Free Exercise: America’s Story of Religious Liberty, a new documentary film produced in connection with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, recounts the history of religious freedom in our country from colonial times until today. Narrated by journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser, the film focuses on six episodes in which minority religious groups fought for their right to practice their faiths and participate as equal citizens: Quakers in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam; Baptists in eighteenth-century Virginia; and Black Christians, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The film ends with a panel discussion on religious freedom today, when newly arrived communities like Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists likewise wish to make their way in American society while remaining true to their religious heritage.

Free Exercise is an engaging and instructive film. The producers have interviewed noted scholars and commentators, including Michael McConnell, Akhil Amar, Rick Garnett, and others known to Law & Liberty readers, as well as several religious leaders. All have interesting things to say. The film humanizes the history of religious freedom in America. It shows that, as much as on legal texts like the First Amendment, religious freedom has depended on the decisions of everyday Americans, both members of minority religions who insisted on their rights and members of majority communities who gradually, and not without conflict, came to see their neighbors with different beliefs and practices as equally worthy participants in American society. The film suggests that by holding America to its formal commitment to religious freedom, minority religions have made our country a more peaceful and tolerant place, a real achievement in a world in which brutal religious persecution unfortunately continues.

But—and here is a point the film doesn’t make, but could have—those religions often changed as well. Religions that began by threatening basic American norms often came to adopt them over time. The story of religious freedom in America is not only one of our society’s gradual acceptance of religious differences. It is also the story of minority religions moderating in ways that minimized intercommunal tensions and allowed groups to live together in peace.

The film begins in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company, which ran the colony from the Netherlands and cared principally about making money, welcomed other peoples to New Amsterdam, including Portuguese Jews and English Quakers. Many of the latter group fled persecution in the New England colonies. Put out of your mind the image of sober, industrious pacifists with broad-brimmed hats. Seventeenth-century Quakers were a rowdy bunch given to loud public proselytizing that involved breaking bottles. New Amsterdam’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, not an easy-going man in the best of circumstances, found this behavior obnoxious and, in 1656, banned Quakers from holding public meetings.

A group of colonists in what is now Flushing, a neighborhood in New York City’s Borough of Queens, signed a petition refusing to cooperate with Stuyvesant’s order. The Flushing Remonstrance argued that Quakers should be tolerated on Christian grounds—an interesting fact, given the conventional (but incorrect) understanding that religious freedom derived entirely from Enlightenment rather than Christian commitments. The citizens of Flushing, the petition declared, would allow Quakers to operate among them unmolested, “desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us, which is the true law both of Church and State; for our Saviour sayeth this is the law and the prophets.”

All 31 signers of the Remonstrance were English, not Dutch, which suggests that the protest had an ethnic component. But none of the signers were Quakers, and from a religious perspective, the petitioners were entirely disinterested. Stuyvesant put the leaders of the protest in prison but relented when the Dutch West India Company countermanded his order and instructed him to stop oppressing religious minorities. Religious persecution was bad for business.

Another minority community that challenged majority beliefs were Catholics. Until well into the twentieth century, Americans saw Catholicism as a threatening force, deeply inimical to the country’s core values. As late as 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked privately that America was a Protestant country and Catholics (and Jews) were here “on sufferance.” The film explores the anti-Catholic riots that broke out in New York and Philadelphia in the 1830s, where mobs burned Catholic churches. (One image from the film stands out: St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in lower Manhattan, surrounded by a wall that still stands, where parishioners stood with guns to protect the church from Know-Nothings who attacked it.) In the 1920s, the Klan led a campaign to close Catholic schools. In 1928, anti-Catholicism helped defeat the Democratic candidate for president, Al Smith.

The LDS Church provides an even starker example. Founded in upstate New York by Joseph Smith in the 1830s, the Mormons, a non-Trinitarian group with their own scripture, posed a serious challenge to the orthodox Protestant majority—especially given the Mormon practice of plural marriage. State governments, and eventually the federal government as well, severely harassed the Mormons, who fled across the continent and settled in the Utah Territory. When Mormons challenged the territory’s law against bigamy as a violation of their free exercise rights, the Supreme Court scoffed. In Reynolds v. United States (1878) and Davis v. Beason (1890), the Court held that the First Amendment did not require giving Mormons the right to practice plural marriage. In fact, the Court said in Davis, polygamy should not be dignified as a “religious” practice at all.

Yet today, Catholics and Mormons are part of mainstream American life. The current president is Catholic; whatever objections his opponents have to him, religion is not among them. A Mormon ran for president on the Republican ticket in 2012 and narrowly lost. In some measure, as Free Exercise suggests, Catholics and Mormons are accepted today because they fought for their rights and because America lived up to its core commitment to religious freedom. The United States proved worthy of the First Amendment.

But that is only part of the explanation. The other part is that, like the Quakers, who went from being bottle-breaking radicals to sober citizens, Catholics and Mormons themselves changed in ways that made them less threatening to the American majority. One major point of contention between the Catholic Church and the wider American society had to do with religious liberty itself. The nineteenth-century Church was the Church of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), a papal document that condemned freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state as dangerous heresies. America’s Protestant majority saw this document and the values it espoused as hostile to fundamental American commitments. In the 1928 campaign, The Atlantic published an open letter questioning whether a Catholic like Smith could serve as president, citing the Syllabus and other papal pronouncements on church and state.

A hundred years later, though, and largely through the efforts of American Catholics like Fr. John Courtney Murray, the Second Vatican Council adopted Dignitatis Humanae, a document that specifically endorses religious liberty as a civil right. Catholic scholars have argued that Dignitatis Humanae and the Syllabus of Errors can be interpreted consistently with one another and that, from a theological perspective, there was no change. However theologians understand the situation, though, after Dignitatis Humanae, something had indeed changed as a practical matter. A major point of tension between the Catholic Church and American culture had disappeared, largely because of American influence.

Or consider the LDS Church. A primary source of conflict between Mormons and the wider American society in the nineteenth century had to do with plural marriage, the issue in cases like Reynolds and Davis. In 1890, however, the LDS Church officially ended the practice—making it possible for Utah to be admitted as a state six years later. Practically speaking, Mormonism changed in a way that made it much less threatening to the wider American public. Mormons conformed to social convention, and relations between the LDS Church and other Americans have been better ever since.

What causes religions in America to move toward the mean over time? Some argue that the Lockean ideology that underlies our First Amendment is designed to encourage religious moderation—to minimize religious “enthusiasms” that threaten social peace. If that’s the case, Lockeanism certainly seems to be working. Or perhaps another factor explains things. Two hundred years ago, Tocqueville wrote about the strong pressures for social conformity that exist in the United States, where he observed “little independence of mind.” Whether as a result of ideology or social norms, or both, the pattern is apparent.

Of course, another way to describe religious moderation is the watering-down of important spiritual commitments, and that is not necessarily a good thing. Free Exercise doesn’t address that question, but that doesn’t detract from the film’s importance. The film offers an accessible and engaging treatment of the history of religious freedom in America and will interest anyone who wants to know more about it. For information about where to view the film, check out the website, here.