Free Exercise: America's Story of Religious Liberty

BROOKHISER: America was founded on a revolutionary ideal.

COLE: To me, freedom of religion is everything.

GEORGE: 'Toleration is insufficient.

We need equal liberty.'

HEFLAND: Concern about religious liberty is as old as America itself.

RABBI SAPERSTEIN: What happens when those freedoms are taken away from us?

BROOKHISER: This is the story of the greatest experiment in religious liberty the world has ever seen.

NARRATOR: "Free Exercise" coming up next.

(match strike) BROOKHISER: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh.

We, the people of the United States, can live out our faiths freely because of a guarantee enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

But it wasn't always this way.

Long before there was a United States, Quakers seeking freedom in New Amsterdam instead suffer the lash.

But fellow colonists peaceably assemble and lodge the first written protest against persecution in America.

YOUNG: They were willing to stand up and say, "It's our right to be able to accommodate their rights" BROOKHISER: In Virginia, Baptist preachers are beaten, horsewhipped, and sent to jail.

But a founding father follows his conscience, wielding his pen against the injustice.

GEORGE: James Madison says, "No, toleration is insufficient.

We need equal liberty."

BROOKHISER: In April 1789, George Washington comes here to St. Paul's Chapel to pray after his first inauguration just down the street.

Months later, James Madison's words, "Free Exercise," are carved into the Bill of Rights.

But what do those words really mean?

CHOIR: Push that savior up.

Lift the savior up.

BROOKHISER: In Black Churches, it meant freedom to worship...

PREACHER: We ask the Lord... BROOKHISER: But also freedom from slavery: faith lighting the way along the Underground Railroad.

DICKERSON: Faith and freedom.

Slaves could not be fully a Christian in slavery.

BROOKHISER: Catholic immigrants, hoping to exercise their beliefs and educate their children in religious schools, instead meet venom and violence.

ARCHBISHOP DOLAN: The arrival of the Irish immigrant really poured kerosene on the anti-Catholicism.

BROOKHISER: Sergeant, good to see you.

SERGEANT HEFT: By the end of the rioting, the church was really a burnt shell.

BROOKHISER: So both sides are shooting to kill?

SERGEANT HEFT: Absolutely.

BROOKHISER: Mormons are chased from state to state, finally trekking west into Utah to live and worship in peace.

OAKS: The governor said, "Drive out these obnoxious Mormons.

And if they can't be driven out, exterminate them."

BROOKHISER: Jews in the Civil War South, wrongly tainted as smugglers, are expelled by General Grant from his department, but when the news reaches Washington, President Lincoln revokes the order.

NADELL: There's intimidation about being publicly seen as a Jew.

BROOKHISER: America was founded on a revolutionary ideal.

RIENZI: We all are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.

Those rights come before government, right.

That people form governments in order to protect the rights.

BROOKHISER: The founders ordained and established a government "of the people,' that would protect a fundamental blessing, religious liberty.

COLE: To me, freedom of religion is absolutely everything.

HELFAND: And I want to know that those exercises of religion are protected.

RABBI SAPERSTEIN: We take our freedoms for granted.

What happens when those freedoms are diminished or taken away from us?

UDDIN: The U.S. stands apart from many places around the world despite all of our challenges, still offering the most robust protections for religious freedom.

AMAR: Religious liberty will not survive and thrive unless it lives in the hearts and minds of the American people.

BROOKHISER: This is the story of the greatest experiment in religious liberty the world has ever seen.

BROOKHISER: The early 1600s is marked by extreme religious violence.

SOLDIER: Fire!

BROOKHISER: The Protestant Reformation is raging on the European Continent.

England is fighting a bloody Civil War.

Many new religious groups emerge from this protest movement, and waves of believers set sail across the Atlantic, headed to a New World where they can worship as they see fit.

Massachusetts is founded by Puritans, Virginia by Anglicans, and in the middle is New Netherland, settled by members of the Dutch Reformed church.

Among the religious refugees hoping to settle in North America is the English sect of Quakers.

HELFAND: I think concern about religious liberty is as old as America itself.

People wondering and worrying whether or not there are various ways in which they practice and exercise religion, would they be accepted in this new country?

BROOKHISER: One of the most momentous steps was taken here in Flushing... now a neighborhood in New York City, in the 1650s, a village in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.

It was about Quakers and the brave townspeople who stood up for them.

Who are the Quakers, and, and where do they come from?

WEIMER: Quakers arise in the 1640s in England in the midst of the English civil wars.

And like many radical Puritans, they are critical of the Church of England.

People want a Christianity that is more attuned to the needs and, desires, and experiences of ordinary people.

And I think they're drawn to this message that you don't need priests to mediate for you.

No liturgy, no sacraments, no ordination, simply listening to Christ within.

Quakers, in their prayer meetings, they sometimes had such intense experiences that they would start to tremble or shake, and this is where they get their name, the name Quakers.

BROOKHISER: And they want to tell this to everybody.

WEIMER: They do.

They think most other Christians are hypocrites and have lost the way, and so they want to bring people into the Quaker family.

BROOKHISER: In 1657, the first Quakers arrive in New Netherland and immediately challenge the established customs of its Dutch Reformed Church.

One Quaker, a man named Robert Hodgson, begins holding religious meetings out in Flushing, then a small village on Long Island.

WEIMER: They go right into the public street, and they start preaching that people need to repent, and the fire of God's wrath is upon them.

They go into church meetings and break bottles as a sign of people's brokenness.

They want to perform in such a way that people will pay attention.

BROOKHISER: So, would Quaker dissenters be treated any differently in their new home than they had been back in the Netherlands?

This is Amsterdam.

In the 1600s, a city of canals, of commerce, and of greater religious toleration than any place in Europe.

But what did religious toleration mean for believers here?

And what would it mean for believers in New Amsterdam?

To find out more, I'm cruising the Dutch canals with Sophie van Bijsterveld, a scholar of Dutch law and religion.

BIJSTERVELD: In the early days of the Republic, which was a Protestant Republic, Dutch reformed Republic, we see also that there were also other Protestant dissenters and through trade and migration, other believers also entered the country and stayed here to live.

BROOKHISER: And were, were permitted and even encouraged.

BIJSTERVELD: The Dutch state is very unique in the fact that very early on already had an article that is regarded as one of the first expressions of modern religious liberty.

Of course, one must remember that it was, as we say today, not a liberty to publicly express one's religion or to act according to one's religion.

BROOKHISER: So it was a private liberty.

BIJSTERVELD: Yes.

COLE: Many of the people who left England for the Netherlands looking for a place where they could freely exercise their faith found that even in the Netherlands, they couldn't have their religious beliefs respected or protected, and so took the arduous journey across the ocean to try to find an unconquered land where they could practice their beliefs.

We need to keep in mind how courageous that was.

BROOKHISER: Back in New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, the Director-Governor of the colony, allows his subjects to worship as they will in private, but he will not tolerate Quakers.

When Stuyvesant hears of Robert Hodgson proselytizing out in Flushing, he has the Quaker arrested, chained to a cart, dragged 15 miles, and thrown in the dungeon at Fort Amsterdam, an imposing bastion similar in design to Fort de la Pre in France.

Confined in a fortress, Hodgson is hanged from the ceiling and thrashed "until his flesh is cut into pieces."

Two days later, he's propped up and whipped again.

News travels throughout the colony, and all in New Netherland quickly learn of Quaker torture at the hands of Stuyvesant.

WEIMER: Stuyvesant is in a difficult situation.

Do you want a martyr on your hands?

Do you really want a reputation for being a persecutor?

And so Stuyvesant banishes him.

BROOKHISER: Almost 400 years later, I'm on the very same streets that Peter Stuyvesant once walked, meeting up with Tabetha Garman, a Stuyvesant scholar.

GARMAN: And we wanna get to... BROOKHISER: We wanna get to... New Netherland was established as a business venture.

Ensuring commercial prosperity and enforcing religious orthodoxy was in the hands of Governor Stuyvesant.

Alright.

GARMAN: Thank you.

BROOKHISER: Here you go.

So, what does Peter Stuyvesant think about indulging?

GARMAN: He would not have been a fan.

He was a big believer in legislating morality, and in his view, anything where you could lose control would've been frowned upon.

So organizing laws, making everyone behave in an upright, righteous, Dutch Reformed way.

BROOKHISER: This is what Stuyvesant wants, and how do Quakers fit into this plan?

GARMAN: Oh, they don't.

The Quakers would be the direct opposite of everything Stuyvesant wanted.

WEIMER: So then he puts forward a law against hosting Quakers and Quaker meetings.

BROOKHISER: If caught, colonists could be fined, imprisoned, or even banished.

WEIMER: And almost no one objects, except for the inhabitants of Flushing.

BROOKHISER: For the people of Flushing, most of whom are not Quakers, Stuyvesant's crackdown on the Quakers is more than their conscience can bear.

The men of Flushing assemble, draft an official letter of protest, a Remonstrance, and send it to the Governor.

Here at Albany, in the archives of the state of New York, this remarkable first step toward religious liberty is preserved.

RULLER: Here is the Flushing Remonstrance.

BROOKHISER: The Flushing Remonstrance was written on December 27th, 1657.

In it, the men of Flushing appeal to Stuyvesant to cease his brutal persecution of Quakers.

You told us to do this, but we can't.

GARMAN: Right.

BROOKHISER: And here's why.

GARMAN: Exactly it.

We can't.

ACTOR: You have commanded that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people.

