America's Founding Ideals and Religious Bias Today

Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America, has argued that America's founding ideals still have something to say about religious bias today. As I read him, the task is for people of diverse backgrounds to respect each other's identities, build relationships across communities, and cooperate to serve the common good. I think he is right, and I want to spend this piece working out why, because the argument is easy to nod along to and harder to actually use.

My starting question is a simple one. When the founders wrote about religion, what problem were they trying to solve, and does that problem look anything like ours?

What problem were the founders actually trying to solve?

They were trying to stop neighbors from using government to punish each other for believing differently. That is a less lofty framing than the one we usually hear, but I think it is the accurate one. The colonies and the early states had a long, uncomfortable history of established churches, religious tests for office, and penalties for dissent. Virginia, where much of the early debate played out, had an established Anglican church and had jailed Baptist preachers for preaching without a license.

Out of that experience came three documents worth reading side by side, because each pushes on the problem from a slightly different angle.

Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance (1785). James Madison wrote this petition against a proposed Virginia tax that would have supported teachers of the Christian religion. His central claim was that religion is a matter of conviction and conscience, and that the duty we owe to our Creator is not something the state may direct. He was arguing against a tax that favored Christians, which tells you something: the principle was meant to protect even the majority religion from the corrupting reach of the state.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777, enacted in 1786). The statute says that civil rights have no dependence on religious opinions, any more than opinions in physics or geometry. I find that comparison clarifying. Nobody asks what you believe about geometry before deciding whether you may testify in court or hold a job, and the statute asks us to treat belief about God the same way when it comes to civic standing.

Article VI of the Constitution (ratified 1788). The third clause states that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." This is the founding-era text that most directly bears on bias, because it closes the door on the most obvious form of institutional discrimination: deciding who may serve based on what they believe.

The First Amendment (1791) then added the two clauses most of us know, one barring an establishment of religion and one protecting its free exercise.

Did the founders think religious freedom meant tolerance?

Not quite, and the distinction matters more than it looks. The clearest statement of it comes from George Washington, in an August 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, now usually called the Touro Synagogue letter. Washington wrote that "it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." He went on to say that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," and that all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

Part of this was borrowed. Moses Seixas, writing for the congregation, had addressed Washington as head of a government "which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance," and Washington reused that phrase nearly word for word. The turn away from "toleration" toward "inherent natural rights" was his own. Tolerance is something a powerful group grants. Rights are something a person already has. A Jewish congregation in a small port city was being told by the president that its standing did not depend on anyone's generosity.

I have written before about why surface-level civility falls short of this standard, in a piece on tolerance and recognition. The founding texts, read closely, make the same point more than two centuries earlier. A society can be perfectly polite and still treat some of its members as guests.

How do the founding ideals compare with what we do today?

It helps me to lay the founding principles beside the modern habits that tend to undercut them. The table below is my own synthesis, not a legal analysis or a finding from data. Each principle in the left column comes from a document you can read yourself, while the right column offers illustrative habits, not measured trends.

What I notice in the right column is that very little of it is illegal. Article VI binds the federal government, and the First Amendment restrains government action. Most religious bias today operates in the space those texts do not reach: the workplace conversation that goes quiet when someone mentions their mosque, the neighborhood association that grumbles about a new temple, the family group chat that treats a relative's conversion as a betrayal. The founding ideals give us a standard. They do not give us enforcement, and in everyday life the enforcement has to come from us.

There is one major legal exception in private workplaces. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to accommodate an employee's religious practice unless doing so would impose an "undue hardship," which the Supreme Court in Groff v. DeJoy (2023) read to mean substantial increased costs. That law, not the founding texts, is what governs holy-day scheduling on the job.

Why does Patel's emphasis on relationships matter?

Patel's formulation names three things: respecting identities, building relationships across communities, and cooperating to serve the common good. Interfaith America has built a good deal of its work around the third part, the idea that people of different faiths do best when they are building something together, whether that is a food pantry, a hospital volunteer program, or a campus service project.

In my view, the founders gave us the legal floor and left the relational work undone. That was probably unavoidable. You cannot legislate friendship. But a floor with nothing built on it is a cold place to live, and I think a good share of our current religious tension comes from people having rights alongside each other without ever having a reason to know each other.

There is a practical reason relationships matter here, and it has to do with how bias works. In my view, religious bias thrives on abstraction. It is easy to hold a harsh opinion of "Muslims" or "evangelicals" or "atheists" as a category. It gets much harder once the category has a name, a kitchen table, and a story about why Thursday evenings are complicated for them. This fits the intergroup contact research that began with Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice (1954), which found that sustained, cooperative contact between groups tends to reduce prejudice, though the effect depends on conditions.

What would founding ideals look like at a kitchen table or a meeting?

I do not want this to stay in the realm of constitutional history, so here are some translations I have come to find useful. They are my own reading, and you can disagree with any of them.

