When the Founding Fathers began their work to unify the colonies, America’s religious landscape looked nothing like today’s marketplace of ideas. Mainline Protestants — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Puritans, Quakers, and Lutherans — dominated the budding nation, and Protestant Christianity was fused with public life.
To talk of religious liberty back then was a question of how to handle these various Protestant denominations and, essentially, keep them from killing or oppressing each other. There were hardly any Catholics; there were very few Jewish people; there were essentially no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. What the Founding Fathers eventually arrived at was a plan for tolerance — an early version of freedom from official religions and a freedom to exercise faith without being punished.
Yet a new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the Founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life.
Late last week, the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, housed within the Department of Justice, released a draft 224-page report pushing the idea that belief in God should be the bedrock of American law and society, and proposing dozens of policy proposals and legal recommendations to restore the place of religion in daily life. It argues that when the Founders chose to declare independence, drafted up the Constitution, and debated the Bill of Rights, they “drew from religious traditions of man being made in the image of God,” and that belief in a Christian God was the starting point for individual rights. “The uniquely American approach to religious liberty,” they argue, is one “in which religion is not merely indulged by the government, but rather honored as a natural right, fundamental to the flourishing of a free society.”
It’s this privileged position for religion that was corrupted in the 20th century by “a new [European] philosophy,” which “laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty which persist even today.” In this telling, it’s philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre who rejected God, inspired American thinkers and leaders to embrace relativism, and constructed a “‘Berlin wall’ of separation” that restricts religious life today and must be corrected. As a result, the government took an “increasingly hostile view towards those who embrace Judeo-Christian values” and interpreted the law to shut down practices like school prayer and open displays of religious texts in public buildings.
Using this history, the commission calls for the creation of a national religious liberty violation hotline, creating a DOJ task force to enforce freedom and hear claims of violations, and appointing federal judges who err on the side of religious liberty, as they define it.
They cite examples of religious oppression and anti-Christian bias in schools, workplaces, the military, and the healthcare system: restrictions on teachers, coaches, and students leading prayers, limits on students wearing religious symbols and delivering religious speech, limits on displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools, the pushing of “gender ideology” on Christian students, and requirements for faith-based college groups to accept non-believers. They cite Covid-19 vaccine mandates as violations of religious liberty in the military, coercion for religious medical providers to offer care that conflicts with their beliefs, and overly restrictive rules for military chaplains.
In all, it calls for a plethora of policy and legal changes rooted in an alternative history that government should be welcoming religion into daily public life, not concerned with limiting or restricting it, even if it’s in the name of religious pluralism. To deny this is to attack religious liberty.
But this history is wrong.
The federal government has grown more secular in some ways since its founding. But the story of America’s relationship with religion is the story of the Founders’ vision in action, of religious pluralism at work and evolving with a changing nation. It’s a tale of how political and legal leaders tried to apply those core values in response to growing and new religious communities in America who arrived after the revolution.
You can read Christian’s full story on the Vox site here.
