What is Freedom of Religion?
One year after his inauguration as the nation’s first president, George Washington traveled to Rhode Island. There, he received a message of welcome from the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, who expressed to him their gratitude for the freedom of religion in the United States:
Deprived as we have hitherto been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now, with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty Disposer of all events, behold a government, erected by the majesty of the people, a government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, deeming everyone, of whatever nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental machine.
For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great Preserver of Men, beseeching him that the angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised land may graciously conduct you through all the dangers and difficulties of this mortal life.
Washington was deeply moved by this message of welcome. He sent the Jewish congregation a cordial and warm reply in which he, too, spoke of the blessing of the freedom of religion for the new nation:
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. 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.
In his celebrated biography of Washington, Ron Chernow comments that Washington’s reply to the Jewish community of Newport “ranks as his most beautifully enduring statement on religious toleration, showing that he had no notion of foisting a Christian state on the nation.” The new nation, in other words, would not be characterized by Christian nationalism.
Religious historian Mark A. Noll has written that the founding documents of the United States, particularly the Declaration of Independence, “involved the rejection of European Christendom, the formal linking of church and state.” The founders of the new nation saw in “Britain’s church-state regime … a prime source of tyrannical corruption.” In place of the oppression of an ossified and decrepit (and British) Christendom, the freedom of religion was enshrined as the very first freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. The Bill of Rights opens with the famed Establishment Clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
If Christendom was not to be the soil in which religious freedom could take root, what would give it nourishment and growth? The answer, according to Noll, for nearly the first century and a half of the nation’s existence, was the democratic appropriation of the Bible:
Because of how effectively patriots had used Scripture to further their cause, the Bible remained the most prominent old-world feature to survive the rejection of European Christendom. Democratically read, preached, and distributed—and as the surest source of republican virtue—the Bible retained an honored place in the novus ordo seclorum, the American new order of the ages.
Like the net in Christ’s parable thrown into the sea that collects fish of every kind, the democratization of the Bible meant that the desperate social and political movements of the nation, many of which “stupefied Europeans,” were nonetheless encompassed by the larger and shared moral framework provided by the nation’s adherence to the Bible.
The common moral language and ethos of the nation, however, was not to last. The net was rent by centrifugal forces of slavery and Civil War, as well as by the rapid secularization of the West that followed the two World Wars of the twentieth century. In place of a common moral language, our own postmodern era is marked by fragmentation. Such fragmentation has given rise to renewed debate about the nature and scope of religious freedom in America.
The USCCB’s Report on Religious Liberty
In their Annual Report on the State of Religious Liberty in the United States, released February 17, 2026, the bishops of the United States observe that “[t]he role of religion in American public life was a significant subject of debate” over the course of the previous calendar year, a debate that will continue throughout 2026 and beyond. The bishops address key moments of the debate in each of the branches of government and identify areas of ongoing “critical concern,” like the threat of transgender ideology and the increased denial of religious liberty to undocumented immigrants.
In the report, the bishops offer a straightforward definition of religious liberty: “Religious liberty means immunity from coercion in religious matters.” But where does this right to freedom from coercion come from? To answer this question, the bishops turn to Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, which teaches that the right to religious freedom “[h]as its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.”
In other words, the American bishops, in agreement with Catholic tradition, hold that the right to religious liberty entails the freedom to “seek the truth about God and to live in accordance with that truth.” The bishops assert that the freedom of religion “protects the space” in which questions about God can be asked honestly, free from the intimidation or coercive power of government. Regarding the common good of society—understood as “the set of conditions necessary for a society to flourish”—the freedom of religion is an essential component, because, as their report notes, “Since human persons naturally desire to know and adhere to religious truth, their flourishing goes hand in hand with religion and religious institutions.”
The freedom of religion is a capacious freedom. It is not simply concerned with private individuals but encompasses the good of society itself: it embraces the social nature of human beings in their right to religious expression and public association and institutional organization, as the Church expressly recognizes. The freedom of religion is also a quintessentially American freedom, as witnessed by Washington’s correspondence with the Jewish synagogue of Newport. In their urgent message from 2012, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” written in response to the alarming incursions of the Obama Administration against religious freedom, the U.S. bishops noted with pride that the American Catholic experience influenced Vatican II’s teaching on the freedom of religion in Dignitatis Humanae.
What, then, is the cause of the current debate around religious liberty? At its root, the debate stems from two incompatible ways of understanding the human person. In a wonderful analysis of Dignitatis Humanae, theologian Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., notes that a basic interpretive question since the document’s publication has concerned the “location” of human dignity. If the right to religious liberty is grounded in human dignity, as the document (and the bishops) assert, where, or in what, does human dignity reside? Upon what seafloor, so to speak, does the anchor of human dignity fasten, thus holding the freedom of religion secure?
Broadly speaking, there have been two answers to this question. One response is the assertion that human dignity is grounded in radical freedom, while another response holds that human dignity is grounded in truth. This theological debate has its analogue in the cultural and political debates surrounding religious freedom today. On one hand, the U.S. bishops affirm that religious liberty safeguards the human person’s capacity to search for truth. On the other hand, as Justice Scalia once noted, “We indeed live in a vulgar age” in which the concept of truth is largely rejected.
The Roots of our Cultural Fragmentation
In one of his writings on religious freedom, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger situates the rise of democratic republics in the larger historical framework of the Enlightenment. Ratzinger notes that in such democracies all citizens share in the power of the state, and in this way, they also share the freedom of self-determination. The precious commodity of freedom is carefully guarded by an elaborate structure involving the separation of the powers of government, so that citizens are protected by law and not governed by arbitrary power, religious or otherwise.
