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Faith & Religious Liberty

Free Exercise, and No Establishment

Faith has shaped American life from the Mayflower Compact to the civil rights movement. This collection presents Christian heritage and conservative religious thought, alongside the constitutional protection that belongs to every faith and to none.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

Primary SourceAmendment I · Ratified 1791

Religious liberty is one of the oldest American commitments. Dissenters who crossed the Atlantic to worship freely, founders who argued that conscience cannot be coerced, and generations of believers who built congregations, schools and charities made the United States a nation where faith has flourished without an established church. The Constitution secures both halves of that settlement: the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion and forbids any law respecting an establishment of religion, and Article VI bars religious tests for federal office.

Christianity has been the faith professed by most Americans throughout the nation’s history, and Christian conviction animated movements from abolition to civil rights to today’s debates over life, marriage and conscience. This collection presents that heritage, and the conservative Christian thought that grew from it, substantively. It does not treat Christianity as the nation’s official religion — the Constitution establishes none — and it records the part that Jewish, Latter-day Saint, Muslim and other believers, and Americans of no religion, have played in defending religious freedom.

Faith is a significant force in the Republican coalition, but it does not define every Republican. In Pew Research Center’s 2024 analysis of the party coalitions, about 81 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters identified with a Christian denomination — a large majority, not a unanimous one. Religiously unaffiliated voters made up about 15 percent of the Republican coalition, and members of other faiths belong to it as well. Across the whole country, 62 percent of adults described themselves as Christians in Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study.

Both clauses at once. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion and forbids an established church. PatriotMurica presents Christian heritage as history and conviction. It does not present Christianity as an official religion of the United States.
Atlas thread: Religious LibertyEssay: Two Traditions of Religious Liberty

Religious Liberty

Americans came to treat freedom of conscience as a natural right — first in the states, then in the federal Constitution, and later in statutes protecting believers at home and abroad.

The American idea of religious liberty took shape in the states before it reached the federal Constitution. In Virginia, where the Church of England was established by law, Baptists, Presbyterians and other dissenters pressed for freedom, and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson turned their arguments into law. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance (1785) helped defeat a proposed tax to support teachers of the Christian religion, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) declared that no one could be compelled to support any worship or be penalized for his religious opinions.

President George Washington carried the principle into the new national government. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, he rejected the idea that liberty of conscience was a favor one class of citizens extended to another, and described a government that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

In the late twentieth century Congress added statutory protections. After the Supreme Court held in 1990 that neutral, generally applicable laws ordinarily do not violate the Free Exercise Clause, a broad coalition won nearly unanimous passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993). Congress followed with the International Religious Freedom Act (1998), which made religious freedom abroad a formal goal of U.S. foreign policy, and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (2000), which protects congregations in zoning disputes and people held in prisons and other institutions.

  • June 1785

    Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments

    James Madison’s petition against a Virginia bill to fund “teachers of the Christian religion” argued that the religion of every man “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man,” and warned that an authority able to establish Christianity could as easily establish a single sect. Circulated alongside many other petitions, including those of evangelical dissenters, it helped defeat the assessment.

    Source: The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press

    Primary Source

  • January 16, 1786

    Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

    Drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and guided through the General Assembly by Madison, the statute declared that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion.” Jefferson listed it on his epitaph beside the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia.

    Source: The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press

    Primary Source

  • August 18, 1790

    Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport

    Replying to an address from Moses Seixas, a warden of Newport’s synagogue, President Washington wrote that Americans no longer spoke of mere toleration, as if one class of people allowed another to exercise its natural rights, because the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The letter remains one of the founding era’s clearest statements of equal religious citizenship.

    Source: Teaching American History, Ashland University

    Primary Source

  • January 1, 1802

    Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists

    Answering Connecticut Baptists who complained that their state’s established church treated their religious liberty as a favor rather than a right, President Jefferson described the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church and State.” The Supreme Court first quoted the letter in 1879, and the metaphor has been central — and contested — in church-state law ever since.

    Source: The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press

    Primary Source

  • November 16, 1993

    Religious Freedom Restoration Act

    Responding to Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a coalition of religious and civil-liberties groups won passage of RFRA by voice vote in the House and 97–3 in the Senate, and President Bill Clinton signed it. The law bars government from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion unless it uses the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. In City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) the Supreme Court held that it cannot be applied to the states; it still binds the federal government, and many states have adopted their own versions.

    Source: U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • October 27, 1998

    International Religious Freedom Act

    Championed by Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.) in the House and Senators Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) in the Senate, and passed with broad bipartisan majorities, the act made the promotion of religious freedom a goal of U.S. foreign policy. It created an Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department, the independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and a special adviser on the National Security Council.