We cannot condemn them in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them.

McCONNELL: The Flushing Remonstrance is a beautiful and eloquent early statement of religious freedom principles.

HECHT: People who were not Quakers, who were not necessarily religious at all, recognized the danger of religious oppression, of the loss of religious liberty.

YOUNG: I think it's emblematic of something that we see throughout our history.

And that is that there are opportunities that each of us, as a fellow citizen, will have to either be able to stand up for other people with whom we strongly disagree or not.

WEIMER: "The worst thing we can do," these remonstrators say, "is persecute.

That's the worst possible thing we can do."

GARMAN: It's showing that difference in thinking that started emerging in the American colonies over the way people had been thinking for centuries.

BROOKHISER: They're making different arguments to Stuyvesant, but the big one is uh, is the Golden Rule.

GARMAN: Mmm-hmm.

ACTOR: Our desire is to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us, for our Saviour sayeth this is the law and the prophets.

YOUNG: They were willing to stand up and say, "It's our right to be able to accommodate their rights," even when they knew that the likely outcome was going to be bleak, and it was.

BROOKHISER: 31 men sign the Flushing Remonstrance.

One of them is the Flushing town clerk, Edward Hart.

And I love these, uh, you know, the signatures here, and some of them, these little marks.

GARMAN: They couldn't write, so they made their mark, and then Edward Hart carefully wrote out their name so that it would be recorded that they had registered a complaint.

BROOKHISER: Immediately after it is delivered to Stuyvesant, Edward Hart, and his fellow protestors are rounded up and thrown into the dungeon.

GARMAN: He's taking a horrible chance, Edward Hart is.

Because everyone would've been very aware of Stuyvesant's tendency to pick a single person, of Stuyvesant's kind of brutality that he had exhibited.

They certainly would've known what he had done to the Quaker Hodgson.

BROOKHISER: Under pressure, Edward Hart recants, denying the Remonstrance he had written, and gains his release.

But what happens when news of Stuyvesant's iron fist travels back to Holland?

BIJSTERVELD: It was actually in this room that the board of directors gave the order to build the Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan.

BROOKHISER: So they're making decisions here for things that happen across the Atlantic Ocean?

BIJSTERVELD: Absolutely, absolutely.

BROOKHISER: The Dutch West India Company needs settlers to ensure its foothold in America, and in a thorough rebuke, they command Stuyvesant to tolerate not just Quakers but other religious minorities as well.

Then, in 1664, an English fleet arrives to seize the colony.

Stuyvesant surrenders Manhattan without a fight.

New Netherland becomes New York, and his autocratic rule is over.

This park shows the final result of the New Netherlands repression of Quakers.

The statue of Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor, looks at a Quaker meeting house.

A degree of religious freedom has been granted on pragmatic grounds.

It wouldn't be the last time.

HELFAND: We all have things that are core to who we are, and that if they were to come under threat, it would be devastating.

The history of religious persecution, you know, long before the United States existed, when there was no protection of religious exercise.

I mean, it's hard to look at that history and say, "Nah, this isn't something we really need to protect anymore."

CONGREGATION: Shall we gather at the river Where bright angels feet have trod?

BROOKHISER: Of all the dissenting religions that emerge during the Protestant Reformation and settle in the American colonies, Baptists are among the most persecuted.

CONGREGATION: Yes, we'll gather at the river That beautiful... BROOKHISER: Baptists believe in a radical idea: that only consenting adults who personally accept Jesus Christ as their savior could be baptized.

Most of the original thirteen colonies were established with religious underpinnings.

By the 1700s, Baptists have moved into Virginia, where the Church of England dominates and where clashes begin.

Baptists refuse to pay the mandatory church tax, ministers preach without licenses.

By the time of the American Revolution, half the Baptist preachers in Virginia have been arrested.

HAMBURGER: Who would've thought baptism is interesting as a political matter but it is.

Baptism is a sign of genuine freedom and religious liberty.

It's a theological doctrine with profound implications for our freedom.

And this is why Baptists become leaders in the movement for religious liberty.

CONGREGATION: That flows from the throne of God.

BROOKHISER: To learn about this evangelical faith in colonial America, I'm with Professor Thomas Kidd, who is preparing seminarians for the ministry.

KIDD: In colonial revolutionary America, the Baptists are just terribly persecuted.

The Baptists are a sort of radical edge of the reformation impulse to test all of tradition by the Bible.

Right, and so if you don't see something explicitly in the Bible, then you might be willing to set aside 1,200 years of church tradition, but it makes them extreme outliers.

HAMBURGER: They meet in their small, plain, unadorned houses of worship, sometimes even in the open air.

Their ministers are largely unlearned.

They don't know Greek or Latin.

KIDD: They preach in public.

They go and baptize people in public and ponds and rivers and so forth.

And if they won't stop preaching, then they get beat up, horsewhipped, and sent to jail.

BROOKHISER: This is Culpeper County, Virginia.

250 years ago, Baptist ministers were imprisoned here for defying the colonies' Anglican establishment.

KIDD: In one case, James Ireland, who was a Baptist convert and, and preacher, got arrested for illegal preaching by Anglican authorities.

But his followers were trailed after him and came to the jail to, to hear him.

He had an open window to the outside.

And so, he was preaching through the cell grate.

HAMBURGER: Anglicans who disapprove throw stink bombs in.

They, they take hot peppers and, light them up and throw those into the jail.

KIDD: But he just kept on speaking.

It's quite a remarkable moment of kind of endurance in the face of really practical kinds of persecution.

BROOKHISER: When one of them preached the Gospel of his dear redeemer out his cell window, someone stood on a bench and made water in his face.

This persecution would lead directly to the First Amendment.

A half-day on horseback from the Culpeper jail is Montpelier, the home of James Madison.

Madison is the son of a wealthy planter and a member of the Anglican Church, a denomination supported by a tax on citizens.

Anglicans in Virginia have their churches and follow established rules and worship traditions.

They also disdain the Baptist dissenters.

But it's James Madison who will one day be a strong champion for the Baptists and set America on its path to a constitutional guarantee of religious liberty.

It was common for a wealthy Virginian to go to the College of William and Mary in the capital city of Williamsburg.

But Madison instead attends a school in the north that would broaden his philosophical horizons and challenge his Virginia ways.

This building was Princeton when James Madison came here?

GEORGE: That's right.

This is Nassau Hall.

It was Princeton University.

BROOKHISER: Who was running Princeton, and what sort of a school was it?

GEORGE: It was run by Presbyterians, Presbyterian ministers, and it was a Presbyterian university.

John Witherspoon was the leading figure and, of course, was Madison's principal mentor and intellectual influence.

So he's right up here.

BROOKHISER: Okay.

And what, what was Witherspoon believing and teaching?

GEORGE: Well, of course, Witherspoon was friendly to Enlightenment ideas, but he saw no contradiction between his Christian faith and the Enlightenment ideas that he came to champion.

BROOKHISER: So, what does Madison take from this back to Virginia?

GEORGE: Madison takes back from Princeton and from Witherspoon to Virginia the belief that religious questions are profoundly important.

Each of us has an obligation to God to wrestle with those questions and to decide what we believe what we think is true.

But he also takes back the belief that freedom of religion is critically important because God does not want to be worshiped under compulsion.

What faith really is, is the free ascent of the intellect and will to the truths of religion, in their view, the Christian religion.

So Madison is a religious freedom advocate from the moment he walks out the door here.

And he takes that back to Virginia, where not everyone agrees.

BROOKHISER: Baptists are considered troublemakers by Virginia's elite because they preach to the poor and uneducated and to slaves.

But when Madison returns home, thousands of converts, Black and White, are flocking to the faith.

KIDD: The Baptists were growing fast in the mid-1700s.

And I think that caused some concern among state authorities and church authorities that the Baptists were becoming almost a kind of insurgent movement.

And, of course, Baptists and other dissenters didn't like paying taxes to support churches that they didn't attend.

BROOKHISER: I've come to James Madison's Montpelier to visit scholar Jay Cost, who has written about James Madison's transformation from quiet Virginia planter to path-breaking politician.

COST: Living around Baptists and seeing the persecution actually hit home for Madison.

He appreciated that this was bad for his community.

BROOKHISER: So what is he writing about religious liberty?

COST: Well, he has a lot to say about religious liberty from a very, very young age, in fact.

"Pride, ignorance, and knavery among the priesthood and vice and wickedness among the laity.

That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some.

BROOKHISER: So, that's the Baptists who are...

COST: That's the Baptists being persecuted and him coming back and seeing, maybe with fresh eyes, exactly, exactly what's going on.

BROOKHISER: In 1776, just weeks before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, James Madison is in Williamsburg.

The colonies are about to become sovereign states, and Madison is launching his political career as a young delegate to the convention, drafting a "Declaration of Rights for an Independent Virginia."

Enlightenment ideals call for the "fullest toleration" of religion, but Madison makes a crucial change in the document.

GEORGE: Madison says, "No, toleration is not the right approach, it's insufficient.

We need more than toleration in Virginia.

BROOKHISER: The province of Maryland was founded in 1632 as a haven for English Catholics fleeing persecution.

Not long after their arrival, the provincial assembly passes the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, which is the first known use in America of the term "the free exercise" of religion.

It lasted only 40 years before it was undone by hostile Protestants.

In Williamsburg, the convention adopts Madison's crucial phrase.

"Free Exercise" and the words are fixed in print for all Virginians to read.

For the first time, religious liberty is recognized as a basic and inherent, human right.

