Like so many of our foundational rights in the United States, freedom of religion is one that has expanded over time to encompass more individuals and communities in its embrace—not always perfectly, but fairly steadily. As a United Church of Christ minister, I take this right seriously as a matter of inheritance; it was my own Congregational spiritual ancestors—the Pilgrims—who fled persecution and structural oppression in Europe and arrived on the shores of this continent with little other than a hope to live their faith freely and create a society in line with their values. Their fierce belief in individual conscience and local church autonomy shaped the governance of the Massachusetts Colony and, a century-and-a-half later, along with the American-born and itinerant frontier-based Christian church they merged with in the early twentieth century, informed the representative governance of the U.S. Constitution and its first amendment. My denomination’s ongoing commitment to freedom of religion and belief and the separation of religion and state is nurtured by a root system that digs deep into the soil of this foundational ideal as both a faith commitment and a civic right.
As a woman ordained in this tradition, I am also aware that the practice of this ideal—especially within both the early New England-based Congregational Church and the United States—has been imperfect. Like so many of the foundational rights of the United States, including the right to vote, the bounds of whose freedom of religion was protected was initially narrowly defined. Anne Hutchinson learned this when she dared to pick up the Bible and lead worship services in the Massachusetts Colony. Her religious liberty was not protected when she was convicted and forcibly exiled by the theocratic Massachusetts colonial government for doing so. But it was her commitment to expand the bounds of religious liberty based on individual conscience and the courage and commitment of those who supported her like Roger Williams, who welcomed her to a Rhode Island that would protect her right to practice her faith in line with her conscience, that would set the trajectory for the ordination of women in the Congregational Church two centuries later. In this sense, I have freedom of religion as a faith commitment shaping the governance of my own Christian denomination, as well as the U.S. Government’s commitment to it in line with the more inclusive model of colonial Rhode Island, to thank for my own ability to preach and teach as an ordained minister within it.
The Religious Liberty Commission established by President Trump has been tasked with “producing a report on the foundations of religious liberty in America.” Given recent attacks on historical narratives offered from the perspectives of non-European-descended Americans, including by the commission’s chair Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, I am concerned about what kind of story will be told about my spiritual ancestors’ early and imperfect practice of this “foundational” American right. I wonder: on the foundation of whose religious liberty will the commission focus?
Will the perspective of Native Americans be meaningfully included? The long list of commission members and advisors suggests they will not. However, their story about the foundation of religious liberty in the United States is an important one in that their ability to practice their cultural and spiritual traditions was severely curtailed throughout most of U.S. history; the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was not passed until 1978, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. Prior to its passage, the U.S. government routinely violated the right of Native Americans to freely practice their spiritual traditions and to protect land central to their practices. The government was also complicit in imposing Christian practice on them, particularly young Native children forcibly sent to Christian boarding schools that received federal funds. Just last month, the Supreme Court refused to intervene in support of the Apache Stronghold in their effort, based on religious freedom arguments, to protect sacred land on which a particular coming-of-age ceremony is performed from government seizure and transfer to a foreign-owned company for copper mining. The historic and ongoing experience of our Indigenous neighbors offers a critical and essential experience to meet the commission's goals, and a clear and full picture of the foundation of religious liberty in this country. So too is the experience of enslaved Africans whose own indigenous Yoruba traditions, and even their free practice of Christianity, were curtailed for centuries.
My final example takes me back, to myself as a teenager living in Minneapolis, still new to human rights activism. I learned about an incarcerated inmate who was being prevented from performing a harmless candle ritual derived from his Wiccan practice at his state execution. As I recall, the judge refused to grant his right to this religious practice because he could not point to an authoritative sacred text on which the practice was based. But of course, not all religions are text-based; many are oral traditions. I didn’t need a religious studies degree to tell me that, nor to reveal to me that the foundations on which the right to religious freedom I was learning about and just beginning to advocate for was established and legally proscribed with some unintended fault lines. There were cracks in the foundation through which some fellow Americans were slipping, their religious practices not protected. I worked with others to advocate successfully for this man’s right to practice his religion at that most precious moment on the threshold of life and death.
Romantic nostalgia must not cloud the judgement of the members of this commission if they are to produce a frank and constructive report on the “foundations” of religious liberty in the United States. The foundation on which this right was established by the architects of the modern state, one laid by the Congregational Church to which I am ordained, was not structurally sound. It is thanks to the activism of those throughout American history—women, African Americans, Mormons, Native Americans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Humanists, and Christians both conservative and progressive—that the foundation has been broadened and better enforced over our country’s history. Those stories are critical to understanding what it means to strengthen freedom of religion and belief in this country, and that progress must not be reversed but built upon.
