Sixteen Words: The Origins of America’s First Freedom
This year, in honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence, our League of Women Voters columns are devoted to the rights and freedoms at the heart of our nation’s founding. Religious liberty is among the most foundational of those freedoms — the very first right named in the Bill of Rights. We turn to its origins now.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
— First Amendment, U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights
These sixteen words open the Bill of Rights—placed there deliberately before the freedoms of speech, the press, and assembly. Religious liberty is America’s first freedom, grounded in a foundational principle: government will neither establish an official religion nor interfere with the free practice of any faith. The question today is whether we still understand why our founders placed it first.
The founders were not writing in the abstract— they were writing from history. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), fought between Protestants and Catholics across the Holy Roman Empire, remains one of Europe’s most devastating conflicts. Germany alone lost roughly one-third of its population, either in battle or from the famine and disease that followed. Estimates of total casualties from religious wars across Europe between 1525 and 1648—spanning conflicts before and including the Thirty Years’ War—range from 4 to 12 million.
Men like Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were avid readers of history. They understood that fusing religious authority with political power could lead to terrible oppression. Across the Atlantic, the establishment of the Anglican Church in predominantly Catholic Ireland fueled centuries of rebellion, suffering, and conflict. These were not distant abstractions; they were living, cautionary tales.
Given this patchwork of entanglement between church and state across the colonies, the founders also faced a practical problem at home. Many of the original thirteen colonies had official churches: the Anglican Church dominated the South, while the Congregational (Puritan) Church held sway in New England. Colonial governments taxed everyone—believers and non-believers alike—to support those churches, a practice that bred deep resentment. Some colonies also imposed religious tests for holding office, effectively barring Jews, Catholics, and members of other faiths from civic leadership.
Maryland pointed the way toward a better path: its Toleration Act of 1649 became an early template for religious freedom in America. That model shaped the founders’thinking at the national level.
Rather than choosing between Anglican and Puritan, the founders rejected Patrick Henry’s proposal to declare the new nation a Christian country and to levy taxes to support Christian churches. Instead, they wrote those sixteen words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Shortly thereafter, Jefferson and Madison led a successful campaign to abolish Virginia’s state church establishment, cementing the principle in the most populous state of the new republic.
For more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has put that principle into practice: no government-sponsored tithes or taxes to support churches; no religious tests for public office; no government preference for one faith over another—or over no faith at all. Citizens are free to practice their religion, or not, as their conscience dictates. In short, the amendment prohibits the use of government power to tip the scales of belief.
The tensions the founders sought to manage have not disappeared; they have simply taken new forms. Should the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms? Should taxpayer-funded vouchers support attendance at religious schools? These are live disputes, and the answers depend on where one draws the line between neutrality toward religion and entanglement with it. Recently in Texas, a legal challenge was required before students at Muslim schools were confirmed to be equally eligible for a new voucher program—a reminder that equal treatment across faiths is not always the starting assumption and that the amendment’s protections remain worth defending.
The founders placed religious freedom first in the Bill of Rights because they had witnessed what happens when governments and churches become one.
It is America’s oldest lesson—and, given the debates still before us, perhaps its most urgent.