Editor’s note: The centrality of religious freedom to the revelatory nature of America’s founding is why we’ve curated seminal selections on this first freedom in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. These essays highlight the critical role faith played and continues to play in living out the inherent truths of the Declaration of Independence.
The first provision in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution is what many believe to be its most important guarantee. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
For almost a century, the First Amendment’s guarantee that the United States shall have “no law (prohibiting) the free exercise (of religion)” has been understood as a limitation on state as well as federal power. The guarantee of religious freedom is one of the supremely important founding principles in the United States Constitution, and it is reflected in the constitutions of all 50 of our states.
As noted by many, the guarantee’s “pre-eminent place” as the first expression in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution identifies freedom of religion as “a cornerstone of American democracy.” The American Colonies were originally settled by people who, for the most part, came to this continent for the freedom to practice their religious faith without persecution, and their successors deliberately placed religious freedom first in the nation’s Bill of Rights.
So it is that our federal law formally declares: “The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States.” So it is, I maintain, that in our nation’s founding and in our constitutional order, religious freedom and its associated First Amendment freedoms of speech and press are the motivating and dominating civil liberties and civil rights. Religious teachings and religious organizations are valuable and important to our free society and therefore deserving of special legal protection.
Our nation’s inimitable private sector of charitable works originated and is still furthered most significantly by religious impulses and religious organizations. I refer to such charities as schools and higher education, hospitals and those that care for the poor, where religiously motivated persons contribute personal service and financial support of great value to our citizens. Our nation’s incredible generosity in many forms of aid to other nations and their peoples are manifestations of our common religious faith that all peoples are children of God. Religious beliefs instill patterns of altruistic behavior.
Many of the great moral advances in Western society have been motivated by religious principles and moved through the public square by pulpit-preaching. The abolition of the slave trade in England and the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States are notable illustrations. These revolutionary steps were not motivated and moved by secular ethics or coalitions of persons who believed in moral relativism. They were driven primarily by individuals who had a clear vision of what was morally right and what was morally wrong. In our time, the Civil Rights Movement was, of course, inspired and furthered by religious leaders.
Religion also strengthens our nation in the matter of honesty and integrity. Modern science and technology have given us remarkable devices, but we are frequently reminded that their operation in our economic system and the resulting prosperity of our nation rest on the honesty of the men and women who use them. Americans’ honesty is also reflected in our public servants’ remarkable resistance to official corruption. These standards and practices of honesty and integrity rest, ultimately, on our ideas of right and wrong, which, for most of us, are grounded in principles of religion and the teachings of religious leaders.
Our society is not held together just by law and its enforcement, but most importantly by voluntary obedience to the unenforceable and by widespread adherence to unwritten norms of right or righteous behavior. Religious belief in right and wrong is a vital influence to advocate and persuade such voluntary compliance by a large proportion of our citizens.
Others, of course, have a moral compass not expressly grounded in religion. John Adams relied on all of these when he wisely observed that “we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Even the agnostic Oxford-educated British journalist Melanie Phillips admitted that “one does not have to be a religious believer to grasp that the core values of Western civilization are grounded in religion, and to be concerned that the erosion of religious observance therefore undermines those values and the ‘secular ideas’ they reflect.”
My final example of the importance of religion in our country concerns the origin of the Constitution. Its formation over 200 years ago was made possible by religious principles of human worth and dignity, and only those principles in the hearts of a majority of our diverse population can sustain that Constitution today. I submit that religious values and political realities are so interlinked in the origin and perpetuation of this nation that we cannot lose the influence of religion in our public life without seriously jeopardizing our freedoms.
The founders who established this nation believed in God and in the existence of moral absolutes — right and wrong — established by this Ultimate Lawgiver. The Constitution they established assumed and relied on morality in the actions of its citizens. Where did that morality come from and how was it to be retained? Belief in God and the consequent reality of right and wrong was taught by religious leaders in churches and synagogues, and the founders gave us the First Amendment to preserve that foundation for the Constitution.
The preservation of religious freedom in our nation depends on the value we attach to the teachings of right and wrong in our churches, synagogues and mosques. It is faith in God that translates these religious teachings into the moral behavior that benefits the nation.
This essay is adapted from an earlier address at Chapman University School of Law and appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.