    U.S. Government Publishing Office

    Primary Source

  • September 22, 2000

    Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act

    Sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and passed by unanimous consent in both chambers, RLUIPA applies RFRA’s demanding standard to land-use decisions affecting houses of worship and to the religious exercise of people in prisons and other state institutions. The Supreme Court upheld it in Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005) and applied it unanimously in Holt v. Hobbs (2015) to protect a Muslim prisoner’s beard; in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026) it held that the law does not allow damages suits against prison officers in their personal capacities.

    U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division

    Primary Source

The First Amendment

Sixteen words protect the free exercise of religion and forbid its establishment; the Fourteenth Amendment later extended them to the states.

The First Amendment, ratified with the Bill of Rights in 1791, opens with two religion clauses: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Establishment Clause keeps government from creating or favoring an official church; the Free Exercise Clause protects the practice of faith. Article VI of the original Constitution had already provided that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

As first written, the clauses restrained only Congress, and several states kept tax-supported churches into the nineteenth century — Connecticut until 1818 and Massachusetts until 1833. After the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court held that its guarantee of liberty applies the religion clauses to the states: the Free Exercise Clause in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) and the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

For decades the Court read the Establishment Clause through the three-part test of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) it said it had abandoned that approach and that the clause must be interpreted by “reference to historical practices and understandings” — a shift welcomed by accommodationists and criticized by separationists.

  • Ratified December 15, 1791

    The Religion Clauses

    The First Amendment’s opening words — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — place religious liberty first among the freedoms of the Bill of Rights, ahead of speech, press, assembly and petition.

    Source: National Archives

    Primary Source

  • Signed September 17, 1787

    No Religious Test

    Article VI requires federal and state officers to support the Constitution by “Oath or Affirmation” — the option to affirm accommodated Quakers and others who would not swear oaths — and bars any religious test for federal office at a time when many states still limited office to Protestants or Christians. In Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) the Supreme Court unanimously held that states, too, may not require officeholders to declare a belief in God.

    Source: National Archives

    Primary Source

  • Ratified July 9, 1868

    The Fourteenth Amendment

    Its command that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” became the vehicle through which the Supreme Court applied the religion clauses, and most of the Bill of Rights, to state and local governments.

    Source: National Archives

    Primary Source

  • 1940

    Cantwell v. Connecticut

    Newton Cantwell and his sons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, were convicted for soliciting door to door in New Haven without a state certificate. A unanimous Court reversed and held that the Fourteenth Amendment had made state legislatures “as incompetent as Congress” to prohibit the free exercise of religion.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • June 14, 1943

    West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

    Overruling a decision only three years old, the Court held 6–3 that public schools could not compel Jehovah’s Witness children to salute the flag. Although decided on free-speech grounds, the case remains a landmark for freedom of conscience.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1947

    Everson v. Board of Education

    By a 5–4 vote the Court upheld a New Jersey township’s reimbursement of bus fares for children attending Catholic as well as public schools, while holding for the first time that the Establishment Clause binds the states. Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment “has erected a wall between church and state” that “must be kept high and impregnable.”

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

Faith in American History

Covenants, revivals, independent churches and presidential proclamations have marked the American story from Plymouth to Appomattox and beyond.

Religious conviction shaped the settlement of English North America. The Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620 bound themselves “in the Presence of God and one another” into a “civil Body Politick,” and the colonies that followed gave faith different places in public life: Puritan Massachusetts, the Calverts’ Maryland — founded as a refuge for Catholics — Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and William Penn’s Quaker Pennsylvania.

Waves of revival reshaped American Christianity. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, carried by preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, crossed colonial and denominational lines. The Second Great Awakening, beginning around 1800, spread Methodist and Baptist churches across the frontier and fed reform movements including temperance and abolition. Black Americans built independent churches that became centers of community life, beginning with Richard Allen’s Bethel Church in Philadelphia.

Presidents have long invoked Providence in times of founding and crisis. Washington’s 1789 proclamation and Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation set apart days of national thanksgiving, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered weeks before the end of the Civil War, remains among the most searching theological reflections ever offered by an American president.

  • November 1620

    The Mayflower Compact

    Anchored off Cape Cod before settling at Plymouth, forty-one of the Mayflower’s male passengers agreed to “covenant and combine” themselves into a “civil Body Politick” able to make “just and equal Laws,” describing their voyage as undertaken “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith.” It is one of the earliest written frameworks of self-government in English America.

    Source: The Avalon Project, Yale Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1730s–1840s

    The Great Awakenings

    The First Great Awakening brought emotionally powerful preaching by figures such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield to towns across the colonies. The Second, led by evangelists such as Charles Grandison Finney, spread new congregations along the frontier and encouraged believers to reform society, energizing temperance, missionary and antislavery work.

    National Humanities Center

    Historical Record

  • 1787–1816

    Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church

    Born into slavery, Richard Allen purchased his freedom, co-founded the Free African Society in Philadelphia with Absalom Jones in 1787 and opened Bethel Church in 1794. In 1816 Bethel and other Black Methodist congregations formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States, with Allen as its first bishop.

    PBS

    Historical Record

  • October 3, 1789

    Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

    At the request of both houses of Congress, President Washington designated Thursday, November 26, 1789, as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, declaring it “the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God.”

    Source: The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press

    Primary Source

  • 1830s–1860s

    Faith and the Fight over Slavery

    Many abolitionists, Black and white — from Frederick Douglass to evangelical reformers shaped by the revivals — condemned slavery as a sin, while slavery’s defenders also cited Scripture. The conflict divided the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845, when Southern Baptists formed their own convention.

    National Humanities Center

    Historical Record

  • October 3, 1863

    Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

    In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln invited Americans to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.” Presidents have proclaimed a national Thanksgiving every year since.

    Source: The American Presidency Project

    Primary Source

  • November 19, 1863

    The Gettysburg Address

    Dedicating the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln resolved that the nation, “under God,” would have “a new birth of freedom.” Supporters of adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 pointed to his words.

    Primary Source

  • March 4, 1865

    Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

    Lincoln observed that North and South “read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” declined to claim divine favor for either side, and closed with the charge “With malice toward none, with charity for all” to “finish the work we are in” and “bind up the nation’s wounds.”

    Source: The Avalon Project, Yale Law School

    Primary Source

Christian Heritage and Conservative Thought

Catholic, evangelical, mainline and Orthodox Christians — alongside Jewish and other religious conservatives — have shaped the modern American right.

Christian ideas about human dignity, natural law, the family and the limits of the state run deep in American conservatism. After World War II, Catholic writers such as William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review (1955) became the movement’s flagship, and the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, who argued that the American founding rested on natural-law principles Catholics could embrace, helped bring those ideas into national debate. Evangelicals built their own institutions, from the National Association of Evangelicals (1942) to Christianity Today (1956).

From the late 1970s, evangelical and Catholic activists joined in organizations such as the Moral Majority (1979) and the Christian Coalition (1989), and their cooperation on abortion, religious liberty and education made religious conservatives a major force within the Republican coalition. Mainline Protestants — for generations much of the party’s northern base — and Eastern Orthodox Christians have contributed their own voices.

Religious conservatism in America has never been only Christian. Jewish thinkers such as Will Herberg, Orthodox Jewish organizations active in religious-liberty and school-choice cases, Latter-day Saints, and Muslim Americans who have won major religious-liberty rulings have all shaped the defense of faith in public life. Christians who share a creed also disagree — about the proper role of the state and about how their faith should inform their politics.

  • 1891–present

    Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law

    Beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Catholic social teaching defended private property, the family and voluntary associations, and later articulated subsidiarity — the principle that larger authorities should not absorb what families and local communities can do. John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths (1960) and the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), which his work informed, affirmed religious liberty as a right grounded in human dignity. Catholics on the left and right have drawn different conclusions from the tradition.

    Source: The Holy See

    Historical Record

  • 1955

    National Review and the Postwar Movement

    William F. Buckley Jr., a devout Catholic whose first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), criticized the secularism of his alma mater, founded National Review to unite traditionalists, libertarians and anticommunists. Its contributors included the Jewish theologian Will Herberg, author of Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1955), who served as the magazine’s religion editor in the 1960s.

    Historical Record

  • 1942–1956

    Evangelical Renewal

    The National Association of Evangelicals (1942) and Christianity Today (1956), founded with the support of the evangelist Billy Graham, gave evangelical Protestants national institutions. The theologian Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine’s first editor, urged believers in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) to engage the social problems of their day.

    Historical Record

  • 1979; 1989

    The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition

    Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition mobilized religious voters around abortion, school prayer, the family and religious liberty. White evangelical Protestants became one of the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies — about 30 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in Pew’s 2024 analysis.

    Source: Pew Research Center

    Historical Record

  • 1990; 1994

    First Things and Evangelicals and Catholics Together

    Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who later became a Catholic priest, founded First Things to advance a religiously informed public philosophy. With Charles Colson he launched “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (1994), a statement of common witness that symbolized how former rivals had become allies.

    Institute on Religion and Public Life

    Historical Record

  • 1854–present

    Mainline Protestants

    Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists formed much of the Republican base from the party’s founding into the twentieth century. President Eisenhower was baptized a Presbyterian soon after taking office in 1953, and President George H. W. Bush was a lifelong Episcopalian. Within the mainline churches, conservatives such as the Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey defended traditional teaching on bioethics and just war.

