Concept thread · Rights

religious liberty

Freedom to worship and hold religious sentiments without molestation, and freedom from state-imposed religious qualifications — secured in the original Constitution by the bar on any religious test for office and proclaimed in the Northwest Ordinance.

The thread

1. 1776 · defendsnuanced
   Lind defends the Quebec Act as toleration rather than tyranny — it re-granted the Canadians the free exercise of their religion without civil disqualifications, and at their own petition.
   ⚖ Answering the Declaration's charge that the Quebec Act set up "an arbitrary government," Lind points to its religion clause as proof of the opposite: it "re-grant[ed] to the Canadians the free exercise, unchecked by any civil disqualifications, of the religion in which they had been educated" — and, he adds, "in consequence of their petition." He really is arguing for free worship without civil penalties against colonists who despised the Act's indulgence of Catholicism, so the connection is real; but listen to his verbs — Parliament "re-granting" religion to petitioners treats free exercise as a favor the sovereign bestows, not a right the people hold. That is how he sits on this thread: its one loyalist voice, praising the same goods the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance would later fix as rights, but in the older language of toleration.
   An Answer to the Declaration →
2. 1787 · enacts
   The ordinance imposes as territorial policy that no peaceable person may be molested for his mode of worship or religious sentiments.
   Northwest Ordinance →
3. 1787 · codifies · codified into law
   The no-religious-test clause fixes a guarantee against religious qualifications for federal office, the founding-document anchor of the religious-liberty thread.
   Constitution of the United States →

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