Educate. Empower. Choose.
If you came here because you want to explain the First Amendment’s religion clauses to a student, a parent, or a neighbor without a slogan standing in for the paper, you are in the right place. The National American Citizen Association educates the next generation about the threat to Western civilization and the importance of Israel, and about the Constitution free people still hold in their hands. Free people cannot choose what they have not been taught to read. Here is what the religion clauses say, what Virginia wrote before the Bill of Rights, what Madison remonstrated against a tax for teachers of religion, and what the Supreme Court held when a state tried to license who may preach — documents you can open yourself.
This place is civic education. Companion essays already on the record include Why Israel Matters, What We Inherited, Branches of Government, and American History. The press-and-propaganda companion drafted for this series is Read the Press Clause, Spot the Device. This page is the other half of Amendment I: conscience before the state.
What Amendment I says
Start with the text. Amendment I, as published in the Avalon Project’s Bill of Rights transcription:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Sources: Yale Avalon, Bill of Rights; National Archives, Bill of Rights transcript
Two bans sit in one sentence. Congress may not establish a religion. Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. The Press Clause comes next in the same Amendment; it does not cancel these two. Free people keep all of them, or they lose the tools that keep the ruler out of the conscience and out of the newsroom.
The religion clauses do not say that every belief is wise. They say the national legislature does not get to write an official creed, and does not get to forbid a person from exercising religion. That is the American floor. Later doctrine applied those limits to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The floor is still the text.
What the Declaration already assumed
The Bill of Rights did not invent the American claim about conscience. The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, grounded rights outside the state:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Source: Yale Avalon, Declaration of Independence
Rights come from the Creator, not from Congress. Governments are instituted to secure those rights, not to invent them. That is the same root What We Inherited places under the American tree. If rights are granted by the ruler, the ruler can take them back. If they are unalienable, the religion clauses are not a favor. They are a recognition.
What Virginia wrote in 1786
Before the First Amendment was ratified, Virginia had already put the argument into statute. Thomas Jefferson drafted; James Madison championed; the General Assembly passed An Act for establishing religious Freedom on January 16, 1786.
The statute opens by naming the problem:
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness…
It then draws the line officers still need:
that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate…
Then the enacting clause — the citizen’s quote:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.
Source: Encyclopedia Virginia, An Act for establishing religious Freedom (1786)
No compelled attendance. No compelled support. No civil disability for belief. Profession and argument remain free. Civil capacity does not shrink or swell with a creed. That is free exercise in statute form, a generation before many Americans ever opened a pocket Constitution.
The Act closes by calling these rights “of the natural rights of mankind,” and by warning that a later assembly that repealed or narrowed the Act would infringe natural right. Jefferson put authorship of this statute on his tombstone. He was not wrong about its weight.
What Madison remonstrated in 1785
The year before the statute passed, Virginia faced a different bill: A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion — a general assessment to fund Christian teachers with public money. Madison answered with Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (ca. June 20, 1785), a petition with fifteen numbered reasons.
He began from a truth he treated as fundamental:
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.
Then the equality rule free people still need in the original words:
Above all are they to be considered as retaining an “equal title to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of Conscience.” Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.
And the tenure of the right:
Because finally, “the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience” is held by the same tenure with all our other rights.
Source: National Constitution Center, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments; full text also at Founders Online
Madison was not asking for a private club. He was refusing a tax that would have used the state to prefer one arrangement of Christian teaching. The assessment failed. Jefferson’s statute followed. The First Amendment’s religion clauses sit on that Virginia fight: no establishment by compulsion, free exercise by equal title.
What the Constitution forbids of office
Article VI of the Constitution does two related jobs. It names the supreme law of the land — this Constitution, the laws made under it, and treaties made under the authority of the United States. It also forbids a religious test for federal office:
…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Source: National Archives, Constitution transcript
Officers swear (or affirm) to support this Constitution. They are not required to profess a creed to take the oath. That is not hostility to religion. It is refusal to make the Republic a church with a membership exam. A nation-state under law can protect conscience precisely because office is not a sacrament and belief is not a civil capacity test. Compare that to movements and regimes that make ideology the law, which What We Inherited and Why Israel Matters document from the primary papers. People are not a creed. The paper is the paper.
What the Court held in Cantwell
In Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940), Newton Cantwell and his sons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, were convicted under a Connecticut statute that required a certificate from a public official before soliciting money for a religious cause. The official could decide whether the cause was “religious.” Jesse Cantwell was also convicted of inciting a breach of the peace after playing, with permission, a phonograph record that attacked organized religion and singled out the Roman Catholic Church.
Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, reversed. He stated the incorporation rule in plain words:
The fundamental concept of liberty embodied in that Amendment embraces the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws.
Then the double aspect every citizen should be able to quote:
The constitutional inhibition of legislation on the subject of religion has a double aspect. On the one hand, it forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship. … On the other hand, it safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion. Thus the Amendment embraces two concepts,—freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute but, in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society.
The certificate scheme failed because it made a state officer the censor of what counts as religion:
Such a censorship of religion as the means of determining its right to survive is a denial of liberty protected by the First Amendment and included in the liberty which is within the protection of the Fourteenth.
On the breach-of-peace count, the Court found no assault, no threat, no personal abuse — only persuasion of willing listeners. Offense at a religious argument is not enough to criminalize the speech. States may use general, non-discriminatory rules for time, place, and manner on the streets. They may not hand a bureaucrat a veto over whether a cause is religious enough to speak.
Source: Cantwell v. Connecticut, Cornell LII opinion text
Put Virginia’s statute, Madison’s remonstrance, Article VI’s no-test clause, and Cantwell on one table. Compelled support is out. Equal title to free exercise is in. Belief is absolute. Conduct can be regulated for peace and order, but not by a religious gatekeeper in a state office. That is the American method: documents, not chants.
What to do with this
Educate. Read Amendment I’s religion clauses. Read Jefferson’s 1786 Act. Read Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance. Read Article VI’s no religious Test clause. Read Cantwell. Original documents, not a feed.
Empower. A citizen who can quote “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and who can tell belief from conduct the way Cantwell does, cannot be bullied by a slogan that pretends the Constitution chose a church — or banned conscience.
Choose. Choose the nation-state under law that protects equal title to free exercise. Choose officers who swear to the Constitution, not to a religious test. Choose to teach the next generation the clauses, the Virginia fight, and the Court holding — so they can tell a free people’s inheritance from a rewrite.
The religion clauses matter because rights come from the Creator in the Declaration, because Virginia refused compelled worship and compelled support in 1786, because Madison insisted on equal free exercise before the Bill of Rights, and because the Court told the states they are as incompetent as Congress to establish a creed or to prohibit its free exercise. Free people keep that paper in their hands, or they lose the room where argument can still contradict error.
Sources
- Constitution of the United States, Amendment I (Bill of Rights). Yale Avalon. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rights1.asp
- Bill of Rights transcript. U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript
- Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. Yale Avalon. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declare.asp
- An Act for establishing religious Freedom (Virginia), January 16, 1786. Encyclopedia Virginia (primary text). https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/an-act-for-establishing-religious-freedom-1786/
- James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, [ca. June 20,] 1785. National Constitution Center historic-document library; Founders Online. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/james-madison-memorial-and-remonstrance-against-religious-assessments-1785 ; https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163
- U.S. Constitution, Article VI (supreme law; no religious Test). National Archives transcript. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
- Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940). Cornell LII. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/310/296
Civic education and political commentary. Quotations are from the public documents linked above.
