American founding fathers insisted that the U.S. would be home to religious liberty. Principles and practices of faith were not to be legislated or controlled by the state. The people would be free to preserve their religious heritage or to choose their own beliefs.
The framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights looked to their faith for guiding principles, but government of, by, and for the people meant refusing to establish or allow a unitary state-sanctioned religion or cede responsibility for public policy to religious leaders.
Religious liberty, instead of divorcing the founders from their faith, married them to well-examined faith. The precepts embraced by their ancestors could be considered openly in the light of their own day. Assumptions could be tested, practices could be adapted.
In the face of familial, cultural, religious, and personal pressure, bucking tradition has never been a simple exercise. Nevertheless, freely choosing one’s beliefs — often to the chagrin of peers and family members — has anchored the American faith experience from the beginning. From Quakers who bucked the theocratic leaders of their homelands centuries ago to Roman Catholics who challenge their leaders or migrate to the Episcopal Church to cradle Methodists who embrace nondenominational Pentacostal Christianity, our faith is a dynamic journey, not a destination.
We are a country which celebrates its beliefs as an exercise of soul-searching and personal conscience, not rote submission to external authority. Professing the faith of our forefathers often includes reverence for tradition borne of testing the alternatives, falling away, and prodigal return to the fold.
Individually, each of us knows what is true and what works because we have tested the alternatives. Some of us find our core beliefs in the context of submitting to the authority of scripture or organized religion, minimizing our sense of free choice. A glance at our neighborhoods, schools, cities, and workplaces reminds us, though, that the state has not limited the options from which we choose our values, scriptures or religious authorities.
Even when it seems our beliefs have chosen us, each of us is resonsible for the first step — the choice — to adopt our values, open our scriptures, cross the threshhold of our house of worship.