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America’s Best Idea: The First Amendment and the Freedom of Religion

Randall Balmer, John Phillips Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College

America’s best idea, the separation of church and state, is under attack by those who espouse Christian nationalism, which seeks to conflate religion and the state by means of religious symbols and taxpayer support for religious education. This is both bad theology and bad history. Jesus himself declared that his kingdom “was not of this world,” and the nation’s founders emphatically were not, as David Barton and other Christian nationalists argue, evangelical Christians. Painfully aware of the wars of religion in Europe and England, the founders wanted to avoid the entanglement of church and state while guaranteeing freedom of religion. In so doing, they were drawing on the ideas of Roger Williams, a former Puritan who founded the Baptist tradition in America. Williams wanted to separate the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a wall of separation – in large measure because he wanted to protect the integrity of the faith from interference by the state. The First Amendment has worked remarkably well throughout American history, and those who would seek to abrogate the separation of church and state are actually working against their own interests.

Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, is an award-winning historian, a CNN contributor, and commentator on religion in North America. After earning the Ph.D. from Princeton University, he taught at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Emory and Northwestern universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008. He is the author of eighteen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part PBS documentary. Dr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for writing and hosting that series.

He is a columnist for the Valley News and the Santa Fe New Mexican. His commentaries appear in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Des Moines Register. In 2024, he was given the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion.