January 16 is Religious Freedom Day, marking the Virginia General Assembly’s passage in 1786 of Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom. It is a fitting day to recall that American religious liberty has never been a single idea. From the beginning it has drawn on two traditions: one that protects faith by keeping government at a distance from it, and one that protects faith by honoring its place in public life. Most Americans have drawn on both, and so has the law.
Conscience Before the Constitution
Colonial America inherited established churches: the Church of England in Virginia and much of the South, and Congregational churches in most of New England. Dissenters pushed back. Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts, founded Providence in 1636, and Rhode Island’s royal charter of 1663 guaranteed liberty in matters of religion. Williams wrote of a hedge or wall separating the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world, an image meant to protect the church more than the state.
The Separationist Tradition
In Virginia the argument came to a head in 1784 and 1785, when Patrick Henry and his allies backed a general tax to support teachers of the Christian religion. James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance answered that the religion of every man “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man,” and that state support would corrupt faith rather than strengthen it. The assessment failed, and the legislature enacted Jefferson’s statute instead. Baptist preachers such as John Leland in Virginia and Isaac Backus in New England, whose congregations had suffered under establishments, were among the tradition’s strongest champions. When the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, a state that still supported an established church, wrote to President Jefferson, he replied on January 1, 1802, that the First Amendment had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
The Tradition of Public Faith
A second tradition, just as old, held that republican government depends on religion and morality and that public life may acknowledge them. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared “Religion, morality, and knowledge” to be “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” The First Congress appointed chaplains, and President Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789. In his Farewell Address, Washington called religion and morality “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Because the First Amendment then restrained only Congress, several states kept official support for churches well into the nineteenth century; Massachusetts ended its establishment only in 1833.
Where the Traditions Met
The two traditions agreed on more than they disputed. Neither wanted a national church, and both treated the free exercise of religion as a natural right rather than a privilege granted by the state. Washington expressed that common ground in 1790, writing to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, that toleration was no longer to be spoken of as an indulgence one class of people extended to another.
“For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
The Courts Take Up the Question
For most of the nineteenth century the religion clauses were seldom litigated. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), the Supreme Court quoted Jefferson’s Danbury letter. After applying the Free Exercise Clause to the states in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), the Court applied the Establishment Clause to them in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), declaring that the wall between church and state “must be kept high and impregnable” even as it upheld, 5–4, New Jersey’s reimbursement of bus fares for students at religious schools. The separationist reading shaped decisions for decades, including the test announced in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971).
The tradition of accommodation reasserted itself in turn. When the Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) that neutral, generally applicable laws ordinarily do not violate the Free Exercise Clause, Congress answered almost unanimously with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Court protected a football coach’s prayer at midfield and held that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings, confirming that it had abandoned the Lemon test. The Court has continued to hear such cases since. In June 2025 it ruled unanimously that Wisconsin could not deny a Catholic charity a religious tax exemption because the charity neither proselytized nor limited its services to Catholics, and held 6–3 that parents were entitled to preliminary relief allowing them to opt their children out of lessons using storybooks that conflicted with their faith.
One Inheritance
Separationists and accommodationists have each claimed the founders, and each can quote them, because the founding generation held both commitments at once: that government must never coerce belief or establish a national church, and that a free people’s public life need not pretend that faith does not exist. The argument between those commitments is itself part of the American inheritance.