Editor’s note: The centrality of religious freedom to the revelatory nature of America’s founding is why we’ve curated seminal selections on this first freedom in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. These essays highlight the critical role faith played and continues to play in living out the inherent truths of the Declaration of Independence.
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Why do I take religious freedom so seriously? Well, for starters, because I take religion very seriously, and I’m in very good company with the founders of this grand republic that we’re proud to call our earthly, albeit temporary home, the United States of America.
They, our founders and their parents, had come here precisely because they were frustrated in countries where religion was imposed or prescribed. Nations where battles were waged to coerce religious conviction, nations where they were hounded and harassed for their beliefs.
Not here.
This is not the way that they or, more importantly, God intended it to be. Nothing, they insisted, is more free than creedal assent. Nothing merited more protection than religious freedom. Nothing deserved more top billing in our Constitution.
And not only was religious freedom to be vigorously guarded, it was downright essential for the flourishing of this noble experiment in democracy.
As the father of our country observed, our liberty will not be degraded into mob rule as long as our people are religious, for faith is needed, fostering the virtue and responsibility essential to the common good.
The most perceptive commentator on the American experiment, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, would write decades after George Washington’s insight that democracy would shine and endure in this country precisely because these Americans take religion seriously.
I take religion seriously because that’s how I was raised, and I take it seriously because of my education. As early as the seventh grade, I was moved to read that our Catholic ancestors came from England to Maryland to escape religious restriction and flourish.
Indeed, one of the most celebrated families of first patriots was the Carroll family, whose Catholic members included Charles, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Daniel, a representative at the Constitutional Convention, and John, our first bishop in America.
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My own Irish ancestors would share that value with the Carroll family as they left a beloved starving island where they were oppressed for their Catholic faith, and that faith was often the only possession most of them brought with them on those ships called coffins.
If I need yet another reason to take religion seriously, I find it in the classroom called history. That shows that every noble cause in our American pedigree was inspired by faith, from independence itself to the fight against slavery, to the rights of workers to an end to racial bigotry, to the cause of peace, to the amelioration of poverty, to the defense of the innocent baby in the womb and grandma in hospice.
I take religious liberty so seriously because I take religion so seriously, and because religion, folks, is not only a good, its freedom is a given — a given not by any government or charter, but a given inherent in the dignity of the human person, a given by God himself.
Thus is religious freedom not some hobby or a nice idea, but a fact, a given part of the very nature that cannot be erased. Thus my passion for this primary liberty is not just because I happen to be a believer or a patriotic citizen but because I’m a person endowed with certain ingrained rights.
Thus do we bristle when told that religion is fine for an hour or so on the Sabbath, a crutch maybe for superstitious people, but never to be taken seriously by enlightened folk. Never allowed to influence society or culture. That is not anti-religion, that’s anti-human nature, that’s anti-human rights.
When I was in Rome to select the next pope, my brother cardinals around the world would plead with me, “Timothy, please, we look to America as a model for a just society where the right to worship and freely exercise religion is enshrined.” Because they tell me, these cardinals, “We live in countries where paranoid bullies despise any allegiance other than to them. Please keep showing us this is not the right way.”
In the lineage of Thomas Beckett and John Fisher and Thomas More, the Carrolls, the Cristeros, the Solzhenitsyns, the Martin Luther Kings of this planet, we call the bluff of those who considered religious freedom an outdated enemy of democracy, insisting instead it’s the very cement keeping the architecture of our house of democracy secure.
This essay is adapted from a speech Dolan gave at the Becket Fund Canterbury Medal Gala in 2025 and appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “One Nation, Under God.” Learn more about how to subscribe.
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