of the emergence of religious freedom as a fundamental right is long and complicated. Notable landmarks along the way include the following:

Defenders of religious freedom through the ages argued for limited government authority.

In ancient times, religious tolerance sometimes existed to maintain social order. A merely tolerant government maintains the right to intervene, however, and political authorities often coerced or punished worship they perceived as threatening.

Tertullian, an early Christian (c. 155–220 A.D.), opposed forced religious practices and advocated for religious freedom beyond mere toleration, based on individual conscience.

Several hundred years after Tertullian, the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, recognized in his Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) that political authority should allow worshipers freedom and autonomy in certain spheres.

The Magna Carta, adopted in 1215, guaranteed the freedom of the English Church from government authority.

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, meaning that the ruler of a territory would determine the established church of that territory. These accords also provided limited protections for religious minorities to practice their faith in private. This marked a significant step toward religious tolerance in Europe.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) called for a separation of religion and state into “two kingdoms.”

John Locke (1632–1704) further delineated and justified the boundaries between religious and civil authority. He focused on the limits of civil authority and on worship as a free and voluntary act, uncoerced by government.

Various early American colonists advocated for religious freedom, including Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore (1605–75), who drafted the Maryland Act of Toleration; Roger Williams (1603–83), who founded the colony of Rhode Island on principles of religious freedom and non-establishment; John Clarke (1609–76), who drafted religious freedom principles into Rhode Island’s Royal Charter; and William Penn (1644–1718), who founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities.

James Madison (1751–1836) further expounded on Locke’s and others’ writings, arguing that the right to religious freedom derives from God’s sovereignty and is not a civil right, granted by government.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), declared the right to freedom of belief and the right to freedom from government coercion (i.e., coerced religious activity and coerced support of established churches) to be “natural” rights that cannot be narrowed by law.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791, states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .”

The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1868 and became the basis for applying the First Amendment’s non-establishment and free exercise provisions to the states in U.S. Supreme Court cases decided in the post–World War II era.

Religious freedom as the progenitor of other freedoms

The concept of religious freedom that developed over centuries served as the progenitor of other freedoms in several ways, including:
- The limited government it demanded made space for other freedoms to emerge.
- In its expression, it operationally necessitated or supported related freedoms.
- Many other freedoms emerged from explicitly religious roots, including freedom of speech, which often involved the speech of religious dissenters; freedom of the press, which involved the right to print the Bible; freedom of association and freedom of assembly, which emerged as religious minorities won the right to gather and worship together.