Natural Rights and Religious Liberty: The Founders' Perspective

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : Congress -- and the states, via the 14th Amendment's application of the First Amendment against them -- lacks legitimate authority to regulate any aspect of religious worship, including by whom, how, where, and when it is performed.
59% : Conservatives also note that the First Amendment declares that Congress "shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.
58% : The First Amendment, moreover, prohibits the establishment of religion, which Thomas Jefferson said erects a "wall of separation" between church and state.
55% : James Madison, the most philosophically articulate Founder on religious freedom, stated the matter most clearly.
54% : We have a political right to religious liberty because we have more sacred and sovereign duties to God.
54% : Most exemption litigation today falls under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the First Amendment.
53% : The Founders had a different understanding, at least when it came to "natural rights" such as religious liberty.
53% : The Founders understood the inalienable natural rights of religious liberty only to require the state to remain within its proper sphere.
52% : But the categorical character of religious liberty also means that its scope is relatively narrow.
51% : Freedom from religion and the freedom to practice one's religion are, in fact, both aspects of the Founders' understanding of our inalienable natural right of religious liberty.
50% : The natural right to religious liberty, in other words, is not granted by government; it is a part of the natural fabric of the created moral order, an order in which rights and duties are reciprocal.
49% : The meaning of religious freedom remains one of the more contested areas of our constitutional politics.
49% : The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause together articulate the limits on government authority needed to safeguard individuals' natural right to religious liberty.
49% : The Founders, again, would have held a narrower view of the rights of religious liberty, at least at the level of natural rights.
48% : Does the Founders' Constitution offer a coherent understanding of religious liberty, one that we might recur to today in our religiously and morally pluralistic nation?
48% : For the Founders, then, the right of religious liberty imposes limits on the state's authority.
47% : Many social conservatives understand the right of religious liberty to mean a right of religious individuals and institutions to be exempt from laws that burden their religious beliefs or commitments.
47% : Conservatives would have to accept that religious freedom means only that government cannot impose targeted disabilities on religion -- not that one is entitled to exemptions from otherwise valid laws.
44% : Nonetheless, social conservatives' basic argument remains the same: religious liberty means that individuals ought to be exempt from otherwise valid but religiously burdensome laws.
42% : Perhaps the Founders' more modest approach to religious liberty would satisfy no one.
40% : This absence of jurisdiction that prohibits regulation of worship as such is also why the Founders said government cannot establish a religion.
40% : The locus of such arguments today is LGBT+ non-discrimination laws, which many traditional and orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims find impossible to comply with fully.
24% : With President Joe Biden's recent tweet that transgender equality is the "civil rights issue of our time," the conflict between these competing views of religious liberty will only be amplified.

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