Writing recently for Public Discourse, RFI President Emeritus Tom Farr argued: “Without the American commitment to the religious freedom of everyone, including traditional religious believers, we will no longer be the America of our founding. We will continue our descent from unity into political and cultural fragmentation and chaos.” To make his urgent appeal, Farr goes back to the beginning of our experiment in ordered liberty:

America’s Founders knew they lacked the authority to “grant” religious freedom to anyone outside our borders. But they knew who did: and they said so. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders acknowledged God as creator of every person, and of the natural law and the natural, “unalienable” rights we all possess. In the First Amendment, they guaranteed the natural right of “free exercise” of religion for all Americans, to be practiced in private worship and in public life, alone or in community with others. 

Free exercise thus became a source of our nation’s flourishing, strength, and unity, and of America’s native realism: a determination to live in boundaries set by the real world, including the natural law. The Catholic political theorist John Courtney Murray labeled this characteristic a “realist epistemology” grounded in natural law. The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration, he wrote, are “the basis and inspiration of the American project.” He went on to write that the “First Amendment right of religious freedom for all has been “good for religion, [and] for Catholicism.” 

The Founders saw free exercise as the means of keeping religion in public life yet unencumbered by government control and regulation. Their goals were to protect the rights and duties of conscience and to keep before the public eye the “self-evident” religious truths, laid out in the Declaration, about God, the natural world, human nature, and freedom.  

Read the full article: “The Founders’ Gift and Its New American Enemies.”