Ratzinger’s great insight, however, is that even constitutional republics are not created ex nihilo. The structure and virtues of a constitutional republic, delineated so clearly by James Madison, for example, depend, in fact, on an existing community. As Ratzinger argues:
Ultimately the democratic system can function only when certain fundamental values—let us call them human rights—are recognized by everyone as valid and remain exempt from the reach of the majority. In other words, the merely formal democratic system of limited power and the separation of powers does not function in and of itself. It cannot be applied in a way that is completely values-free; rather, it presupposes an ethos with specific contents that is commonly accepted and commonly adhered to in practice, even though absolutely compelling arguments for it cannot be adduced.
Ratzinger’s argument here is echoed, in a different key, by the philosopher Roger Scruton, for whom “we” is always presupposed to any tie of government. The ties of government are secondary to the ties of membership in an existing society with a principle of unity prior to government.
Membership, however, bespeaks a common ethos and moral landscape. This has been called into question in modern times, especially in the writings of Sartre. Ratzinger notes that for Sartre, “the human being is pure existence, without essence. What he is and what he ought to be are not determined.” Ratzinger describes Sartre’s understanding of freedom and the human person:
The idea of freedom here has been taken to its most radical extreme: no longer mere emancipation from tradition and authority, but now emancipation from the idea of “man” as a creature, emancipation from one’s own nature, complete indeterminacy that is open to everything.
Human freedom and moral action are not to be sought in a system of rules, but rather asserted. That is, reality, including freedom, is not intelligible until, by force of will, the human being chooses what his or her reality will be, and in this way exercises authentic freedom.
What is Freedom of Religion Today?
Simone de Beauvoir gave succinct expression to the anthropology of Sartre and expressed what has become the increasingly dominant understanding of freedom in our contemporary culture. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she writes: “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.” That is, a choice is good (moral) insofar as it can be construed as a choice affirming or actualizing unconstrained freedom.
The shortsightedness of such an understanding should be self-evident, as it claims that a choice is moral if and only if it is free. Although perhaps not completely foreseen by de Beauvoir, such a concept of morality entails the assertion of dominance, since whatever might constrain or withhold my will I can freely suppress or abolish. In their search for a freedom unshackled from nature or God, the existentialists end up in the radical voluntarism of “might makes right.”
Such an understanding of freedom, however, has been prevalent in the debates about religious freedom. Consider the following two examples which share the same voluntaristic understanding of freedom.
In her dissent in the 2020 Supreme Court decision Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote:
Ready access to contraceptives and other preventive measures for which Congress set the stage … both safeguards women’s health and enables women to chart their own life’s course.
Notice how closely this sentence follows de Beauvoir’s logic. The access to birth control (and abortion) is moral because it guarantees freedom, and just because such a choice guarantees freedom, it is moral. The Little Sisters of the Poor have no right to establish an institution informed by their own religious principles. But that Ginsburg’s view of freedom violates their freedom of religion is quite beside the point. All that matters is the pure voluntarism of personal expression, uninhibited by any other constraint.
A second example concerns the current administration’s increased buildup of detention centers for undocumented immigrants, together with the denial of ministers’ and priests’ access to such centers for the religious and sacramental care of those detained. The recent bishops’ report notes the confusion occasioned by such an arbitrary and voluntaristic approach:
In the absence of long overdue reform of the U.S. immigration system by policymakers, religious organizations addressing people’s spiritual and corporal needs without discriminating on the basis of immigration status become convenient scapegoats. Meanwhile, these very organizations which have been essential in encouraging the successful integration of immigrants, helping combat their exploitation, and in the process supporting the development of American communities, somehow become the ones accused of acting against the national interest.
Here again, the same voluntaristic understanding of freedom is at play, but this time on the part of the executive branch. What is moral has been determined by the executive, and that such an understanding may violate another’s right to the freedom of religious expression, while perhaps regrettable, is quite beside the point.
Against the attempts to ground human dignity in unrestricted freedom, the recent Magisterium of the Catholic Church has instead located such dignity in the human person’s orientation to and capacity for truth. During the drafting of Dignitatis Humanae, Bishop Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II) was instrumental, insisting, “non datur libertas sine veritate” (“there is no freedom without truth”). This assertion would be enshrined in encyclicals such as Veritatis Splendor and reiterated again by Pope Benedict XVI. It is the assertion that human dignity comes from man’s openness to God and from the capacity to seek him in sincerity of heart.
In the fractured state of contemporary moral and political discourse, the Catholic Church is uniquely positioned to offer a unifying vision of human dignity grounded in the openness to truth and to God. In this way, the Church can help clarify the authentic source of religious liberty. In an important essay delineating the situation confronting the Church today, Dominican theologian Thomas Joseph White notes that, while we live in an age of metaphysical despair, such despair offers the Church a unique opportunity to engage with our fellow citizens and counter the prevalent skepticism of our time. He writes:
Who else is presenting coherent philosophical conceptions of reality? The human person has a natural desire for the universal that, even if repressed by today’s skepticism, aches for fulfillment. Consequently, the Church needs to make philosophical arguments in the public square, ones that show that the world is inherently intelligible (and that our minds are naturally made for objective truth). This will resonate powerfully in today’s skeptical consensus.
We need philosophical arguments to counter the empty voluntarism of our time, and this is a challenge the Church should meet head-on. By mounting philosophical arguments in the public square, the Church in the United States can remind our fellow Americans that we find freedom and justice only under God, whom we seek in freedom of mind and heart.