Weeks later, the colonies declare their independence from Great Britain, and a war of revolution must be won.

Winning would depend on political and military leaders who could mobilize Americans of many faiths, uniting them in one patriotic cause.

KIDD: A lot of Baptists thought, why should we support these people who have very recently been persecuting us for our faith?

BROOKHISER: George Washington embraced the religious diversity of his brand-new struggling army.

He needed men to fight, and he especially needed the backing of France, a Catholic country, to help win independence from Britain.

HAMBURGER: In the Revolution, Baptist, perhaps in a higher percentage than any other religious group, sent men into battle.

KIDD: They used the war, I think, to amplify their calls for religious liberty because they need everyone on board with the, the patriot cause.

Washington is a real leader, I think, on the practical implementation of religious liberty in the Continental Army in particular.

And he's always very concerned about reaching out to Baptists and Jews and Catholics, that they were included in the new nation.

BROOKHISER: In 1785, with the war won and independence achieved, Madison is back at his desk arguing to end the Anglican Church's monopoly in Virginia.

COST: This is really Madison's first, great public essay the, "Memorial and Remonstrance on Religious Liberty."

"Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish religious discord by proscribing all difference in religious opinion.

BROOKHISER: In 1786, the Virginia legislature passes the Statute for Religious Freedom, which disestablishes the Anglican Church and grants religious freedom to people of all faiths.

The following year, a national constitution is being written.

Would this document extend religious liberty to all citizens of the new nation?

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention came to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to discuss the structure of government.

They didn't even consider adding a bill of rights until the last week.

Exhausted after months of haggling, the delegates debate one final question: should the Constitution list the basic rights that the government could not violate?

James Madison and his political rival George Mason were worlds apart on the issue.

AMAR: Toward the end of the Philadelphia Convention, George Mason says, "Listen, we should have a bill of rights," And Madison basically opposes Mason in Philadelphia, as do most of the other delegates.

This turns out to be a massive mistake.

That's what it is all about.

Independent state constitutions.

And most of these state constitutions have bills of rights.

And so the absence of a federal bill of rights is obvious to every farmer, every shopkeeper, on day one.

They look at it, and they say, "Dudes, you forgot the rights."

KIDD: The Constitution uses the wonderful phrase, "Free exercise of religion."

What do you think Baptists in the 1780s and nineties... What do you think free exercise of religion means to them?

STUDENT: Um, I think, primarily, they're wanting the ability to gather together and preach the gospel as they understand it and baptize as they understand it.

Not just within the four walls of their church but also out in the public square.

To be publicly religious and to have no fear of reprisal or, persecution or censure.

BROOKHISER: Madison returns home and campaigns for a seat in the new national government, where it's hoped the fight for a Bill of Rights will resume.

To get elected, he needs the backing of a key voting bloc in his district: the Baptists.

HAMBURGER: Madison is running for the House of Representatives.

And it's not clear he's going win.

AMAR: Now politicians hate to admit that they've made mistakes.

And they especially hate to admit that they've made mistakes when they've made mistakes.

But Madison carefully pivots.

McCONNELL: The longstanding story is that he was visited by a Baptist Evangelist, who said, "Look, if you'll support the Bill of Rights, we'll support you."

BROOKHISER: Madison cuts a deal with the Baptists, one of the largest religious groups in his district, and is elected to the first Congress.

AMAR: And he's true to his word.

And because he's given his word, he pushes very hard for a bill of rights.

BROOKHISER: He kept his promise to the Baptists.

As a result of his efforts, the first amendment to the Constitution declares, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." HAMBURGER: America's different.

Politically, in America, it becomes possible for religious minorities to see themselves as part of a majority seeking equality.

McCONNELL: There are a lot of people in America today who think that the separation of church and state means that churches and religious people need to stay out of politics; that politics is supposed to be something secular.

Well, if the Baptists had stayed out of politics, we wouldn't have a Bill of Rights.

PARTICIPANT: Whoo!

SINGER: For he is worthy to be praised HOST: Music to help you connect with God.

HOST 2: Family.

SINGER: Oh, Jesus.

HOST 3: God is on the move.

I hope you feel that in your life today.

HOST 4: When you sing to him... PASTOR: We come this day, Lord God, for the fire within us to be rekindled.

BROOKHISER: Billboards, radio broadcasts, TV channels.

All these recall the explosion of evangelical Protestantism in the Second Great Awakening of early 19th century America.

CHOIR: Lift the Savior up Lift the Savior up Still, he speaks from eternity BROOKHISER: The Second Great Awakening ushered in a wave of enthusiastic religious gatherings and people inspired to reform Protestant churches and infuse them with a new spirit.

PASTOR: Come on y'all, we're going to preach the sermon together.

And when we think about the great responsibility that God has placed, God still has people knocking on the door and needing us to stand up to make a difference in his name.

Let me get an "Amen!"

CHOIR: Lift the Savior up.

Lift the Savior up.

Still, he speaks from eternity.

BROOKHISER: Many at the time hope for Christ's imminent return.

To prepare, society must be cleansed of its evils.

And nothing is a worse evil than America's centuries-long history of slavery.

RIVERS: Slaves were resistant to Christianity, but two things happen, one, there is, this important focus on racial justice.

PASTOR: And where does our help come from?

RIVERS: But there's also a difference in style, that the gospel is being presented in a much more emotional, much more ecstatic form, which Africans responded to.

PASTOR: Even in my pain, I will bless the Lord at all times, even on a bad day!

Even on a bad day.

BROOKHISER: The Second Great Awakening gathers strength, particularly in northern cities like Philadelphia, where many free Blacks attend White churches and hear the message of salvation.

But while salvation is preached from the pulpit, segregation is practiced in the pew, leading Richard Allen, a man born into slavery, to break away and form the first all-Black denomination in America.

BROOKHISER: So this is a statue of Richard Allen.

RIVERS: And he is such a monumental figure.

There he is, welcoming the masses into salvation.

Richard Allen was born a slave.

He was wakened, that is, became a Christian while still a slave.

The church actually starts meeting in an old blacksmith's shop.

BROOKHISER: Oh wow.

RIVERS: And then becomes this amazing edifice.

BROOKHISER: Why was it so important to Richard Allen to have an independent African church?

RIVERS: It was really important to Richard Allen because they weren't being treated with respect and dignity.

DICKERSON: Allen, after purchasing his freedom in 1783, became a traveling Methodist exhorter where he went around and he spoke mostly to White audiences at St. George's Methodist Church.

But he discovered that the growing Black population had been largely neglected.

And so he gained permission to preach early in the morning, at 5:00 AM, at St. George's Church to the African Americans.

RIVERS: The style of Methodist preaching was extemporaneous.

People spoke from the heart.

And this, he felt, was very powerful and, in fact, proved very effective in reaching out to newly freed slaves.

DICKERSON: His preaching gained him much popularity there, and the numbers of Blacks who were coming to St. George's started to swell.

And that precipitated a very ugly incident.

RIVERS: St. George's asks freed slaves now to sit in a balcony.

One of the members is pulled off of his knees in the middle of prayer, and all of these freed Africans walk out of the church and never return.

BROOKHISER: So they're being treated as second-class Christians.

RIVERS: They're being treated as, at best, second-class Christians.

DICKERSON: And upon being disrespected and manhandled at St. George's, they marched out.

Allen became the first Black bishop in the Atlantic world of a orthodox Protestant denomination.

CHOIR: Lord, he... Is worthy to be praised.

BROOKHISER: From five churches in 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal church grows over the next three decades to 300 churches, with nearly 200 preachers and more than 17,000 members.

CHOIR: Lift him up... Lift our savior... PASTOR: As we prepare to depart, let us remember that we are departing that we might serve.

CHOIR: He is worthy to be praised BROOKHISER: There is a long tradition of Black ministers blending faith and social activism going all the way back to the period of slavery.

KITT: Steal away... Steal away... BROOKHISER: Preachers from many Black denominations, AME, AME Zion, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, and others spread abolitionist messages, fuel slave rebellions, and help people to escape on the Underground Railroad.

KITT: Steal away home... BROOKHISER: To enslaved Americans, the hymns taught a liberating lesson: that worshiping Jesus brought them closer to freedom.

KITT: ...To stay here.

DICKERSON: Slaves and former slaves like Richard Allen perceive that a person could not be fully a Christian, one could not fully realize his or her Christian possibilities in slavery.

This linkage between faith and liberty, faith and freedom, was foundational, that one required the other.

ANDERSON: Deep River, My home is over Jordan.

BROOKHISER: Many conductors on the Underground Railroad are formerly enslaved Blacks, like Harriet Tubman.

But the railroad is a genuinely interracial coalition of people motivated by abolitionist conviction and religious faith.

ANDERSON: I want to cross over into campground.

BROOKHISER: I'm on the Ohio River, heading towards the house of John Rankin.

Rankin was a White Presbyterian minister who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Over the decades, 2,000 men and women seeking their freedom passed through his house.

John Rankin built this home high on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River and dedicated his life to helping enslaved people cross the border from Kentucky into Ohio, slavery to freedom.

In one remarkable episode, dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her best-selling "Uncle Tom's Cabin," escaping slave Eliza Harris crosses the river in the dead of winter, leaping over dangerous ice floes to reach the safety of the Rankin House.

Hi there.

CAMPBELL: Hi Rick.

BROOKHISER: Was John Rankin anti-slavery all his life?

CAMPBELL: Yes, very much.

That's the way he was raised.

Rankin was a Tennessean by birth, he and his wife Jean made the decision that they could not raise their children in a state that would allow slavery.

Rankin believed you could not own another human being, and he really spent a lifetime trying to put an end to the issue of slavery.

BROOKHISER: And how did fugitives know that?

CAMPBELL: Slaves in Kentucky learned through the grapevine that if you made it in your escape to the Ohio River around Ripley, Ohio, they were told, "Look for the house on the hill and the light in the window."

That that was a safe house.

BROOKHISER: In this window?

CAMPBELL: Yes.

This window, this light.

BROOKHISER: And you can see this from the river, CAMPBELL: You absolutely can.

Remember, in those times, even a candle in this window up on this hill would shine across the Ohio River.

BROOKHISER: The largest recorded escape attempt by enslaved people in America occurred in 1848, when 77 souls fled Washington, D.C., aboard a Chesapeake Bay Schooner bound for New Jersey.

The mass exodus was secretly aided and abetted by a network of Black churches, according to Underground Railroad expert Dr. Cheryl LaRoche.

LaROCHE: These 77 people came from across Washington.

Many of them came out of, or were members of, the Black churches, or their ministers were also supporting them, so in order to really understand the story of the Underground Railroad and religion, we need to move into town.

We need to start to look at the churches.

We need to look at where they are and how these churches relate to the Underground Railroad.

BROOKHISER: Great.

LaROCHE: Sounds like good?

BROOKHISER: Let's go.

LaROCHE: All right.

DICKERSON: These churches were known to African Americans and to Whites as places to where slaves could go.

LaROCHE: We're coming up on Asbury United Methodist Church.

This congregation has occupied this same plot of land for 186 years.

When you look at these AME churches, the same leaders who formed the church also formed the schools.

BROOKHISER: How do they get around the literacy prohibition?

LaROCHE: They get around the literacy prohibition because they want to learn to read the Bible.

And, you know, the Christianizing of the soul, the Bible is important.

BROOKHISER: So when you can read the Bible, you can read anything.

LaROCHE: Once you can read, you can read anything.

BROOKHISER: It was illegal for most enslaved Americans to read or write, but Frederick Douglas, who would become a leader in the abolitionist movement after his escape to the North, organized a makeshift church where he taught other slaves to read.

In 'Sabbath Schools' and 'praise houses,' those held in bondage learned that religious salvation and emancipation were really one and the same.

LaROCHE: We know that freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of knowledge, and freedom of the body are all incorporated into this idea of escape from slavery.

BROOKHISER: On April 15th, 1848, a message must reach the 77 souls planning their escape on the Pearl.

SINGER: Swing low, sweet chariot... BROOKHISER: Perhaps a now-famous spiritual is sung that day, a song that carries through the capital a secret message: that the Pearl is rigged and ready, and she sails tonight for a new home.

GROUP: Coming for to carry me home.

BROOKHISER: The Pearl headed down the Potomac River in the dead of night.

The 77 fugitives aboard had every hope of reaching safe harbor in the north, where churches on the Underground Railroad like Mother Bethel AME were waiting to give shelter.

DICKERSON: It was well-known among African Americans.

If you could make it to Philadelphia and you could make it to Bethel Church, you would be okay.

GROUP: Steal away, BROOKHISER: The Pearl continues its overnight journey, but the wind is against it, and the schooner is forced to anchor at Point Lookout, Maryland, where the Potomac River empties into Chesapeake Bay.

When Washingtonians awake and realize their servants are gone, they form a posse, board a powerful steamboat, rush downriver, and apprehend the runaways.

Many of the escapees must face their worst fears when, as punishment, they are sold by slave traders into the Deep South.

KITT: I ain't got long To stay here.

DICKERSON: Exactly how many slaves it facilitated in getting to their freedom, we don't know.

Perhaps we'll never know.

That's not something that was recorded for obvious reasons.

RIVERS: From that point on Christianity plays such an important role in the Black community.

COLE: It is one thing to believe, but it's critically important to be able to practice and live out your beliefs.

RIVERS: It is really on display in the Civil Rights movement, a massive expression of religious freedom.

The gains of the Civil Rights movement are really a massive expression of a people acting on their deeply held religious convictions.

COLE: To be of service to others in a way that's meaningful in our communities in our society.

To me, freedom of religion is absolutely everything.

Free exercise is everything.

We can have an open dialogue about what's important to us as citizens.

That dialogue is enriched by religious belief and religious faith.

(bagpipes playing) BROOKHISER: I'm at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City for the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.

This Irish Catholic celebration has become an all-American party, rain or shine, but in the early 19th century, Catholic immigrants were often met with hostility and even violence.

HELFAND: When you look at the 19th century, America does not have a great story to tell.

(singing in Latin) (singing in Latin) There was a majority faith, American Protestantism, and that was kind of taken as the, the lifeblood of what America was.

PATEL: For generations and generations, Catholics were a group that experienced profound prejudice, and there was literally this notion that if you have a Pope if you have priests, if you have nuns, you can't be part of the United States of America.

BROOKHISER: So why is there such hostility to Catholics at that, at this time?

GRAEBE: Catholics were suspect.

They had these strange, elaborate rituals in a foreign language.

They were suspected of being not able to be good Americans, that their allegiance was not primarily to this government but to the pope, a foreign monarch.

And that really got under the skin of these people who did not want them coming in and corrupting what they saw as this kind of pristine Protestant vision of America.

They're not able to reconcile these Catholics with their vision of what it meant to be an American.

CARDINAL DOLAN: At the beginning of our nation, there weren't too many Catholics against whom to have hostility.

It was more of an hostility to an idea.

McCONNELL: There were very few Catholics in the United States at the time of independence, roughly 2% of the population, and most of them were in Maryland, which had been the one colony that was founded as a place where they would be able to go and practice their religion in peace.

GEORGE: There was one Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.

They were accepted, but Catholicism was certainly regarded as an outlier religion, and uh, the, the rights of Catholics, I think it's fair to say, were not, early on, uh respected.

McCONNELL: Things really change as Catholics began to pour into the country.

CARDINAL DOLAN: The arrival of the Irish immigrant really poured kerosene on the glowing embers of the anti-Catholicism that was already kind of intellectually there.

The Irish fled out of desperation.

They literally arrived with nothing except their memories and their faith, their faith, which was very important to them.

GARVEY: There was considerable tension.

A lot of it just about religious differences, but a lot of it was ethnic and then linguistic.

BROOKHISER: An anti-Catholic group forms called 'Nativists.'

who view the Irish as uneducated, job-stealing, and dangerous.

Nativists enter politics as the anti-immigrant American party, or "Know-Nothings."

I've come to Mount St. Michael Academy, a parochial school in New York, one of the many cities where anti-Catholicism flourished.

CHRISTIANO: Today we're going to be focusing on American nativism, with the specific focus on religious persecution and religious discrimination.

This is an 1850s political cartoon, and it's depicting Irish and German voters basically stealing the election.

If we look at how the Irish voter and how the German voter, both Roman Catholic, how they're depicted, we see prejudice right away.

STUDENT: One of the reasons why people discriminate against others is fear of losing political power.

And just to add onto that, a lot of times, people tend to discriminate against others because they're afraid of new cultures and new ideas, kind of polluting already established traditions.

BROOKHISER: During the 1840s, a religious dispute is brewing: The Protestant Bible is used in public schools, but Catholics demand to use their own Bible, and the battle lines between Nativists and Catholics are drawn.

McCONNELL: The public school curriculum was heavily Protestant in nature.

They used the King James version of the Bible.

They used such reading materials as McGuffey's Reader, which was filled with Protestant moralism.

CARDINAL DOLAN: It was pretty Calvinistic.

It was pretty Puritan.

And it was rather anti-Catholic.

There's, there's Dagger John, see?

BROOKHISER: There he is.

The pugnacious Archbishop of New York, 'Dagger' John Hughes, is a man who doesn't want his flock to be second-class citizens because of their faith.

CARDINAL DOLAN: John Hughes said, "We just don't need that.

I don't need to submit my children to that because not only do I want to get them educated, I also want our schools to be agents of handing on the faith, and you kind of agree with that because you're teaching faith in the schools."

BROOKHISER: Hughes is a galvanizing leader whose fight to get the Catholic Bible into schools actually succeeds in getting Protestant control out.

In 1842, New York passes a bill barring all religious instruction from public schools.

CARDINAL DOLAN: He insisted that "Okay, if you're not going to allow equal access for all religions, there's to be no religion."

CHRISTIANO: But we have crocodiles coming out of the river, and the crocodiles are wearing the clothing that the pope would wear.

You have a man, Protestant, protecting the children from these crocodiles.

What this is showing us is that if Catholicism gets to our youth, it's going to endanger them, corrupt them.

This Nativist sentiment was rampant in the United States in the 1800s.

There are major acts of violence that occur in the United States against Catholics, and a key example is the Nativist riot in Philadelphia in 1844.

BROOKHISER: Here in Philadelphia, the dispute about whose Bible to read in public schools would spiral into the worst rioting America had ever known.

They were known as the 'Bible Riots.'

Fighting broke out here in the neighborhood of Kensington, with Nativists torching local churches, a fire station, the seminary of the Sisters of Charity, and dozens of homes.

Sergeant, good to see you.

HEFT: Welcome to Kensington.

Good to see you.

BROOKHISER: Thank you.

I'm hopping into a Humvee of the Pennsylvania National Guard to drive the streets where religious violence erupted and blood flowed.

