The Flushing Remonstrance and America’s First Fight for Freedom
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before the Bill of Rights was drafted, a group of ordinary citizens in Queens, New York, made a bold stand for freedom. In 1657, they issued the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition demanding the right to worship without interference from government. Their words, written in a small colonial town, would echo more than a century later in the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. Larry Reed, President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, tells the story of how this little-known document challenged persecution and laid the groundwork for the separation of church and state in America.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. |
| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.6 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:26.6 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, in the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.6 | You get your podcasts. And we return to our American stories. |
| 0:47.3 | And up next, a story from our friend Larry Reed, |
| 0:50.8 | President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education or Fee, on a document and event that |
| 0:57.6 | helped establish a very important principle in our country. |
| 1:01.8 | Take it away, Larry. |
| 1:04.7 | To the right, honorable, governor of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant. You have been pleased to send |
| 1:12.1 | unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those |
| 1:18.2 | people called Quakers because they are supposed to be by some seducers of the people. |
| 1:24.7 | For our part, we cannot condemn them in this case. Neither can we stretch out our hands against |
| 1:30.2 | them. We desire, therefore, in this case, not to judge lest we be judged, neither to condemn |
| 1:36.8 | lest we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own master. We are bound by the law to do good unto all men, |
| 1:47.5 | especially to those of the household of faith. With those words, Edward Hart, the town clerk of what |
| 1:55.5 | is now the Queen's neighborhood of Flushing, New York, began a powerful 650-word document known as the |
| 2:04.4 | Flushing Remonstrance. |
| 2:07.1 | It was December 27, 1657. |
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