Written by Don Byrd
I’m a few days late to this controversy, but in the NYTimes on Friday, Peter Manseau questioned whether freedom of religion is really America’s First Freedom.
Whatever pride of place religion may have enjoyed during the founding era, the assumption that the written order of the Bill of Rights alone makes religious freedom “first” or “foremost” in terms of significance has not been universally shared since that time. Americans have long been great list makers (“We hold these truths to be self evident…”), but shifting national priorities through the years have reorganized our sense of how rights should be enumerated. For much of American history, “first freedom” was more likely to refer to freedom of the press or speech than religion. In the the middle of the 20th century, however, when the Jesuits John Courtney Murray and Wilfrid Parsons began articulating Catholic understandings of the role of religion in American public life, the phrase found forceful advocates of its current meaning.
Does it make sense to have a competition of primacy between constitutional guarantees? They all work together, and are all important. But without the freedom of conscience, and of the soul, what good are the others?