    Historical Record

  • 2017

    Orthodox Christians

    Eastern Orthodox believers have added a distinct voice. The writer Rod Dreher, a convert to Orthodoxy, argued in The Benedict Option (2017) that Christians should strengthen their own communities and institutions to preserve their faith, prompting a wide debate among conservatives about how far believers should step back from mainstream culture.

    Historical Record

  • 1950s–present

    Jewish and Other Religious Conservatives

    Jewish thinkers from Will Herberg to Irving Kristol shaped conservative ideas; Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish organization, won emergency relief from the Supreme Court against New York’s pandemic limits on worship in 2020, alongside the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Latter-day Saints are a significant conservative constituency, and Muslim Americans won unanimous religious-liberty rulings in Holt v. Hobbs (2015) and Tanzin v. Tanvir (2020).

    Historical Record

Churches and the Civil Rights Era

Black churches supplied the leaders, meeting places and moral language of the civil rights movement.

The Black church was the institutional heart of the civil rights movement. Congregations supplied meeting halls, communication networks, bail money and leaders — many of them pastors — and the movement’s language of redemption, suffering and justice came from Scripture and the spirituals. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 was organized through churches and led by a 26-year-old Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1957 King and fellow ministers, including C. K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent protest across the South. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy from across the country later joined the marches of the 1960s, and religious organizations lobbied hard for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Churches were not united. Many white congregations and denominations defended segregation or urged delay, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) answered eight white clergymen who had publicly criticized the demonstrations. Decades later some denominations formally repented; the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution in 1995 acknowledging its forebears’ defense of slavery and apologizing to African Americans for condoning and perpetuating racism.

  • December 5, 1955 – December 1956

    The Montgomery Bus Boycott

    After Rosa Parks’s arrest, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, stayed off the city’s buses for thirteen months. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by King, organized the boycott through the city’s churches until a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation took effect.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

    Historical Record

  • January 10, 1957

    The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

    Meeting at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Black ministers formed what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with King as its president, to coordinate local protest groups and, in the organization’s words, redeem “the soul of America” through nonviolent resistance. It relied on the strength and independence of Black churches.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

    Historical Record

  • April 16, 1963

    Letter from Birmingham Jail

    Jailed during the Birmingham campaign, King replied to eight white clergymen who had called for an end to the demonstrations. Drawing on Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he argued that an unjust law is one out of harmony with the moral law, and he challenged moderate churchmen who counseled patience.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

    Historical Record

  • September 15, 1963

    The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing

    A bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members exploded during Sunday services in Birmingham, killing four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. The church is now part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.

    National Park Service

    Historical Record

  • July 2, 1964

    The Civil Rights Act of 1964

    Churches and synagogues lobbied intensively for the bill. In the Senate, Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois helped break a Southern filibuster, and a larger share of Republicans than Democrats voted for the final bill in both chambers.

    Source: National Archives

    Historical Record

  • March 1965

    Clergy at Selma

    After state troopers attacked voting-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, King called on clergy nationwide to come to Selma, and hundreds answered. The Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was fatally beaten by white segregationists, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walked in the front ranks of the march to Montgomery that began on March 21.

    National Park Service

    Historical Record

  • June 1995

    The Southern Baptist Convention’s Resolution on Racial Reconciliation

    Meeting in Atlanta for its 150th anniversary, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination acknowledged that many of its forebears had defended the right to own slaves, denounced racism as sin and apologized to all African Americans for condoning and perpetuating racism.

    Southern Baptist Convention

    Historical Record

Presidential Prayer and Tradition

Oaths, prayers, proclamations and mottoes that express a public faith without establishing a church.

The Constitution prescribes the presidential oath word for word and allows an affirmation in place of an oath; it says nothing about Bibles or prayer. Those are customs. George Washington took the oath on a Bible at Federal Hall in New York on April 30, 1789, and in his first inaugural address offered “fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe.” Most of his successors have taken the oath on a Bible, often one with family or historical significance.

The mid-twentieth century added new national observances. During the Cold War, Congress and President Eisenhower emphasized the nation’s religious heritage in contrast to officially atheist communism: the National Prayer Breakfast began in 1953, “under God” entered the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and “In God we trust” became the national motto in 1956.

Courts have generally treated such ceremonial and historical practices as consistent with the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court upheld paid legislative chaplains in Marsh v. Chambers (1983) and prayers opening town board meetings in Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014), pointing to practices that date to the First Congress.

