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Home – Religious Liberty News – Reclaiming Religious Liberty From Distortion

Reclaiming Religious Liberty From Distortion

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer

Government commissions come and go. Most deliver their reports to polite applause and prompt obscurity. But the Religious Liberty Commission that recently presented its draft report to President Donald Trump deserves a look that extends well beyond the Oval Office. At stake is something fundamental to the American character: our distinctive religious pluralism and the constitutional architecture that has protected it for more than two centuries.

Established last May, the commission was charged with identifying emerging threats to religious liberty, upholding federal laws protecting full civic participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protecting the free exercise of religion. That mandate is broadly American, and the process the commission used to fulfill it was a textbook demonstration of how democratic deliberation is supposed to work.

America has never been a secular nation in the European sense. From its earliest days, faith has been woven into the texture of American public life not as part of the establishment, but as a wellspring.

The framers were not hostile to religion. They were hostile to state-established religion, a very different thing. What they constructed was a republic that respects the independence of churches and houses of worship from government control while actively safeguarding the freedom of individuals to live and express their beliefs openly.

“Separation of church and state,” the infamous phrase found in Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, has become, in popular usage, a weapon deployed to push religion out of public life altogether. The commission report’s careful historical grounding helps restore the actual meaning: not a wall excluding faith from the public square, but a guarantee that government will........

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