This is part of an annual series of posts here on Daily Kos in the run up to and on Religious Freedom Day. So far, there have been at least two (here and here) and I expect there will be more. The Day commemorates the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and shepherded through the legislature by James Madison. But you would not know that because as a society, we have mostly forgotten about it.
This becomes a matter of vital importance for our time, because one of the themes for Christian nationalist and Dominionist takeover in the U.S. has been to hijack the idea — and revise and reshape the history of religious freedom in the U.S. en route to redefining it out of existence. Trying to reverse that slide and reclaim religious freedom for the rest of us is, IMO, one of the central projects of our time. It is key to thwarting the theocratic ambitions of the Christian Right, which are being realized far more than they dreamed in the age of Trump.
Democracy and its key elements, including religious freedom, are more fragile than they sometimes seem, and are too easily taken for granted. But the good news is that democracy and its institutions are not that far gone, and our people are not not either. I know that we can rise to the occasion.
That said, here are portions of an essay I wrote in commemoration of Religious Freedom Day. I hope you will click through and read the whole thing. Its a call to action rather than the more analytical pieces I usually write, and I hope people will join me in the profound project of reclaiming religious freedom — without which, democracy would be impossible. (If you do click through to my piece, you can read another fine piece that also commemorates Religious Freedom Day, by Andrew L. Seidel of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
Some people might be surprised at how on the same page a very wide swath of the religious and secular communities actually are on these things. But once you understand what Religious Freedom Day and what it commemorates actually is -- there is nothing surprising about it at all.
One action we can take at this crucial moment is a small thing. If you are on Twittter, you are invited to join Andrew, me and dozens of religious, secular, civil rights and other national organizations for a Religious Freedom Day Twitter storm at #ReligiousFreedomIs
On January 16 we celebrate Religious Freedom Day to commemorate what may be the most revolutionary and liberatory idea in the history of civilization. It was the reason many joined the American Revolution. It’s the first freedom in the First Amendment. But despite all this, we as a society have forgotten or taken its power for granted.
Religious freedom was the idea behind legislation in 18th century Virginia that overthrew the tyrannical Anglican Church, which had functioned as an often brutal arm of the British Empire. Historians and the Supreme Court have considered the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to be the forerunner to the approach taken by the Framers of the Constitution and of the First Amendment regarding the right relationship between citizens, government, and powerful religious institutions.
Still, as important and transformational as it was in our history, we will probably not hear much about it this Religious Freedom Day—the Day designated by Congress to commemorate it. This may be because most everyone to the left of the Christian Right has taken religious freedom for granted allowing its meaning to fade and knowledge of the underlying principle to atrophy.
But this is a story we need to know—and we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to never forget.
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, like the Constitution and the First Amendment that followed, was aspirational. Which is to say that they hoped the principle would shape and inform our culture, politics, and law over time. It did, albeit unevenly and slowly. But the principle also allowed for ever greater advances in human and civil rights in the centuries since. But in our darkening moment, a variety of retrograde ideas of second-class citizenship are ascendant.
As I told journalist Paul Rosenberg, writing at Salon last year, the Christian Right, since the signing of the Manhattan Declaration in 2009, “has sought to turn religious freedom into a tool of insult and repression of the religious views and civil rights of others.”
Christian theologian Rebecca Todd Peters, wrote in RD last year that religious freedom belongs to everyone and that we should not cede the religious argument to conservatives:
“… refusing to codify traditionalist, conservative religious beliefs into law isn’t a violation of anyone’s religious freedom. In fact, it not only protects a large majority of people in this country from the tyranny of patriarchy, it actually protects their religious freedom.”
These contemporary views aside—it’s not too late for the bright light of history to illuminate our present enabling us to see the possibility of a better future.
That light, perhaps more than anything else, may be the Framers’ expectation that in the future there would also be people like us—non-theocratic Christians, free thinkers, deists and people of other religions—who would insist on the promise of equality inherent in any reasonable understanding of religious freedom. Now as then we need to know that we are all in this together.
But there’s even more that liberatory leaders of the past expect from us. The late Robert Edgar, a former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches once said, “If he were alive today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would remind us that ‘We are the leaders we have been waiting for.’”
Well, there is much more, but I don’t want to be the spoiler of my own story!