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National Religious Freedom Day
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About this event
The League of Women Voters commemorates National Religious Freedom Day on January 16, the day in 1786 that the Virginia General Assembly's adopted of Thomas Jefferson's landmark Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
This statute was shepherded through the Virginia Legislature by James Madison and became the basis for the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, leading to freedom of religion for all Americans.
Jefferson and other leaders of the founding generation knew that the kinds of theocrats and monarchists they’d defeated in the 18th century would be back someday. Jefferson, seeking to inoculate the Virginia Statute against false interpretations in the future, late in his life wrote that the religious freedom of the Virginia Statute was not for Christians alone, but that it encompassed “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
This suggests that freedom of religion was not intended to be the imposition of a certain religion's beliefs on all Americans nor a way to be exempt from equal rights and anti-discrimination measures.
Jefferson’s clarification reminds us why it’s essential that we not let the historical revisionists twist the meaning of the First Amendment to serve their purposes. We cannot cede the definition of religious freedom and the narrative of our history revisionists. As Thomas Jefferson so clearly articulated, religious freedom means freedom for people of all faiths and people of none.
Learn more about National Religious Freedom Day on Wikipedia's
website.
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