For the past few years, the Religious Freedom Day group here at Daily Kos has sponsored a blogathon in the run up to and including Religious Freedom Day, January 16th. We hope you will join us to commemorate a piece of legislation for which the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson
wanted to be remembered (along with drafting the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia.)
The Day was designated by Congress in 1992 to commemorate the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786. The following year, Madison served as a principal author of the Constitution, and in 1789, as a principal author of the First Amendment. The Virginia Statute is considered by historians and by the Supreme Court to the authoritative view of the intentions of the Framers regarding the right relationship between the citizens, the government and powerful religious institutions.
In 1992 Congress designated January 16th as Religious Freedom Day to celebrate enactment of the Virginia Statute, stipulating only that it be commemorated by a presidential proclamation.
The rest is up to us.
The Christian Right has been running hard to exploit Religious Freedom Day as an opportunity to advance their agenda. Even more so since Trump became president.
As I told journalist Paul Rosenberg, writing at Salon last year, the Christian Right, since the signing of the Manhattan Declaration in 2009, “has sought to turn religious freedom into a tool of insult and repression of the religious views and civil rights of others.” Since then, the evangelical and Catholic theocrats that we call the Christian Right, have also been seeking to broadly unfold their politics and program, notably restricting reproductive rights and access to abortion care; creating exemptions to respecting the civil rights of LGBTQ people, hijacking the public schools to promote their brand of religion and to attack the faith of others — all under the banner of religious freedom. Evangelicals have taken this to the states, seeking to run a comprehensive Domionionist agenda in the states under the rubric of Project Blitz. A number of national religious, secular and civil rights groups have banded together as the BlitzWatch Coalition to expose and oppose all this.
For the past several years, dozens of national religious, secular, and civil rights organizations and leaders have joined in a Tweetstorm on Religious Freedom Day, January 16. Tweets are posted in the spirit of the broad tradition of religious freedom as it has developed in the U.S. over the past two and a half centuries. It is also in response to the Christian Right — as now epitomized by Project Blitz — that has hijacked the idea, the term, and the Day we commemorate it.
We intend to take them back.
One tentacle of Project Blitz’s is a model RFD resolution that has led to distorted resolutions being introduced and even passed in several states. (I wrote about it
here.) So, working with experts, we crafted a model Religious Freedom Day resolution of our own, intended to be historically accurate, and true to the meaning and significance of the legislation it is supposed to commemorate, and chose not to attach any of the contemporary religious freedom related issues -- of which there are, of course, many. Rather it is intended as a place where maybe most people can agree, and set the stage for some useful 21st century conversation about these things. (The model
resolution itself and some helpful talking points and readings are available at Blitz Watch.)
Along the way, it is important to note that religious freedom has both nothing and everything to do with religion. It is the underlying right to believe as you will—or not—and to change your mind, free from the undue influence of government or powerful religious institutions. It’s a civil or constitutional right, and it is not to be confused with religion in general, or any particular religion at all.
I wrote recently about all this at
Ethics Daily, a publication that reaches deep into the non-fundamentalist Baptist world via its organizational and publishing partners.
Christian nationalists and dominionists, who have conflated the idea of religious freedom with their theocratic aims, enjoy influence at the highest levels of government.
Thus, this is a darkening time for those of us who believe that religious freedom belongs to all of us and should not be used by government to enshrine selected religious doctrines in law.
The framers knew there’d be days like these. The theocrats and monarchists would be back.
But the framers also expected there would also be people like us – the non-theocratic Christians, free thinkers, deists and people of other religions who would insist on religious equality.
Now as then, we need to know we are all in this together.