  • April 30, 1789

    The Oath and the Inaugural Bible

    Article II fixes the words of the oath — “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Washington took it with his hand on a Bible borrowed from a New York Masonic lodge, a Bible several later presidents, including Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush, also used.

    National Archives

    Historical Record

  • January 20, 1953

    Eisenhower’s Inaugural Prayer

    Eisenhower opened his first inaugural address by asking the crowd to bow their heads while he offered “a little private prayer of my own,” asking God to make full and complete the dedication of his administration to the service of the people.

    Source: The Avalon Project, Yale Law School

    Primary Source

  • February 5, 1953

    The National Prayer Breakfast

    Organized by the lay-led International Christian Leadership with members of Congress who met weekly for prayer, among them Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, the first breakfast drew President Eisenhower. Presidents of both parties have addressed the gathering in the decades since.

    Source: The American Presidency Project

    Historical Record

  • April 17, 1952; May 5, 1988

    The National Day of Prayer

    President Truman signed a joint resolution directing the president to proclaim a national day of prayer each year, and in 1988 Congress fixed it on the first Thursday in May in a law signed by President Reagan. The statute describes a day on which Americans “may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.”

    Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • June 14, 1954

    “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance

    Signing the law on Flag Day, Eisenhower said the nation was “reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.” After a federal appeals court held the phrase unconstitutional in 2002, Congress reaffirmed the Pledge’s wording, and in 2004 the Supreme Court reversed that ruling on standing grounds without deciding the constitutional question.

    Source: The American Presidency Project

    Primary Source

  • July 30, 1956

    “In God We Trust”

    The phrase first appeared on a U.S. coin, the two-cent piece, in 1864, during the Civil War. Congress required it on all currency in 1955 and in 1956 declared “In God we trust” the national motto.

    Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • February 3, 1983

    The Year of the Bible

    Acting on a joint resolution of Congress, President Reagan proclaimed 1983 the Year of the Bible in Proclamation 5018, citing the Bible’s influence on the nation’s history and character.

    Source: The American Presidency Project

    Primary Source

  • 1983; 2014

    Legislative Prayer

    In Marsh v. Chambers the Court upheld Nebraska’s paid legislative chaplain 6–3, noting that the First Congress appointed chaplains in 1789. In Town of Greece v. Galloway it upheld 5–4 a New York town’s practice of opening board meetings with prayers offered by local clergy, most of them Christian.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

Religion and Public Policy

Accommodation, conscience protection and equal treatment for religious schools are at the center of today’s church-state debates.

American law has long accommodated religious practice — exempting conscientious objectors from combat, permitting sacramental wine during Prohibition and requiring employers to accommodate workers’ religious observance. Supporters see such accommodations as the natural outworking of free exercise; critics worry that broad exemptions can shift burdens onto others or favor some faiths over others.

Conscience protections for health-care workers date to the Church Amendments of 1973, enacted months after Roe v. Wade, and have been extended and litigated ever since, from Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) to Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania (2020). The Court has also protected religious organizations’ freedom to choose their own ministers and teachers of the faith.

The fastest-changing area is education. Since Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) upheld a voucher program that included religious schools, the Court has held that states may not exclude religious schools or families from otherwise available aid because of their religious character or religious use of the funds. Many state constitutions contain “no-aid” provisions, some traceable to the 1870s campaign for a federal Blaine Amendment, and their future remains contested.

  • 1964; 2023

    Religious Accommodation at Work

    Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars religious discrimination in employment and, since 1972 amendments, requires employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious practice unless doing so would cause undue hardship. In Groff v. DeJoy, a unanimous Court held that an employer must show substantial increased costs, not a trivial burden, in a case brought by an evangelical Christian postal worker who would not work on Sundays.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 2012; 2020

    The Ministerial Exception

    In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, a unanimous Court held that the religion clauses bar employment-discrimination suits by ministers against the churches that employ them. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru it held 7–2 that the exception covers teachers at religious schools who perform important religious functions.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1973–2020

    Conscience Protections in Health Care

    The Church Amendments, named for Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), protect doctors, nurses and hospitals receiving certain federal funds that decline, on the basis of religious beliefs or moral convictions, to perform or assist in abortions or sterilizations. Later disputes over the federal contraceptive mandate produced Hobby Lobby (2014) and Little Sisters of the Poor (2020), in which the Court upheld, 7–2, federal rules exempting religious and moral objectors.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1996–2025

    Faith-Based Partnerships

    The 1996 welfare law’s “charitable choice” provision let religious charities compete for federal social-service funds without giving up their religious character. President George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001; later presidents of both parties kept versions of it, and President Trump established the White House Faith Office in 2025.

