The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience

Challenging decades of scholarship and Supreme Court jurisprudence, newly discovered historical documents reveal that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause was meant to protect only the freedom to worship, not broader rights of conscience.

The First Amendment proclaims that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This language has been taken to provide sweeping constitutional protection for the freedom of belief and the freedom to act on one's beliefs, underpinning conscience-based claims by people seeking to avoid military service, mandatory schooling for their children, or being required to work on the Sabbath. Recently, religious traditionalists have appealed to the Free Exercise Clause to seek exemptions from laws connected with abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage.

In The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience, Donald Drakeman demonstrates that such readings of the First Amendment are dramatically overbroad. Numerous newly available sources clearly show that when the Bill of Rights was ratified, Americans understood "free exercise of religion" as a well-established term of art referring solely to the ability to hold public worship services. That meaning remained unchanged well into the twentieth century. Time and again, when believers asked the courts for conscience-based exemptions from statutes, judges turned them down, telling them to address the legislature instead. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the Supreme Court radically reimagined the Free Exercise Clause, granting religious exemptions from statutory duties for the first time in American history.

As a result, today's Free Exercise Clause bears little resemblance to that of the framers and the American tradition of religious liberty. Given the current Supreme Court's heavy emphasis on original meaning and tradition when interpreting the Constitution, Drakeman's discovery could have significant implications for the future of conscience-based exemptions and the First Amendment itself.