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On June 26, 2026, the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission published a draft report that relies on distorted accounts of American religious history to advance a constitutional interpretation that challenges long-established understandings of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.

The report seeks to elevate an interpretation grounded in flawed historical assumptions as the official position of the US government. It also recommends policies that would encourage states to expand religious instruction and displays in public schools while creating new mechanisms to investigate and sanction educators and institutions accused of violating students’ religious liberty.

The American Historical Association urges historians, educators, and all those committed to evidence-based history to review the report and submit comments via email to the Department of Justice.

 

Historical Context

Religious liberty is one of the most consequential and contested subjects in American history. It deserves to be approached with historical rigor and careful attention to the complexity of the American experience.

The report rightly recognizes that religion has played a profound role in American history. But the history of religious liberty cannot be reduced to a single story of consensus or uniformity.  From the colonial era through the present, Americans have debated the proper relationship between religion and government while working, often imperfectly, to protect both the free exercise of religion and the principle that government should not favor one set of religious beliefs or practices over another.

The history of religious liberty in America is the history of an ongoing effort to build institutions capable of protecting liberty of conscience across profound differences in belief. That history is complex, contested, and continually evolving. Any account of the American past that overlooks that complexity risks distorting both the historical record and the constitutional traditions it helped shape.

How You Can Help

The Department of Justice is accepting public comments through July 12, 2026.

Submit comments via email to:
RLC@usdoj.gov

Subject line format:
PUBLIC COMMENT – [TOPIC OR CHAPTER NUMBER] – [NAME]

Comments should avoid line-editing or debating individual cases and instead address broader historical and constitutional concerns. Historians and educators may wish to emphasize some or all of the following points:

  • Religious liberty emerged from the practical realities of sectarian conflict and vibrant pluralism, not from a monolithic Christian consensus. The founding generation confronted a world marked by religious conflict and diversity. Protections for religious liberty developed in response to disagreement among denominations and competing spiritual traditions, not from a broadly shared Christian consensus.
  • The founders deliberately created a national government devoid of specific religious authority to preserve robust religious freedom in civil society. While personal faith undoubtedly shaped individual founders, they chose to prohibit religious tests for office in Article VI and refused to assign any religious duties to the state. The Constitution established a secular framework that allowed religion to flourish independent of federal control.
  • By recommending that the DOJ back strategic litigation to support state laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools (p. 80), the report actively promotes state-sponsored religious favoritism. Despite the long history of religious pluralism in the United States, this approach abandons secular neutrality and uses the machinery of the federal government to elevate one religious tradition over all others.
  • The report substitutes a flawed ideological narrative in place of rigorous historical scholarship, treating highly contested interpretations as settled historical fact. For example, it unaccountably attributes the 20th-century legal separation of church and state on postmodern philosophers like Foucault and Nietzsche (“God is dead”), dismissing decades of Supreme Court decisions as a hostile “Berlin wall” designed to banish faith from public life (p. 42). Public institutions must acknowledge the complexity and pluralism at the core of American religious history.
  • The separation of church and state has historically not diminished the vibrancy and influence of religious beliefs on American life. The report relies on a false and extreme dichotomy between an America that declares itself a Christian nation and one entirely hostile to faith. Historians and legal scholars have long noted that disestablishment and limits on government involvement in religion provide safeguards for religious vitality and liberty. Disestablishment did not diminish American religion—it liberated a vibrant array of religious traditions, providing space for these to flourish independent of government control.

The public comment process provides an important opportunity for historians and supporters of honest history to highlight the complexity, depth, and nuance of the historical record. You may wish to incorporate some of the following historical sources or examples into your comment to offer a richer, more accurate account of the religious views of the founders than the selective readings that inform the report (which cites several of these documents without sufficient context):

  • Washington’s caution that the federal government gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (1790)
  • The Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (drafted 1777, enacted 1786) with its warning against “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers . . . who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinion and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible”
  • Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802), which emphasizes “that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God” and references “a wall of separation between Church & State”
  • The Petition of the Philadelphia Synagogue to the Council of Censors of Pennsylvania (1783), which warns against the exclusion of religious minorities through religious tests for officeholding
  • Article XI of the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which notes that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”
  • James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785), which notes that it is an “arrogant pretension” for “the Civil Magistrate” to presume to act as a “competent Judge of Religious Truth . . . [or] employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy”
  • Other examples from historical scholarship, teaching, or public life that illustrate the dynamic interactions of different faith traditions

Comments are public and will be published on the Religious Liberty Commission webpage. The commission will redact personal identifying information, so avoid relying on personal details that may be removed from your statement. Additional information and access to the draft report are available through the Department of Justice Religious Liberty Commission resources page. Stand up for history and social studies education. Your voice matters.

Additional AHA Resources