Apply the Article VI test informally. When you are evaluating a colleague, a volunteer, a neighbor, or a candidate, ask whether you would be making the same judgment if you did not know their faith. If the answer is no, you have just administered a religious test, even if nobody wrote it down.

Replace tolerance with curiosity. "I tolerate your beliefs" quietly keeps the power with the speaker. "Tell me what that practice means to you" puts the other person in the position of expert on their own life. This is the shift Washington was pointing at.

Protect the minority in the room, including the unpopular one. Madison's argument worked because he insisted on protecting a principle rather than a favored group. If you only defend religious freedom for people you like, you are defending a preference.

Do things together before you discuss things together. Patel's emphasis on cooperation for the common good suggests a sequence. People who have packed boxes side by side at a food bank have a different kind of footing for a hard conversation than people who meet for the first time in a debate.

If you want a structure for the conversation itself, I think a lot about how written ground rules change what people are willing to say, which I explored in a piece on why written dialogue rules outperform assumed norms. Interfaith settings are exactly where assumed norms fail, because everyone arrives with a different sense of what respect looks like.

Isn't the founding record more complicated than this?

Yes, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The founders did not agree with one another, and several of them held views we would now find narrow. Many states kept religious tests for office well after 1788, and some kept them for decades. Article VI constrained the federal government, and the First Amendment was originally understood as limiting Congress, so the states handled religion in their own ways for a long time.

The founders also lived in a country where the practical meaning of "religion" was overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, and the Jewish congregation in Newport was an unusual presence.

There is also a long-running dispute about how far the founders meant to separate religion from public life. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, signed under John Adams and approved by the Senate, contains an article stating that the government of the United States is "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

People cite that line on one side of the argument, and others point out that it appears in a diplomatic document with particular aims and that the founders also made many public references to Providence and prayer. Reasonable people read the whole record differently.

What I take from the complexity is that the ideals outran the founders themselves. That is, in my view, the most hopeful thing about them. Washington's letter to the Newport congregation promised more than the country delivered in 1790, and every generation since has been invited to close the gap. Using the founding ideals against religious bias today is not nostalgia for a time when everyone lived up to them. It is taking seriously a standard that was set higher than the people who set it.

What does this mean for communities, workplaces, and congregations?

The implications of Patel's argument reach well past any single organization. A few observations on where I think this lands for ordinary readers.

For workplaces and schools, the founding framing suggests that the goal is neither erasing religion from view nor privileging one tradition's calendar and customs. It is something closer to the Virginia Statute's standard: people's standing and opportunity should not depend on their religious opinions, and they should be free to hold and practice them. In practice that often means small things, like scheduling flexibility around holy days and noticing whose holidays are treated as the default.

For congregations, it suggests that hospitality across traditions is a civic act as well as a religious one. A church that hosts a mosque's overflow crowd during a holiday, or a synagogue that joins neighbors for a service project, is practicing what Washington described: making equal standing something people experience rather than something they read about.

For civic groups and neighborhoods, it suggests the Article VI instinct should extend beyond government. Planning boards, school committees, and volunteer organizations are the places where informal religious tests tend to creep in, and the informal Article VI test described above applies there as much as anywhere.

For individuals, it suggests starting small. I have come to think that the most effective response to religious bias is not a statement but a relationship, and that the founders' great unfinished project is one each of us can advance by learning one neighbor's story well enough to retell it accurately.

What is the open question?

I keep returning to a tension this argument exposes. The founding ideals protect our right to believe differently, and they also assume we will live next to each other peacefully while doing so. Rights alone do not produce that peacefulness. Something else has to, whether we call it civic friendship, interfaith cooperation, or just good neighborliness.

If Washington was right that the government gives bigotry no sanction, then the remaining work belongs to the rest of us. What would it look like if each of us treated our own corner of the country, a street, a break room, a school board, as the place where that promise either holds or doesn't?

Last updated: 2026-10-28

Frequently Asked Questions

What do America's founding documents say about religious freedom?

Article VI, clause 3 of the Constitution bars religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment prohibits an establishment of religion and protects its free exercise. Earlier, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (enacted 1786) held that civil rights do not depend on religious opinions.

What did George Washington say to the Touro Synagogue in Newport?

In an August 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Washington wrote that the government of the United States gives "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," and that all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. He also moved the discussion from toleration to inherent natural rights.

Does the First Amendment stop private religious bias?

No. The First Amendment restrains government action, not private individuals. Much religious bias in workplaces, neighborhoods, and families falls outside its reach, which is why relationships, norms, and personal habits matter alongside law.

What is Eboo Patel's approach to countering religious bias?

Patel, president of Interfaith America, emphasizes that people of diverse backgrounds should respect each other's identities, build relationships across communities, and cooperate to serve the common good.

How can ordinary people apply founding ideals to religious bias?

One practical step is an informal Article VI test: ask whether you would judge a person differently if you did not know their faith. Others include replacing tolerance with curiosity and working alongside people of other traditions on shared projects.