Join Jane Calvert, author of Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, Vincent Phillip Muñoz, author of Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses, and Thomas Kidd, author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, for a discussion on religious liberty and the founders. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Jane Calvert has taught at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the University of Kentucky, and Yale University and is currently director and chief editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project. Her work, which has been supported by leading research institutions as well as federal agencies, focuses on the intersection of theology and political theory in the Colonial and Founding Eras. She is the author of Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson and Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson.
Thomas Kidd serves as research professor of Church History at Midwestern & the John and Sharon Yeats Endowed Chair of Baptist Studies. Kidd completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he worked with historian of religion George Marsden. Kidd has authored numerous books including Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh; Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis; American History, vols. 1 and 2; Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father; American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths; Baptists in America: A History; George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father; Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots; God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution; and The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Religion & Public Life in the department of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the founding director of Notre Dame's Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government. Muñoz is the author of God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson; Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents; and Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses. His scholarship has been cited multiple times in church-state Supreme Court opinions.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- The First Amendment, National Constitution Center exhibit
- Jane E. Calvert, Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson (2024)
- Thomas Kidd, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (2022)
- Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (2022)
- Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (2010)
- Vincent Phillip Muñoz , God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (2009)
- Letter From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, (August 18, 1790)
Excerpt from Interview: Vincent Phillip Muñoz explains the founders saw worship as an inalienable right and debated government support for religion's role in fostering morality.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz: The idea of an inalienable right or unalienable, as the founders would say. They said worship according to conscience is an unalienable right. What they meant by that in simplest terms, and to oversimplify somewhat, is that we owe those obligations or obligations to worship according to conscience to the creator, and therefore we don't have control over how we ought to worship to the government. And so this is why the government cannot legitimately tell us how we must worship or punish us for not worshiping. Government can't license preachers. Government can't say you may or may not be a preacher. And the reason is because we don't give that authority to the government. We don't alienate authority over our religious beliefs and our religious practices or our religious opinions to the government.
So the government can't penalize us for those beliefs or practices. So, inalienability is a jurisdictional term. Think about it. What can the government legitimately do? And the founders are saying, we're gonna create a government for our common welfare, for a common defense to foster the common good, the common political good, but not every human good is part of the government. We're not gonna turn over authority over our religious worship to the government. And colloquially, we talk about the separation of church and state. Separation of church and state is really to limit the state and to allow churches and church authorities to be separate from the government, but they have their own authority, which some understand comes directly from God. And so that's what the founders in general, I think they all agreed about the concept of inalienability.
And where the differences come in, and I'm not sure if our other scholars would agree with this, but maybe I can put it this way. All the founders thought that moral character was necessary for Republican government. A Republican government requires a moral citizenry. And I think most of the founders thought religion was necessary to help cultivate morality. Where they disagreed was whether government support was necessary to religion? Did religion actually need the help of the government? And some like John Adams and George Washington thought it was perfectly legitimate for the government to aid religion because religion helped cultivate the moral character necessary for good government. But others like Madison and Jefferson thought religion might be necessary for government, but government isn't necessary for religion. And government support actually tended to corrupt or harm religion. That's not a difference in fundamental principles, but a difference in practical application of those principles.
Excerpt from Interview: Jane Calvert highlights contrasting Revolutionary views: Tory loyalty, Whig revolution, and Quaker civil disobedience.
Jane Calvert: It's a really interesting relationship between John Adams and Calvinism and Dickinson and Quakerism. So it's a big theme. So basically it comes down to the major question at the time of the American Revolution was what is a people supposed to do if the government is oppressive? And the decade before the Declaration of Independence was Americans trying to figure that out. And they had three models in front of them. One was Toryism which was sort of the small sea conservative approach. And that was sort of based on the established church of England, Anglicanism. And the idea was that the king was God's vice-regent on earth, and he should protect the people's rights. But if he didn't, it was his prerogative to do what he saw fit as God's vice-regent on earth.
So if he oppressed the people, the people only had the right to pray and petition as they put it. So they would send petitions to him and beg for relief, and hopefully he would grant it. But that was as far as things could go. On the other extreme were the Whigs and these were sort of the radicals. And they said, well, yes, we start with praying and petitioning. Theirs was sort of a secular version of Calvinism. And so they said that, yes, you begin with praying and petitioning, but if that doesn't work and the oppression continues, then eventually the people have the right and the duty to overthrow the government and put a new government in place. And so that's what ended up being dominant in the American Revolution.
But Quakers presented a third way that was kind of in between those extremes. And Quakers said, well we don't believe that there should be oppression, but we also don't believe that the king should be able to do whatever he wants. Nor do we believe that he should be overthrown. They believed in protecting the unity of the polity, the small sea constitution of the people. And so they invented a new theory and practice of resistance that we now call civil disobedience. There wasn't a name for it when they invented it and it didn't really get a name until the early 20th century. But it was basically where you break the unjust laws, but you do so peacefully with love in your heart, and you accept whatever consequences come at you from the government.
And thereby you raise public awareness for the injustice and all the better if you are executed, because then you are a martyr for your cause. And if this sounds extreme, it's exactly what Martin Luther King preached during the Civil Rights Movement. And he wrote the best, most succinct explanation of Quaker civil disobedience in a letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963. He did so at the behest of Quakers, and Quakers published the first 50,000 copies of it. So this is what Dickinson offered, and it's one of the reasons that he and John Adams clashed so mightily during the founding. And if I could just continue for a moment one of the major reasons Dickinson did not want independence and refused to sign the Declaration of Independence was that he was very afraid that the Quakers would be denied their religious liberty and persecuted. And so Dickinson did not. So he went off and he joined the battalion. He found it after independence was declared, and then a year later, exactly what he feared happened did happen. And so after Americans basically excised his provision for religious liberty in the Articles of Confederation they then turned on the Quakers.
And instituted the most severe persecutions Quakers had endured since the 17th century. And it was at the behest of John Adams, by the way, and that a group of Quakers in Philadelphia were rounded up. They were denied habeas corpus and held without charge and shipped off to Virginia for nine months. And some of them died. Their livelihoods were destroyed. Much of their property was destroyed. And this is exactly what Dickinson worried about if independence went forward, that there would be no protection anymore for religious dissenters.
Excerpt from Interview: Thomas Kidd explains the founders linked human equality and rights to being created by God, though its application sparked debates.
Thomas Kidd: I think that there was a very broadly shared idea that human equality comes from our common creation by God. I mean this doesn't require even any kind of specific Christian belief, but that there's a created order and that people's rights come from the way that God made us. Most profoundly that we have equal standing together compared to one another because we are all created by God. So, there's a sort of horizontal equality because of our vertical relationship to God. That was very, very widely shared and routinely cited as a sort of common sense principle about equality and rights among the founders. Now, of course, the implications of that were debated obviously on slavery, but also on women's rights that scripture is clear that male and female, he created them.
And so, this is not just a male issue, but the devil was always in the details about, well, if we're equal before God, then what does that mean politically? But certainly when you're talking about the view of the rights of British Americans as Jefferson put it in a pre-declaration writing that he did, I mean, you have to start with the idea that we are all created by God, and that God gave us our inalienable rights as the declaration says. And therefore that that's where you start when there are cases of political oppression or denial of basic human liberties, that this is unjust because of our equal standing before God. And so, that's another one of those ideas that, I mean, if you heard that kind of talk today, you would think, oh, well, this person must be some sort of devout Christian or a devout Jew or something like that, to make these kinds of claims. But even someone like Jefferson took that for granted, despite the fact that he is quite skeptical in his personal beliefs about the details of Christian doctrine.
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