In his Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln praised the Founding Fathers for creating “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” The future president saw the link between the two spheres of freedom, stating that our political liberties depend on our religious ones and vice versa.
Though Lincoln saw America as liberty’s fullest manifestation, our nation owes a great debt to the mother country, England, for putting us on that path. Today marks an important anniversary of that history.
Three hundred thirty-five years ago, on May 24, 1689, the English Parliament passed the Toleration Act. This act formed part of the outworking of the Glorious Revolution — a pivotal moment in which the cause of political liberty triumphed in England. From this revolution came the English Bill of Rights, which cemented a number of protections for Parliament and for English subjects. Those political actions reverberated across the Atlantic, informing our own Bill of Rights a century later.
The Toleration Act focused on religious freedom, though, not political. It permitted nonconforming Protestants, meaning those who were not part of the Church of England, to have their own ministers and places of worship. Prior to that point, only the established church possessed the legal permission to worship according to its precepts. Others could be and were prosecuted for adhering to different religious beliefs.
However, this momentous event hardly completed the task. Dissenting Protestants still could not fully participate in England’s political life. Moreover, Roman Catholics and those of other faiths or no faith had lesser political rights and no religious liberty.
America sought to correct this failure. William Penn’s Pennsylvania operated with expansive religious freedom. Charles Carroll, a Roman Catholic, participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The result, which we still benefit from to this day, is our First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion from the federal government and, while permitting state establishments, bans the formation of a national church.
America certainly has not been perfect in how it has treated religious minorities. We should not shy away from admitting those episodes and grieving for them. But compared to the course of human history, America has been a beacon of light in the cause of religious freedom. As President George Washington noted in his letter to a Hebrew congregation in 1790, “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.”
We would do well to celebrate the Toleration Act and America’s greater working out of its principles, especially because of the threats now facing liberty, both political and religious. Lincoln was right that the two are tied together. Our rights possess a common foundation in the laws of nature and an understanding of human beings as rational and capable of self-government.
But religious liberty holds a special place. While the political is focused most directly on the current and temporal, religion emphasizes the eternal. While politics focuses on our relationship to other humans, religion emphasizes our relationship to the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the world. Religious liberty respects these points by agreeing that God alone is Lord of the conscience, not the state.
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That certainly does not mean laws can’t regulate religious action. In particular, a role exists for the state to ensure basic public safety. Nor does it mean that there is no role for public advocacy for religion. America has a long history of public laws and officials encouraging particular religious beliefs and practices.
But our dedication to religious liberty does draw needed lines beyond which the state must not go. These lines must be reinforced not just with logical arguments but with a remembering of how we have adhered to those lines more and more in the past, even as far back as 1689.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.