Religious Liberty: The First Freedom
The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour
Hillsdale College
4.8 • 649 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guests: Kelly Shackelford & Kelly Scott Franklin
Host Scot Bertram talks with Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, about the current state of religious liberty in the United States and his work on President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. And Kelly Scott Franklin, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, returns for a new series on the poems of Emily Dickinson. This week, he focuses on "Death sets a Thing significant."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners |
| 0:23.7 | across the country. When you're looking to appoint a judge, some attorney who's really bright, |
| 0:30.8 | but willing to make $200,000 a year when he could be making, or she could be making millions of |
| 0:35.9 | dollars a year, Where do you find somebody |
| 0:38.1 | like that? It's the same kind of person who is such a cause person that they would actually |
| 0:43.5 | donate their time like they do with us to defend the First Amendment. This is your host, Scott Bertram. |
| 0:49.9 | Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. That was Kelly Shackleford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute. |
| 0:58.2 | We talked with him in depth about religious liberty and religious freedom today. |
| 1:02.3 | Later on in today's program, Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin from Hillsdale's English Department joins us to begin a brief series on Emily Dickinson. |
| 1:12.4 | First, we're joined by Kelly Shackleford. He's president and chief executive officer of First Liberty Institute. Find them at |
| 1:18.3 | firstliberty.org, a constitutional scholar, he's argued before the U.S. Supreme Court multiple times, |
| 1:24.9 | also recently appointed by President Trump to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission, and we'll talk a bit about that later on in our conversation. |
| 1:32.9 | Kelly, thanks so much for joining us. |
| 1:34.2 | Oh, happy to do it. |
| 1:35.2 | Having a conversation today about religious liberty, where we were, where we are, where we might be in the future in the country. |
| 1:43.0 | For listeners who might not follow |
| 1:45.1 | this sort of legal conversation closely, how do you define religious liberty in simple terms? |
| 1:51.1 | And what does it protect in our everyday life? Well, it's the first freedom. Our country was |
| 1:56.6 | built on religious freedom. It's the first two clauses of the First Amendment. And what I always |
| 2:01.6 | like to start with on religious freedom is, what if you're not religious? Should you care about this? |
| 2:07.4 | The answer is absolutely. It was called our first freedom because our founders understood that if you |
| 2:12.1 | lose this freedom, which is really freedom of conscience, you'll lose all your freedoms. You'll lose |
... |
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