    Source: The White House (George W. Bush Archives)

    Historical Record

  • 2017–2025

    Equal Treatment for Religious Schools and Charities

    Trinity Lutheran (2017), Espinoza (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022) held that states may not exclude religious schools or families from generally available public benefits because of their religious character or religious use of the funds. In Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin (2025) a unanimous Court held that a state may not deny a religious charity a tax exemption because it does not proselytize or serve only fellow believers.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Primary Source

  • 1875–present

    The Blaine Amendment and State “No-Aid” Provisions

    In 1875 Representative James G. Blaine of Maine, a leading Republican, proposed a constitutional amendment barring public money for “sectarian” schools. It passed the House but failed in the Senate, and many states adopted similar provisions. In Espinoza the Court’s majority tied many of them to the anti-Catholic sentiment of the era; defenders note that some states, including Montana, re-adopted such provisions in the twentieth century for reasons unrelated to that history.

    Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

    Historical Record

  • 2025–2026

    Anti-Christian Bias Task Force and Religious Liberty Commission

    By executive order, President Trump created a task force chaired by the attorney general to identify and end what the order called anti-Christian bias in federal agencies, and in May 2025 he established a Religious Liberty Commission. The task force’s first report, released in the spring of 2026, argued that the previous administration had acted against what it called traditional Christians.

    Source: The White House

    Trump Administration Position

  • April 2026

    Critics of the Task Force

    The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a separationist organization founded in 1936, called the task force’s report one-sided and argued that it advanced privilege for some believers rather than religious freedom for all; supporters of the effort said it documented real conflicts between federal policy and traditional Christian convictions.

    BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty)

    Opposing View / Debate

The Supreme Court

The Religion Clauses in Court

Landmark decisions on free exercise and establishment, in order.

  • 1879

    Reynolds v. United States

    98 U.S. 145 · Morrison R. Waite

    Holding. Upheld a Latter-day Saint’s conviction under the federal law against bigamy in the Utah Territory, holding that the Free Exercise Clause protects religious belief but not conduct that violates a valid, generally applicable criminal law.

    Significance. The Court’s first major free-exercise decision quoted Jefferson’s “wall of separation” letter and warned that exempting religiously motivated conduct would “permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” The law it upheld was the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862, signed by Lincoln; the first Republican platform, in 1856, had condemned polygamy and slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism.”

    Primary Source

  • 1940

    Cantwell v. Connecticut

    310 U.S. 296 · Decided 9–0 · Owen J. Roberts

    Holding. Reversed the convictions of Jehovah’s Witnesses who solicited door to door without a state certificate, holding that the Free Exercise Clause applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.

    Significance. Incorporated the Free Exercise Clause against the states; the Court said the Fourteenth Amendment had made state legislatures “as incompetent as Congress” to restrict religious liberty.

    Primary Source

  • 1947

    Everson v. Board of Education

    330 U.S. 1 · Decided 5–4 · Hugo L. Black

    Holding. Upheld a New Jersey township’s reimbursement of bus fares for children attending public and Catholic schools.

    Significance. Applied the Establishment Clause to the states and adopted Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor while permitting neutral benefits that reach religious schools — the starting point for both separationist and accommodationist readings of the clause.

    Primary Source

  • 1962

    Engel v. Vitale

    370 U.S. 421 · Decided 6–1 · Hugo L. Black

    Holding. Struck down New York’s practice of opening the public-school day with a prayer composed by the state Board of Regents, even though students could be excused.

    Significance. Held that “it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers,” and was followed in 1963 by Abington School District v. Schempp on devotional Bible reading. The rulings prompted decades of proposals for a school-prayer amendment, including one backed by President Reagan that fell 11 votes short of two-thirds in the Senate in 1984.

    Primary Source

  • 1971

    Lemon v. Kurtzman

    403 U.S. 602 · Decided 8–0 and 8–1 · Warren E. Burger

    Holding. Struck down Pennsylvania and Rhode Island programs that paid or supplemented the salaries of religious-school teachers of secular subjects.

    Significance. Announced the three-part “Lemon test” — a secular purpose, a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and no excessive entanglement — which governed Establishment Clause cases for decades until the Court said in 2022 that it had abandoned it.

    Primary Source

  • 1972

    Wisconsin v. Yoder

    406 U.S. 205 · Warren E. Burger

    Holding. Held that Wisconsin could not compel Amish parents to keep their children in school beyond the eighth grade, because the requirement gravely burdened their religious way of life.

    Significance. A landmark for both free exercise and parental rights, recognizing parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children; the Court relied on it again in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025).

    Primary Source

  • 1990

    Employment Division v. Smith

    494 U.S. 872 · Decided 6–3 · Antonin Scalia

    Holding. Upheld Oregon’s denial of unemployment benefits to two members of the Native American Church dismissed for using peyote in a religious ceremony, holding that neutral, generally applicable laws do not violate the Free Exercise Clause even when they burden religious practice.

