{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.curtis.senate.gov/press-releases/curtis-religious-liberty-relies-on-civility-mutual-respect", "Curtis: Religious Liberty Relies on Civility, