Is religious liberty important today? | Mark Rienzi & Montse Alvarado | Constitutional Conversations

0:00 can you explain in kind of layman’s terms what the what the concept of religious liberty is perhaps today and how that may have shifted over time and maybe think from from the founding to now what kinds of evolution do you see in that understanding and how is that manifested itself in law and perhaps in

0:20 culture sure so if you think about the founding right people coming to America are leaving a Europe in which people are killing each other over religious differences right whether the Catholics are in charge in one country the Protestants in charge in another country the truth is they’re all killing each other because they’re all convinced they’ve got absolute religious truth straight from God and that people

0:41 shouldn’t be allowed to live out their lives the other way and that they should use the government to punish them the generation that comes over and founds the United States sometimes they commit the same sin sometimes they say well religious liberty for me and not for you but over time we see America grow in its understanding of religious freedom to the idea that it shouldn’t be the

1:01 government that answers these questions of of who God is or what does God require of us that’s not something that the government should decide that’s something that individual people and family and civic institutions should decide so that religious liberty is really the way a bunch of very different people which is what we have in the United States a bunch of very different people with very different beliefs can live together in peace because we say

1:22 there are certain subjects that the government doesn’t get to decide and certainly one of them is who God is or what God is or what God thinks or what God requires of us that’s not something anybody can resolve at the ballot box that’s something people and their children and their families need to decide for themselves and I would add bait on that trend of what has changed how has it shifted it’s two different

1:43 things one is misunderstanding freedom of religion is simply freedom of worship it’s not just that it’s more than that freedom of religion has to do with what you think but also what you do not what you do inside the walls of your church but in your community and the second piece of that is no one questioned before that faith fueled works that you

2:04 were compelled by your faith to do good things to work at the soup kitchen to help in adoption in foster care to work in a school and teach and volunteer no one questioned that those things were fueled by the religious impulse by a duty to God and that’s definitely in question now