HEFT: By the end of the, the rioting, the church we just left, St. Michael's, was really a burnt shell.

The militia had only been able to deploy about you know, 20 to 30 men there.

As fires erupted elsewhere in, in Old Kensington, they, they had to move around and, and counter those fires and counter the response of other crowds.

BROOKHISER: Two months after the burning of the first Catholic churches, Catholics and Nativists are entrenched outside the doors of St. Philip Neri Church, bracing for another battle.

Father.

REVEREND KUCZYNSKI: Good evening.

BROOKHISER: Good to see you.

There'd already been another church that had been burned.

What must your predecessor and the parishioners have felt?

REVEREND KUCZYNSKI: All I can imagine is the great fear of the people, that all that they had worked for to create this beautiful edifice to be the center of their life, a life that they share with God, the fear that this would be burned as the other churches had been burned.

So, I could understand why the men of the parish literally took it upon themselves to try to defend this building.

SINGER: July the Seventh in Kensington there was a grievous battle where many a man lay on the ground by the cannons that did rattle HEFT: Catholics are aware that there's going to be more violence in their community, so they take a proactive step, and they reach out to the governor of Pennsylvania.

And they're going to request arms for their own communities.

They're going to try and defend their churches themselves.

BROOKHISER: The Pennsylvania militia deployed to St. Philip Neri Church to lead the fight against the attacking mob.

SINGER: The battle lines were drawn between two rival Christian forces and guns were pointed each to each the sides had set their courses The riot raged, the bullets sprayed and fifteen met their maker.

Because of faith, the foes were laid to rest upon God's acre BROOKHISER: So how does it play out once night falls?

HEFT: Once night falls, the violence continues.

This intersection that's right in front of us would've had a cannon and about 40 to 100 men.

(cannon blasts) Some of those cannoneers are going to be wounded by the mob who's firing musketry back at them.

BROOKHISER: So both sides are shooting to kill.

HEFT: Absolutely.

CARDINAL DOLAN: Philadelphia suffered badly.

Badly.

And they lost a good number of churches.

When the threat came to New York, my predecessor, John Hughes, said, "We're arming.

We're going to surround our churches."

BROOKHISER: A decade before the Philadelphia riots, New York is engulfed in its own violence.

There are frequent brawls between Protestants and Catholics.

After arsonists have burned down a nearby church, parishioners at St. Patrick's Cathedral build an imposing wall to protect it from the growing hostility.

So Bishop Hughes actually arms these walls, doesn't he, at a certain point?

GRAEBE: Yes.

He said, "Anyone who tries to attack or try to burn down this cathedral, we're ready to respond."

HELFAND: There's nothing more devastating to a person than the idea that the very things that go to the core of who they are, are under threat.

For people of faith, protecting their religious liberty their ability to live out a life of faith is part of what, at the very essence of who they are, it's part of what makes their life possible.

CARDINAL DOLAN: John Hughes said, "Look, about the only way you're going to get anywhere here in the United States is to take democracy at its face value and for us to get involved."

So that began this extraordinarily well-oiled engine of the education of immigrant children in our Catholic schools.

BROOKHISER: John Hughes begins building Catholic schools and parish by parish, in city after city, the nation's bishops follow suit.

KELLY: The network of Catholic schools across America was so important because it gave Catholic parents a way to educate their children in accord with their faith.

BROOKHISER: But a half-century later, a notorious hate group would threaten these thriving institutions.

The Ku Klux Klan is undergoing a revival on the 1920s, and like the first Klan during Reconstruction, this 'Second KKK' believes in white supremacy, but it also targets Jews, Catholics, and other minorities.

RIENZI: The second KKK in the early 1900s thought that they were going to Americanize everybody to be sort of, the White Protestant majority, that the KKK thought was good.

BROOKHISER: Out west in Oregon, where thousands are joining their ranks, Klansmen are on a crusade to stamp out Catholic schools.

In 1922, the Klan-backed Compulsory Education Bill is passed, banning private education in Oregon.

KELLY: The passage of the Compulsory Education Act was a major political victory for the Klan.

The Klan saw the law as a way to eliminate Catholic education.

That's why they put their political muscle behind it in Oregon, and that's why Catholic groups opposed it.

BROOKHISER: A Catholic religious order challenges the law, and the case 'Pierce versus Society of Sisters' goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

Joining in the legal battle is a Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.

KELLY: When the Knights heard the plea for help coming from the Society of Sisters, they donated $25,000, a great deal of money at the time, to challenge the law in court.

But it wasn't just the Knights and other Catholics, it was Episcopalians, Seventh Day Adventist, Jews, and others, so it really was an inter-religious effort, which was quite remarkable for the time.

BROOKHISER: The Supreme Court, in its landmark 1925 ruling, affirms the bedrock principle of religious liberty: RIENZI: The Pierce case is really foundational for the right of parents to control the education of their children.

That the children really do belong to their parents, not to the government.

And the parents get to decide if they want the child educated in a Jewish school or, a Muslim school or, a Catholic school, or a public school.

(vocalizing) (vocalizing) McCONNELL: One of the things I think is most important about this word "free exercise" is that it's exercise.

It's not just the freedom of religious belief but the freedom to exercise your religion, meaning to put it into practice.

PATEL: I think one of the most inspiring stories in American history is how Catholics go from hated group to really mainstream, American culture expands to include Catholics Come Thou fount of every blessing Tune my heart to sing Thy grace Streams of mercy... SENATOR ROMNEY: If you come over the Beltway in Washington, D.C., you see this extraordinary building, and you wonder what in the world goes on there.

These are the grandkids.

The oldest, let's see, is in here somewhere.

There she is.

My ancestors come from early days of my faith, a faith that, in most cases, people don't understand terribly well.

At the founding of the country, they described this as forming a more perfect union over time.

They didn't suggest we were perfect from the outset, and clearly, religions were persecuted.

Our religion received persecution.

BROOKHISER: Every summer, youth groups from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints pull handcarts along the Oregon Trail, reenacting the somber trek of their ancestors.

The Mormons were chased from state to state, unwelcome wherever they went.

In the end, they banded together and made the trek out into Utah, hoping to worship in peace.

CHOIR: Come, listen to a prophet's voice, And hear the word of God, And in the way of truth rejoice, And sing for joy aloud.

We found... BROOKHISER: The 'prophet' of this new religion is Joseph Smith, who believes he is guided by divine revelation to establish a godly kingdom on earth and prepare the way for the Second Coming of Christ.

Here at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art, the Mormon exodus is dramatized in a series of monumental paintings.

The Latter-day Saints are persecuted savagely and for a long time, why is that?

FLAKE: There are many reasons having to do with where America is at that moment in its history, who the people are, who the Americans are, who the Latter-day Saints are, and the threat they present to this fragile new Democratic Republic.

This art, for example, is a way of passing on the memory of not just their travails, not just their persecutions, but their triumph.

They did establish themselves in a new land as a new people.

Religious freedom in America was worked out the hard way.

BROOKHISER: Lots of fighting along the way.

CHOIR: Come, listen to a prophets voice.

BROOKHISER: The Second Great Awakening flourished especially in upstate New York, where a young Joseph Smith begins to question which version of Christianity to follow; which faith is true?

FLAKE: So Smith turns to the Bible.

And he has an experience with God.

Where he asks his question, "Which of these churches should I join?"

And he says, "I never imagined the answer I got, which was none of them."

BROOKHISER: Joseph Smith believes he's received a revelation, first through an angel and then in words inscribed on golden plates, which he translates into the "Book of Mormon," the Latter Day Saints' origin story.

FLAKE: Smith is a Moses figure.

He has an experience with God.

He creates a book, and he creates a people.

Mormonism holds this thing that so many people are looking for.

There's a prophet on the earth today.

He's about 25 when the church is organized.

He's almost 40 when he dies.

And in those 14 years, he creates an organization to which 30,000 people are going to be attracted.

GEORGE: When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which comes to be known as the Mormons, emerges on the scene, they are regarded by the bulk of Americans as a heretical sect.

Of course, it claims to be restoring the original gospel.

And this gets Americans, mainly Protestant but, but, but Catholic as well, pretty upset and concerned.

FLAKE: It elicits extreme feeling on both sides, hatred, and love.

The one group saying, "We have to gather to it."

The other side saying, "We have to eradicate it."

CHOIR: Carry on, carry on!

Carry on, carry on, carry on!

BROOKHISER: In 1831, Joseph Smith and the first Mormons leave New York and head to a new home in Ohio, where their population swells.

Seven years later, they continue on to Missouri, the place where Smith has announced will become "The new Jerusalem."

TURLEY: And when the Latter-day Saints arrived, being mostly North-easterners, they brought with them their own culture.

And that culture, in many ways, clashed with the culture that existed then in Northwestern, Missouri.

OAKS: The governor signed an extermination order and sent it to the militia and said, "Drive out these obnoxious Mormons.

And if they can't be driven out, you're authorized to exterminate them."

ACTOR: The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace, their outrages are beyond all description.

BROOKHISER: I'm at the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City to see a letter written by Joseph Smith cataloging the effects of the Mormon Extermination order.

McBRIDE: This is a difficult document to read because it lays out in detail what happened in Missouri.

It, it, it talks about the murders, the destruction of property, the rape of women, and how a sitting governor could actually declare that a people must be driven from the state or exterminated.

BROOKHISER: Mm-hm.

McBRIDE: It's hard to believe in America today that this happened.

