Religious Liberty Lit the Way for America’s Shining City on a Hill, by Gerard V. Bradley

Thank you, Gov. Patrick, and members of the commission, for the opportunity to present these remarks.

The founders of the United States were pioneers of religious liberty. Unlike practically all societies before theirs, they eschewed top-down control of the people’s religion through princely imposition, or by the altar-throne deals common in Christendom, or by enforcing some eclectic civil religion. Or by all three, as in England ca. 1776, where the idea was political prosperity through religious unity. The society our founders founded at that date, unlike most free societies after theirs, did not secure religious liberty by erecting what Richard John Neuhaus dubbed the “naked public square,” a secularized space from which religion has been banished. That is the idea of political prosperity without religion.  And this idea, opposed as it is to the founders’ idea as much as to King George III’s, was the Supreme Court’s mid-20th century point of departure, starting in earnest with the school prayer case in 1962.

The court’s was a decisive break with the founders. For they rejected those false alternatives. For them, it was not either public religion without freedom or freedom without public religion. They went all-in on both/and. They steadily maintained, in the words of the First Congress which wrote the Religion Clauses into the Bill of Rights, that religion was “necessary”to “the happiness of mankind and good government.” ….

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