Religious Freedom Day is celebrated each year on January 16th, marking the passage in 1786 of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. That statute ended the state-established church in Virginia and fully protected the important right of religious conscience.
When America became an independent nation, many early state constitutions (such as North Carolina) protected the right of religious conscience:
That all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own conscience.
The right of religious conscience was then enshrined at the federal level in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke about this right multiple times:
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience.[O]ur rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted. [I]t is inconsistent with the spirit of our laws and Constitution to force tender consciences.
John Quincy Adams also affirmed the importance of the right of religious conscience in American history: “The transcendent and overruling principle of the first settlers of New England was conscience.”
n January 16th, we also remember the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King practiced First Amendment rights (such as free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and right to assembly) in his non-violent protests throughout the Civil Rights movement, which led to his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Celebrate our God-given rights today by memorizing and studying all the First Amendment rights, with a focus on the right of religious conscience!