BROOKHISER: Yeah.

In 1839, as Latter Day Saints are being beaten, starved, and driven from Missouri, Smith turns to the federal government for protection.

He travels to Washington to meet with President Martin Van Buren, seeking redress for the violence against his people.

McBRIDE: And we see Van Buren's response.

He reads the letter, and he says, "What can I do?

I can do nothing for you.

If I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri."

In short, if I come out publicly in favor of your petitioning efforts, I'm going to lose the State of Missouri in the, my reelection bid next year.

BROOKHISER: Although religious liberty is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, Van Buren does not lift a finger to help.

Smith then brings the matter before Congress.

What does Congress do with this?

McBRIDE: They do what Congress always does, send it to a committee.

And the committee ultimately decides unanimously that while they may sympathize with the Latter-day Saints, there's nothing they can do.

OAKS: The experience of Joseph Smith in appealing to the federal government is a historic turning point on the thinking of, of Latter-day Saints.

We can't depend on, on the U.S. Constitution to protect us against the kind of thing that's happening to us.

McBRIDE: Joseph Smith and others are saying, "Well, there's something wrong here because what if the state is the one abusing our rights?"

BROOKHISER: This was a constitutional question.

The Senate is saying, "We, the federal government, has no power over these issues in, in states."

AMAR: Because the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

And we say, fine, um Smith is not asking for a nationally established church.

But it's about, in part, states' rights.

BROOKHISER: Smith's trip to Washington exposes a gap in America's Bill of Rights.

RIENZI: The Bill of Rights, the protection for religious liberty, doesn't yet apply to state governments.

It's not until we get to the 14th Amendment that that protection will apply to state governments.

And so the governor of Missouri can say, "Your religion's no good here."

AMAR: And that's the original First Amendment solution in which different states have very different religious policies, and if you don't like it, move.

BROOKHISER: Smith and his followers retreat back east and work on building a new Zion on the banks of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo, Illinois.

The Nauvoo charter gives it almost unlimited home rule with its own courts and a town militia with 3,000 troops at its peak.

the largest in the state.

And how was the city governed?

PARK: Well, there wasn't much of space between city and church government.

Joseph Smith quickly became the hub of both religious and political worlds in Nauvoo.

He felt that keeping all the control in himself and maintaining that authority was what was going to bring the stability that the Latter-day Saints had long craved.

BROOKHISER: So, all these residents of Nauvoo, are they voters in Illinois?

PARK: They are.

TURLEY: And once again, you end up with tensions between the local people as the large number of Latter-day Saints coming in begins to look like a dominant political and economic position.

YOUNG: They were accumulating massive amounts of property wealth, and political power in Western Illinois, a larger population center than Chicago was at that time, and that probably did feel threatening.

GEORGE: Things come to a head when Mormonism begins to practice polygamy.

It had been rejected by mainstream Christianity very early on, really from the start, but Mormons recovering what they believed to be the original gospel restore polygamy, and this outrages non-Mormon Americans.

TURLEY: There were those inside the church who disagreed with the marriage system.

And there were those on the outside who were looking for a reason to drive out the Latter-day Saints for political and economic reasons.

So all of that created tensions, a kind of tinder box.

BROOKHISER: The federal government had left them in the lurch, it was then that Joseph Smith made a bold move, running for the nation's highest office.

McBRIDE: At the heart of his campaign is one issue, and it's religious freedom.

He argues that the federal government must be empowered to protect religious minorities when states fail to do so.

BROOKHISER: So, did Nauvoo have a newspaper?

PARK: It had two of them, actually, the "Times and Seasons," which focused more on church matters.

BROOKHISER: There was a dissident newspaper, however.

PARK: There was.

The "Nauvoo Expositor" tried to, as the name implies, expose all the things that Joseph Smith was doing, polygamy, theocracy, Joseph Smith's involvement in politics, his intervention of the law.

They didn't recognize Joseph Smith as the leader of the faith anymore, they saw him as a fallen prophet.

Joseph Smith knew that if this knowledge spread abroad through this internal dissension, it could bring big problems for the church, so he gathered the city council together urged them to declare it a nuisance to the city, which they did.

And soon, the city marched on the Expositor's building, destroyed the press, and said that this press is not going to belong in the city.

PARK: Outside of Nauvoo, they saw this as a declaration of war on Joseph Smith, declaring that Latter-day Saints above the law, that they were going to protect themselves over any types of accusations brought against them by the state.

And that's when an arrest warrant goes out for Joseph Smith, he is held in state custody to be tried for treason.

BROOKHISER: Joseph Smith led his followers through four states, looking for a place where they could live and worship according to his revelations.

His Mormon journey ended here in a jailhouse and gunfire.

A mob storms the prison cell.

Smith's brother, Hyrum, is shot in the face and instantly killed.

Smith is wounded as he escapes out the window.

He falls to the ground, and the mob finishes their work.

(church bell ringing) Their founding prophet was dead.

Their city government had been overthrown.

Their religious practices outraged their neighbors.

If the Latter-day Saints wanted to enjoy religious liberty, they would have to cross the continent and leave the United States behind.

FLAKE: This river marks a boundary, and they're headed outside the domain of the United States intentionally.

So, they have the distinction of being a group that has to leave the United States in order to be religiously free.

BROOKHISER: Beginning in the mid-1840s, waves of Latter-day Saints migrate to yet another home, dispatched by a new leader, Brigham Young.

Caravans of Latter-day Saints make the three-month trek by wagon, cart, and foot out to Northern Mexico, later to become Utah Territory, settling in a desolate valley.

FLAKE: When they first arrive, they meet the, the constitutional standards to become a state, but Congress refuses to admit them, even as they're admitting all these states around them.

RIENZI: When Utah's a territory, Congress gets to make all its rules, and Congress doesn't want to allow Utah to become a state if it thinks the state government will allow for plural marriage.

BROOKHISER: In 1862, Congress passes, and Abraham Lincoln signs into law an Anti-Bigamy Act, mandating that Mormons must end plural marriage.

GEORGE: This is litigated.

It goes all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, with the Mormons claiming that laws prohibiting multiple wives are contrary to the First Amendment's guarantee of the free exercise of religion.

BROOKHISER: In Reynolds versus the United States, the Supreme Court follows Anglo-American legal tradition that had long outlawed polygamy as an offense against society and subversive of good order.

RIENZI: In Reynolds, the court basically says the free exercise of religion, that's what's in your heart or in your head, but it's not really how you act out in the world.

Marriage is really important, and the majority gets to decide what the rules are.

And here we've decided the rules are two people, not more than two people.

BROOKHISER: The message of the court is unmistakable: religious liberty is not limitless.

If it's to survive, the Mormon religion and not society must change.

OAKS: This was finally overcome when the church president received a revelation that the church would no longer practice plural marriage.

BROOKHISER: In 1894, when Congress votes to admit Utah into the Union as the 45th state, they do so with the stipulation that 'polygamy,' or plural marriage, are forever prohibited.'

OAKS: And after that, Utah began a process of learning how to live with the federal government, and that's a history that's been going on for 150 years.

SENATOR ROMNEY: I think our family has a legacy of faith and a commitment to the church itself.

I have a firm conviction that the teachings of the church are true.

Over the years, we have become a more perfect union, and we got a ways to go.

But it was here where the foundation was laid for what has been a nation which welcomes religious diversity, and, by and large, the people of good conscience accept religious differences without persecution and, and without blame.

(cannon blast) (cannon blasts) BROOKHISER: 1861, the American Civil War begins.

Union troops in the Western Theater under the command of General Ulysses Grant launch a campaign to penetrate southward into the Confederacy.

Grant's first order of business: opening a depot to stockpile food and arms for his troops.

I'm on the Ohio River opposite Paducah, Kentucky, gateway to the south.

Here was where the most antisemitic act of the US government hit the hardest.

So, where are we, and why is it important?

CASHON: This is where the Tennessee River joins up with the Ohio.

And that was an important part during the Civil War because, up there where the Tennessee was, it went straight to Chattanooga.

Going to Chattanooga, they could supply their army all the way down.

So they were able to put a supply depot here in Paducah, and that allowed them to send all their ammunition, food, tents, whatever they could.

BROOKHISER: This is the Union army?

CASHON: Yep.

The Union really use Paducah as their base of operations.

BROOKHISER: Paducah was founded as a trading post, and by the time of the Civil War, a small community of Jewish merchants and their families had settled in.

So what were people trading for mostly?

CASHON: Clothing, food, salt.

BROOKHISER: Cotton?

CASHON: Cotton.

They used the cotton from the south to do the clothing.

And so that allowed them to send it back to the East and sell it.

BROOKHISER: But this is war, and General Grant has a problem: profiteers are moving illicit goods right underneath his command, helping to finance the Confederacy.

Was there smuggling during the war?

CASHON: Yes, there was a lot of smuggling during the war.

The Union Army felt that a lot of the people from Paducah were complicit with the Confederates.

SARNA: Jews were involved in smuggling.

So were lots of other people.

But from Grant's perspective, anybody you caught must have been a Jew, whether they were actually Jewish or not.

CASHON: If you listen to all the reports coming from the Union Army, they were always talking about Jews and speculators.

They, they were synonymous, and they saw that personality, and they attached it to a whole class of people.

BROOKHISER: On December 17, 1862, Grant issues General Order Number 11, expelling Jews from large swaths of the Civil War South.

"The Jews, as a class," his order reads, "violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department... Are hereby expelled..." Days later, a young merchant named Cesar Kaskel, a Jewish immigrant from Prussia, is summoned to Army headquarters and handed a directive: "You are hereby ordered to leave the city of Paducah within 24 hours."

RABBI SAPERSTEIN: An act here in America, a country that held such promise, such hope, that that ideal of equality for Jews as citizens in this country, recognized by the government and protected by the government, that was a shattering experience.

And they must have wondered, is this just happening to us again here in this extraordinary country?

NADELL: Antisemitism emerges in the United States from the very moment, the very second that the Jews landed in New Amsterdam in 1654, when Peter Stuyvesant tried to eject what he called this deceitful race, these hateful enemies and blasphemers of Christ.

BROOKHISER: America's Jewish population in the 1800s are mostly immigrants from Central Europe, many of them peddlers and shopkeepers.

Their strange accents and religious customs stoke age-old stereotypes.

Such prejudice was contrary to the example of George Washington, who steadied the course for religious liberty in 1790 when, as the first American President, he wrote a simple thank-you letter to a Hebrew congregation in Rhode Island.

CHATFIELD: "Gentlemen, while I receive with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of affection and esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you..." GEORGE: One of the great documents of American history is George Washington's letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island.

NADELL: Washington's letter is the foundational document for the American Jewish experience.

GEORGE: Washington is responding to the community who had sent him a congratulatory note on his election as President of the United States, and Washington is saying, "You speak of toleration.

We no longer speak of toleration in the United States as if you were here on sufferance from someone else.

You have as much right as any Christian."

CHATFIELD: "...the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance..." RABBI SAPERSTEIN: If you think about what was happening at the same time, we created in our constitution, for the first time in human history, a nation in which your rights as an individual would not depend upon your religious identity, your religious beliefs, or your religious peaceful practices.

It was something extraordinary.

NADELL: Given Jewish history, a history where they had faced persecution across the millennia, Washington's letter was an astonishing announcement about what America meant for the Jews.

CHATFIELD: "May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths and make us all in our several vocations everlastingly happy."

BROOKHISER: 70 years after Washington's letter affirming the principles of religious liberty, General Grant issues his infamous order to cast out the Jews.

SARNA: There is no previous crisis in the history of the American Jewish community that seemed quite so threatening.

BROOKHISER: Cesar Kaskel, a merchant from Paducah, took the first steamboat east, telling Jewish leaders and reporters about General Order 11 as he went.

His goal to protest it all the way to the White House.

After a six-day journey, Kaskel got to see Abraham Lincoln, who'd not yet heard of the order.

He directed that it be immediately revoked.

"To condemn a class," Lincoln said, "Wrongs the good with the bad."

Back at his headquarters in Kentucky, Grant obeyed.

SARNA: And it's pretty clear that General Grant, looking back, viewed this as a blot on his record.

BROOKHISER: In 1868, when Grant ran for President, Jews asked if the man who'd issued General Order 11 should be elected.

But Grant had turned over a new leaf.

After he won, he appointed record numbers of Jews to federal positions.

And in 1876, he attended the dedication of Adas Israel, Washington's second synagogue, and stayed through the entire service, all three hours.

After Grant left office, pogroms in Russia and poverty across Eastern Europe force more than two million Jews to immigrate across the sea, hoping to find refuge in "the land of the free."

SARNA: Many Jews came to the United States from countries where they were second-class citizens, persecuted, prevented from entering occupations because they were Jewish.

And they were quite determined that America should be different.

BROOKHISER: With antisemitism rising, early 20th century in America, the lynching of a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta in 1913 shocked American Jews.

The event has been depicted in popular culture many times, most recently in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical "Parade."

UHRY: I think Leo Frank was a pretty dark moment in American history.

A young Jewish man in his 20s was lynched for a crime that he didn't do.

BROOKHISER: As the curtain rises, it's Confederate Memorial Day, 1913.

A young girl is murdered while across town, old Civil War heroes parade through Atlanta, and citizens mourn those who died defending the South.

SINGER: We gave our lives for the old hills of Georgia, The old red hills of home.

UHRY: It was dark, and it was serious, and particularly when they're musicals, you can examine American darkness.

I think that's a good idea.

NADELL: Antisemitism develops in moments of crisis.

Just think of the crises in the wake of the Civil War.

The south is in rubble.

The newly freed men and women are trying to figure out their place in the nation.

SARNA: Are these Jews, Northerners, threatening the values and reputation of the South?

UHRY: My mother's uncle started the National Pencil Company.

He hired a clerk from New York.

His name was Leo Frank.

This little girl who worked there, whose name was Mary Phagan, she was 13, she came in to get her pay.

And Leo Frank looked in the book and paid her $1.20.

She thanked him and left, and he was the last person to see her alive.

SARNA: The death of a 13-year-old girl, she's representative and symbolic of true Southern virtue.

Whereas the Jew is the outsider who is threatening all of the values that the South holds dear.

UHRY: It just was an irresistible story.

I mean, it just grew, and it grew, and it grew.

RABBI SAPERSTEIN: When something happens that's terrible, people look to cast blame.

And it's always easy to blame the other.

This is not a new thing.

BROOKHISER: Leo Frank is arrested for the murder; a sensationalist press fuels public hysteria; a fair trial is impossible.

JURISTS: Guilty.

Guilty.

Guilty.... UHRY: Leo Frank was convicted on almost no evidence and then sentenced to hang.

JURISTS: Guilty.

Guilty.... NADELL: It was the janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, whose testimony was decisive in convicting Frank.

And I really believe that in the South in 1913, only a Jew could have been convicted on the testimony of an African American.

BROOKHISER: People of many faiths are outraged by the wrongful conviction of Leo Frank.

Facing a national outcry from ministers, priests, and rabbis, the Governor of Georgia commutes Frank's sentence from death to life in prison, an action that so infuriates a mob from Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown, they kidnap Leo Frank from prison and hang him from a tree.

SINGER: Farewell, my Leo, you're right here beside me You're here by the door... SARNA: Maybe America wasn't what we dreamed it was about.

Maybe we're all at risk.

Maybe we're not really accepted by our neighbors.

SINGER: And you're finally... CHILD: Mister Frank?

FRANK: What is it?

SINGER: ...Free.

CHILD: Happy Memorial Day.

CHATFIELD: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

BROOKHISER: After Leo Frank's murder, American Jews formed groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress to take a firm stand against antisemitism.

They fought the intolerance of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which was on the rise in the 1920s and had widened its web of hate to include Judaism.

The American Jewish Committee brought its moral weight to bear on auto magnate Henry Ford, forcing him to publicly apologize for the anti-Jewish attacks he published in his newspaper, the "Dearborn Independent."

Jewish individuals and organizations sounded the alarm against Nazism in the 1930s... fought restrictive immigration quotas during World War II in order to help European refugees... and marched in solidarity with those in the Civil Rights movement seeking an end to racial discrimination.

PATEL: This notion of a healthy, religiously diverse democracy that would welcome Jews, right?

A group of people who were hated and hounded and harassed for centuries in Europe to not appreciate that in our culture, that's something that we really need to correct.

HELFAND: As an Orthodox Jewish American, my faith is deeply important to me.

I must engage in religious conduct you know, hundreds of times a day.

And I want to know that those, those exercises of religion are protected, protected for me, protected for my family, my community, my synagogue.

I can't even imagine my life without the ability to engage in that sort of religious conduct.

REPORTER: Tragedy strikes as a morning of prayer quickly shifts to a morning of deadly chaos.

OFFICER: Get back, back!

NADELL: The United States guarantees us the ability to exercise our religion.

That said, there's intimidation about being publicly seen as a Jew.

Does that prohibit my free exercise of religion?

No, but it does prohibit my ability to feel safe everywhere displaying that religion.

BROOKHISER: In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson appointed his friend and advisor Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.

A year earlier, Leo Frank had been denied the protection of the laws, but now Brandeis would be helping to interpret the law on the nation's Highest Court.

From then on, issues of free exercise would increasingly be resolved in Congress or in the federal judiciary.

SMITH: Oh, say, can you see By the dawn's early light... CLASS: I pledge allegiance to the flag... BROOKHISER: In the 1930s, Lillian and William Gobitis, Jehovah's Witnesses, refuse to pledge allegiance to the American flag and are expelled from school.

The resulting lawsuit goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that swearing an oath is forbidden by the Bible.

For this supposed lack of patriotism, they are assaulted by angry mobs across the country.

At the Court, justices first decide to enforce the school's mandatory flag salute.

FDR: December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

BROOKHISER: But three years later, in the thick of America's fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, they reverse the ruling, upholding the right to refuse an oath when it runs contrary to conscience.

HECHT: The Jehovah's Witnesses cases in the early forties, was an astonishing turnaround to see the court take one position and then um turn, really, for the Supreme Court of the United States, turn on a dime.

MARK RIENZE: Thankfully, the Supreme Court gets it right and realizes that in America, the point of the Free Exercise Clause is precisely to protect people with unpopular and minority beliefs and practices.

That's the right answer in Barnette.

It's the right answer for our country today.

BROOKHISER: Like George Washington's soldiers in the Revolution, Americans of all faiths need to join together to win World War II, men like the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant chaplains who, when their ship was torpedoed by a Nazi sub, helped save their flocks, then they joined arms, sang hymns, and went down with the ship.

NEWSREEL: Throughout the world throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.