    Significance. Largely set aside the compelling-interest test of Sherbert v. Verner (1963). Congress responded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) and a 1994 law protecting Native American sacramental use of peyote, and Justices Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch have since urged the Court to overrule Smith.

    Primary Source

  • 1993

    Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah

    508 U.S. 520 · Decided 9–0 · Anthony M. Kennedy

    Holding. Struck down city ordinances banning animal sacrifice that were drawn to suppress the rituals of a Santería church while exempting most other killing of animals.

    Significance. Established that laws which are not neutral or generally applicable — above all, laws targeting a particular faith — must survive strict scrutiny, the principal limit on Smith.

    Primary Source

  • 2014

    Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores

    573 U.S. 682 · Decided 5–4 · Samuel A. Alito Jr.

    Holding. Held under RFRA that the federal requirement that employer health plans cover certain contraceptives could not be enforced against closely held for-profit corporations whose owners objected on religious grounds.

    Significance. Confirmed that RFRA protects people who run businesses according to their faith, including the evangelical family that owns Hobby Lobby and the Mennonite owners of Conestoga Wood Specialties, and that the government must use less restrictive alternatives where they exist.

    Primary Source

  • 2017

    Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer

    582 U.S. 449 · Decided 7–2 · John G. Roberts Jr.

    Holding. Held that Missouri violated the Free Exercise Clause by excluding a church preschool from a grant program for resurfacing playgrounds with recycled tires solely because it was a church.

    Significance. Began a line of cases holding that governments may not exclude religious organizations from generally available public benefits because of their religious status.

    Primary Source

  • 2019

    American Legion v. American Humanist Association

    588 U.S. 29 · Decided 7–2 · Samuel A. Alito Jr.

    Holding. Held that the 32-foot Bladensburg Peace Cross, a World War I memorial completed in 1925 and now on public land in Maryland, does not violate the Establishment Clause.

    Significance. Recognized a presumption of constitutionality for longstanding monuments, symbols and practices, part of the Court’s turn toward history and tradition in Establishment Clause cases.

    Primary Source

  • 2020

    Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue

    591 U.S. 464 · Decided 5–4 · John G. Roberts Jr.

    Holding. Held that Montana could not apply its constitution’s “no-aid” provision to exclude religious schools from a tax-credit scholarship program.

    Significance. “A State need not subsidize private education,” the Court wrote. “But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

    Primary Source

  • 2021

    Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

    593 U.S. 522 · Decided 9–0 · John G. Roberts Jr.

    Holding. Held that Philadelphia violated the Free Exercise Clause by refusing to contract with Catholic Social Services for foster-care services unless the agency agreed to certify same-sex couples as foster parents.

    Significance. Because the city’s contract allowed discretionary exemptions, the policy was not generally applicable, so the Court declined to decide whether to overrule Smith; concurrences by Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett debated whether and how it should be replaced.

    Primary Source

  • 2022

    Carson v. Makin

    596 U.S. 767 · Decided 6–3 · John G. Roberts Jr.

    Holding. Held that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause by limiting tuition assistance, for families in districts without their own public high schools, to “nonsectarian” schools.

    Significance. Rejected a distinction between a school’s religious status and its religious use of public funds, extending Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza.

    Primary Source

  • 2022

    Kennedy v. Bremerton School District

    597 U.S. 507 · Decided 6–3 · Neil M. Gorsuch

    Holding. Held that the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses protected a public-school football coach’s brief, quiet personal prayer at midfield after games, and that the school district could not discipline him for it.

    Significance. The Court said it had abandoned the Lemon test and that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by “reference to historical practices and understandings.” The dissent argued that the coach’s prayers pressured students to take part.

    Primary Source

  • 2025

    Mahmoud v. Taylor

    606 U.S. 522 · Decided 6–3 · Samuel A. Alito Jr.

    Holding. Held that parents from several religious traditions were entitled to a preliminary injunction requiring a Maryland school board to give them notice and let them excuse their children from instruction using “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks.

    Significance. Applied Wisconsin v. Yoder to hold that policies substantially interfering with the religious upbringing parents seek to give their children trigger strict scrutiny. The dissent warned that the ruling would bring “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.”

    Primary Source

Opposing View / Debate

Different Conservative Views on Church and State

Conservatives have never agreed on one account of religion in public life. These are the principal positions, each stated in its own terms.

Opposing View / Debate

Does the Establishment Clause require a strict separation of church and state, or does it permit government to accommodate and acknowledge religion?

