What is religious freedom? Why is it important? And why is it now under threat?

Hold on a second. I can hear you saying religious freedom is threatened?

Who doesn't have religious freedom in the United States?

You can be a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Wicked.

You can believe in anything or nothing.

This was true, but not anymore.

Seems like almost every week a new dispute arises between people of faith and government agencies

alleging that believers are violating the rights of non-believers or simply violating government edicts.

Given that the search for religious freedom was central to the founding of America, this is quite a reversal.

As Thomas Payne put it in his influential 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense,

this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty

from every part of Europe.

It wasn't an accident that the first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution,

is about religious liberty. Here's what it says,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

This meant the new United States would have no government-sponsored religion as Europe had at the time and no restrictions on how you practiced your religion.

British historian Paul Johnson draws a stark and telling contrast between the two great revolutions of the 18th century.

The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution in its origins was a religious event,

whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event.

That fact was to shape the American Revolution and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being.

Now, two centuries after the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion, one of the main goals of the American Revolution,

has morphed into freedom from religion, one of the main goals of the French Revolution.

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