BROOKHISER: After the war, there's a continued shift in constitutional law.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, guarantees citizens the equal protection of federal laws, but the judiciary virtually ignore this crucial provision.

It wasn't until Cantwell versus Connecticut that the Supreme Court protects religious liberty from contradictory state laws.

RIENZI: Cantwell acknowledges what should have happened in the 1860s, which is this recognition that, yes, the Free Exercise Clause applies against state and local governments.

And as we get, you know, through the 20th century, people start to take advantage of that and to say, "Okay, court, please protect my rights as against the state government that is doing me harm."

BROOKHISER: The floodgates open to a steady stream of vexing legal questions.

Could public funds be used to bus students to religious schools?

Could Catholic sisters wear religious garb when they teach in public school?

Could the state intervene in private church matters?

I've assembled a panel of scholars and legal experts at a conference organized by the Becket Fund, a public interest law firm that defends the religious liberty of all faiths, to ask, what does 'free exercise' mean today?

The American experience is very long and very various, and there are a lot of bad chapters in it, but is there something in it that, that ought to be of value to the rest of the world?

GARVEY: We have done an excellent job of trying to accommodate religious pluralism in our society.

I think that's been a strength.

HOWARD: And our founding fathers, I think, were prescient in seeing how this could play out.

SINATRA: What is America to me?

A name, a map, or a flag, I see... BROOKHISER: In the Post-War era, old attitudes against religious pluralism begin to change.

KID: I've been living here as long as you.

SINATRA: What has he got smallpox or something?

KID: We don't like his religion!

SINATRA: His religion?

KID: Look mister he's a dirty... SINATRA: Now, hold on!

GRAHAM: And let's make this the beginning of a spiritual fire that could ignite this nation.

BROOKHISER: In the 1950s, Evangelicalism is a growing force on the nation's cultural and political landscape.

GRAHAM: Our forefathers came to this country seeking freedom, and they brought in their hands a Bible, and they said, "On this book, we shall build a nation."

BROOKHISER: Irish Americans were persecuted in the 1800s... but in the presidential election of 1960, John Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, receives over 34 million votes.

SINATRA: The church, the school, the clubhouse, All races and religions, That's America to me" HOWARD: It's the churches and the mosques and the temples who are asking, what does human dignity look like?

GEORGE: All the great movements, social movements, political movements of American history have had religion built into them.

SINGER: March down Freedom Highway Oh yeah, marching each and every day.

GARVEY: Religious people are more than any others responsible for the Civil Rights Movement.

You know, we forget that Martin Luther King was the Reverend Martin Luther King.

Dr. KING: Somewhere, I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.

GARVEY: He was motivated by his Christian principles to bring about a revolution in race relations in the United States to accomplish what the Civil War did not for many Americans.

COLE: It's really been the glue that's held American society together.

There are religious groups that have contributed to the fabric of our society... By taking care of the hungry and homeless, the elderly, and young children all throughout our society.

AMAR: 1965 is a watershed year.

It generates at least three landmark statutes that change America profoundly.

Medicare and Medicaid the Voting Rights Act.

And the Immigration Reform Act of 1965.

BROOKHISER: The Immigration Act of 1965 ends a strict quota system enacted in the 1920s, and in the wake of its passage, immigrants begin pouring in from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, changing the face of America.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.

We are shaped by every language and culture.

AMAR: They're coming to America with all sorts of different religions, not necessarily in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And that's going to profoundly change the nature, demographically, of religion in America.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Today, I have today ordered to Vietnam the Airmobile Division, which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.

REPORTER: Anti-war demonstrators protest US involvement in the Vietnam War.

BROOKHISER: As the war escalated, some people expressed their religious freedom by joining in solidarity with soldiers ministering to them in battle.

Others took part in the anti-war movement, working for peace.

Dr. KING: The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.

BROOKHISER: The difficult question, "How much should society accommodate free exercise?"

reached the courtroom again and again.

HOWARD: A lot of cases in American free exercise have to do with to what extent you can act on your beliefs to what extent the government can limit those actions.

JUSTICE TIETZ: Mr. Chief Justice and gentlemen of the Court.

This is a draft prosecution for refusal to submit to induction because the petitioner didn't get the conscientious objector classification.

JUSTICE BURGER: Are you arguing now that his case is based on religious belief and conviction?

BROOKHISER: Does the Free Exercise clause mean that conscientious objectors can opt out of combat service because of their religious beliefs?

In 1970, the court says, "Yes."

GARNETT: When should a decent political community say, "You know what, we can accommodate these religious believers, we can give them an exemption from this law, so that they can live again with integrity?"

BROOKHISER: In 1969, Wisconsin prosecutes local Amish who refused to send their children to high school because doing so is contrary to their religious belief.

JUSTICE: We view this case as involving solely a parents' right of religious freedom to bring up his children as he believes God dictates.

BROOKHISER: In its ruling, the court allows the Amish to pull their children from the classroom, curtailing the reach of the state.

AMAR: And the big idea is if you're going to mess with rights, there has to be a very, very good reason.

And in legal jargon, we call that a compelling state interest, a compelling governmental interest.

HOWARD: All of these decisions are expanding and expanding a great deal more than when the founding fathers were you know, writing our Constitution.

AMAR: What exactly does it mean?

How much protection does that give to small religions.

Minority religions?

BROOKHISER: In 1983, Al Smith is fired for using peyote during a religious ceremony of the Native American Church in Oregon.

SMITH: I believed in my heart that it's not wrong to go to church and to worship and pray in the old way.

BROOKHISER: But the Court rules that the First Amendment does not protect illegal drug use, even if it's part of a religious ceremony.

GARNETT: Religious exercise is about more than belief.

It is about action.

It is about conduct.

SMITH: It's like they drove a spike into the heart of the Bill of Rights.

If the First Amendment doesn't protect me, how in the hell is it going to protect you?

GARNETT: When we can accommodate religion, we should.

That doesn't mean we always can, and it doesn't mean we always should, but when we can, we should.

SENATOR HATCH: This is the first mentioned freedom in the Bill of Rights, and that it's been given short shrift by the Supreme Court, and we want to correct that.

BROOKHISER: The peyote ruling so rankles Congress that political polar opposites, Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy, come together in 1993 and pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, known as RFRA.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We all have a shared desire here to protect perhaps the most precious of all American liberties, religious freedom.

RIENZI: Oh, it was definitely a message to the court.

RFRA is a broad, democratic reaction to a case that Americans thought the court got gravely wrong.

PRESIDENT REAGAN: I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

I would like to see this country rededicate itself wholeheartedly to this cause.

We are our brothers' keepers, all of us.

INAZU: It becomes really important to have a charity and an empathy toward what other people are doing, even if it seems very strange and different to those of us who are not part of the religious practice.

UDDIN: I think that there are certain religious minorities in the country that face really difficult issues.

And I mean, I'm thinking specifically of my own religious community, the American Muslim community.

GARNETT: A Muslim prisoner who wanted to grow a beard as an expression of his faith and as a part of his religious exercise, but he's in prison.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: They say no beards.

You say half-inch is okay.

How about three-quarters of an inch, how about an inch?

JUSTICE SCALIA: Religious beliefs are categorical.

You know, God tells you, "He's supposed to have a full beard."

JUSTICE ROBERTS: One of the difficult issues in a case like this is where to draw the line.

BROOKHISER: Drawing the line on religious freedom is also a dilemma for the U.S. Military.

When an Army regulation prohibited Captain Simmer Singh from wearing the outward expressions of his Sikh faith... his turban, unshorn hair, and beard... he fought the policy and won an exemption in district court.

Following the ruling, the Army dropped the ban, granting soldiers like Simmer Singh an accommodation based on religious liberty grounds.

GARNETT: In a society like ours, there's a special burden on government to be particularly cognizant of the needs and vulnerabilities of religious minorities.

BROOKHISER: Is that enough to guide us?

Are we grappling in our own often clumsy fashion, more or less well, with a vital question?

UDDIN: A lot of places around the world are happy to sort of, pronounce certain things out of bounds and no one challenges it or can challenge it.

But the US stands apart from many places around the world and despite all of our challenges, still offering the most robust protections for religious freedom anywhere in the world.

And I think that's something that everybody from both sides of the political spectrum can really appreciate that like this ultimately gives us a freedom to be true to ourselves.

BROOKHISER: With society growing increasingly secular, are there good reasons why religious freedom should be important to everyone, even to people of no faith at all?

GARNETT: Religious freedom, as I see, it's like good roads and clean air, right?

It is part of the common good.

UDDIN: It's quite simply, in order to protect my own religious freedom, I have to protect yours too.

HOWARD: There's nobody around this table who thinks that we should have you know, religious freedom for me but not for thee.

RABBI: Baruch atah, Adonai.

GARNETT: I believe that a society that commits itself to religious freedom that's going to be a society that is likely to respect other rights more as well.

James Madison thought that our experiment would lend a luster to our country.

And I think for all of our flaws and missteps that it has.

AMAR: Courts protect rights, and sometimes Congress protects rights.

Oh, but in the long run, it has to be we, the people of the United States.

Religious liberty will not survive and thrive unless it lives in the hearts and minds of the American people.

BROOKHISER: There are ample reasons why America should protect and defend its unique experiment in religious liberty...

But the most important reason was the one the men of Flushing gave Peter Stuyvesant three and a half centuries ago; do unto all men as we desire that all men should do unto us.

This is the law and the prophets.

(match strike) NARRATOR: Look for "Free Exercise" on major video on demand sites, including Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ (music plays through credits)