Both camps claim the founders. Separationists read Jefferson and Madison as requiring government to stay out of religion altogether; accommodationists argue that the clause forbade a national church and religious coercion, not public acknowledgment of God or evenhanded support. Since 2019 the Supreme Court has moved toward an approach grounded in history and tradition.

Separationists

Separation protects religion as much as government. Baptists such as Isaac Backus and John Leland, who opposed the tax-supported churches of Massachusetts and Virginia, fought for it; the Danbury Baptists prompted Jefferson’s “wall of separation” letter; and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty carries the tradition today. Madison himself later questioned paid congressional chaplains and presidential proclamations of days of prayer. On this view, public funding or sponsorship of worship divides citizens by faith and corrupts the church.

Accommodationists

The First Amendment barred a national church and religious coercion, not public faith. The same First Congress that proposed it appointed chaplains and asked President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving. Justice William Rehnquist wrote in 1985 that the “wall of separation” was “a metaphor based on bad history” that should be “frankly and explicitly abandoned,” and the Court’s recent decisions read the clause in light of historical practice.

Critics of the history-and-tradition approach

The three dissenting justices in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022) argued that the Court overruled Lemon and called decades of precedent into question, set aside longstanding concerns about government endorsement of religion, offered school administrators little guidance, and gave too little weight to the pressure public-school students can feel to join a religious exercise led by an adult in authority.

Sources

  1. Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptist Association · The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press
  2. James Madison, Detached Memoranda · The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press
  3. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  4. About BJC · BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty)
Opposing View / Debate

What place should Christian identity have in American national life?

Americans broadly agree that the Constitution forbids an established church, but they disagree about whether the nation should be understood as Christian. In a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 45 percent of U.S. adults said the United States should be a “Christian nation,” yet most who said so described it in terms of Christian values rather than an official religion, and support for separation of church and state far outweighed opposition to it.

Christian-heritage conservatives

Many conservatives hold that America’s laws and institutions grew from a Christian moral inheritance, that the Declaration’s appeal to a Creator grounds equal rights, and that public life should honor that heritage — without an established church or religious test. They point to Justice David Brewer’s statement in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892) that “this is a Christian nation” — words Brewer explained in 1905 were not meant “in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or that the people are in any manner compelled to support it.”

Advocates of a Christian public order

A smaller group embraces the label “Christian nationalism,” arguing, as Stephen Wolfe does in The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022), that a Christian people may rightly order its laws and public life toward Christian ends. The 2022 National Conservatism statement of principles, which does not use that label, held that where a Christian majority exists public life should be rooted in Christianity, while Jews and other religious minorities should be protected in their own observance and institutions.

Conservative Christian critics

Other conservative Christians — among them the writer and lawyer David French, Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and the political scientist Paul D. Miller, author of The Religion of American Greatness (2022) — argue that fusing Christian and national identity distorts the faith, alienates believers of other backgrounds and endangers the religious liberty that protects Christians themselves.

Sources

  1. 45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’ · Pew Research Center
  2. Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  3. National Conservatism Is a Direct Threat to Religious Freedom · The Dispatch
Opposing View / Debate

Should religious believers be exempt from generally applicable laws?

Employment Division v. Smith (1990), written by the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, held that the Free Exercise Clause generally does not require exemptions from neutral laws. The decision divided conservatives and liberals alike, and Congress responded almost unanimously with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Defenders of Smith

Justice Scalia argued that a constitutional right to exemptions would produce “a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself,” and that accommodation should come from legislatures, as it often does. Some originalist scholars, notably Philip Hamburger, have argued that the founding generation did not understand free exercise to include a general right of exemption from civil laws.

Critics of Smith

Critics, including the legal scholar and former federal judge Michael McConnell, argue that the original understanding of free exercise did protect religious practice from incidental burdens, and that Smith leaves minority faiths — like the Native American Church members in Smith itself — at the mercy of majorities. Justices Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch urged the Court to overrule it in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021).

Those wary of sweeping exemptions

Others, across the spectrum, worry that broad exemptions can shift costs onto employees, patients or customers and draw courts into weighing religious claims. In Fulton, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed that Smith’s reasoning was open to question but asked what standard should replace it before the Court overrules it.

Sources

  1. Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  2. Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021) · Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
  3. Remarks on Signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 · The American Presidency Project

Sources

  1. The Changing Demographic Composition of Voters and Party Coalitions · Pew Research Center
  2. Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary · Pew Research Center
  3. The Bill of Rights: A Transcription · National Archives
  4. The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription · National Archives
  5. The Founders’ Constitution: Amendment I (Religion) · University of Chicago Press
  6. Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Public Law 103-141 · U.S. Government Publishing Office
  7. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) · Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University
  8. Religion and Political Theory · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy