[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 106 (Wednesday, June 24, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Page S3189]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Religious Freedoms

  Mr. CURTIS. Mr. President, almost 250 years ago, 56 delegates to the 
Second Continental Congress affixed their signature to the most 
influential document in the history of human rights: the American 
Declaration of Independence.
  Over succeeding generations, more than 100 other nations would model 
their own declaration of independence with statements that followed the 
American pattern of 1776. It proclaimed liberty as an unalienable right 
in what Walter Isaacson has called ``the greatest sentence ever 
written.''
  Among our unalienable rights, the document declared, are ``Life, 
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' Defining liberty and giving 
definition, substance, and legal guarantees of that right has been one 
of America's greatest ongoing commitments to the betterment of 
humanity. And at the forefront of that pantheon of liberties the 
Declaration affirms has been the right to believe and practice religion 
according to the dictates of our own conscience.
  Four decades ago, 160 of 170 international constitutions were 
modeled, in whole or in part, on the American model. Freedom of 
religion is guaranteed in principle, if not in fact, in 97 percent of 
those constitutions.
  When the first colonists arrived in the New World, religious freedom 
existed in theory, like that of John Locke, but not in political 
practice. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the principle of sole 
conscience in 1636, and 150 years later, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson 
authored the pioneering Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

       Almighty God hath created the mind free and manifested his 
     Supreme will that free it shall remain.

  The State legislation he proposed therefore decreed that no person 
shall ``suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but 
that all [persons] shall be free to profess . . . their opinions in 
matters of religion.''
  It was a long journey from Jamestown to Plymouth Rock, to that 
Virginia statute, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
  America has made great progress, but the road has been, at times, 
harrowing for those people at the margins of our mainstream.
  Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts in 1659. Baptists were 
imprisoned in Virginia in the 1770s. Catholic convents and schools were 
burned in 1834. My own people, the Latter Day Saints, were mobbed and 
murdered in Missouri and Illinois in the decade to follow. And Jewish 
people have been the victims of discrimination and violence from the 
founding to the present.
  One of the lessons to be learned from this history is that you can 
legislate religious protections but you cannot legislate respect or 
compassion or bonds of charity. Yet religious freedom hinges on these 
virtues.
  Our public discourse, however, has never tipped so precariously into 
what Arthur Brooks has called a ``culture of contempt.'' If you think 
you sense something alarming in the air, the statistics say you are 
right. A March 2026 Pew survey reveals the distressing fact that 
Americans view their fellow Americans with more hostility and suspicion 
than is the case in any democracy surveyed.
  The United States is the only place surveyed where more adults 
describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as 
bad, 53 percent, than as good, 47 percent. We can do better. We have to 
do better.
  Yes, as members of this national community, we have the right to 
espouse our values--religious, moral, or political--without hindrance 
or constraint. That also means we must accord to others the right to 
espouse their values without hindrance or constraint.
  Religious freedom is distinctly intertwined with pluralism because 
the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values 
and other life orientations.
  The words ``kindness,'' ``civility,'' and ``charity'' nowhere appear 
in our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, whose 
anniversary we will commemorate next week. That is because those values 
were presupposed by the Founders.
  This grand experiment in democracy required for its organization and 
requires for its continuation a willingness to build bridges of 
understanding, as well as defend principles to which we are committed.
  Dr. Matthew Holland has written of how civic charity is deeply 
embedded in our thoughts; John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts 
Bay Colony, of Thomas Jefferson, America's apostle of religious 
liberty, and of Abraham Lincoln, who so powerfully invoked the better 
angels of our nature at a time of national crisis.
  We will never achieve consensus on the particulars of our religious 
commitments or our lack of religious commitments, nor should we. Our 
pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride.
  However, we can honor our founding principles by returning to the 
particular kind of faith they did have in common: faith in the 
essential goodness of each other and one another.
  The psychologist Jamil Zaki has written: Cynicism is a lack of faith 
in people. Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Charity is 
the only way whereby we flourish in our differences, even as we work 
together for a more perfect Union.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.