U.S. Department of State Fiscal Year 2020 Agency Financial Report

The Paramount Importance of Religious Freedom R eligious liberty enjoys similar primacy in the American political tradition – as an unalienable right, an enduring limit on state power, and a protector of seedbeds of civic virtues. In 1785, James Madison gave classic expression to its centrality in founding-era thinking in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.” Quoting the Virginia Declaration of Rights’ definition of religion, Madison wrote, “we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, ‘that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.’” Freedom of conscience in matters of religion is unalienable “because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men.” While government may practice intolerance and enforce orthodoxy, it can never, in Madison’s view, coerce true. Madison maintains that religious liberty is also unalienable “because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.” The duty to exercise reason in determining the content and scope of one’s religious obligations is akin to the duty to exercise reason in determining the content and scope of justice and the obligations that it imposes. Governments that respect unalienable rights preserve the ability of those who live under them to determine and pursue, consistent with the like right of others, what is fitting, proper, and good. Some mistakenly suppose that so generous a conception of liberty must rest on skepticism about salvation and justice. Why give people freedom to choose if God’s will and the imperatives of justice are knowable? In fact, a certain skepticism is involved, but it is directed not at faith and justice but at the capacity of government officials to rule authoritatively on the deepest and greatest questions. The Madisonian view of religious liberty – like the view to which Jefferson gave expression in his Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom – proceeds from a theistic premise about the sources of human dignity even as it denies the state the power to dictate final answers about ultimate matters. Drawing on the modern tradition of freedom and their Biblical heritage, the American founders saw themselves as intellectual and political pioneers of religious liberty. When in 1787, two years after his Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison and his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia incorporated into the new charter of government a ban on religious tests for public office, America took a step that no other nation had ever taken. In 1788, at a parade in Philadelphia celebrating the ratification of America’s new system of government, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration, marveled at the sight of the religious leaders of the city’s diverse faiths walking arm in arm. “There could not have been a more happy emblem contrived” of the Constitution, Rush observed, because it “opens all its power and offices alike, not only to every sect of Christians, but to worthy men of every religion.” “Father of the Constitution” James Madison also was the fifth Secretary of State and the fourth President of the United States. 32 | U ni ted S tates D epartment of S tate 2020 A gency F inanci al R eport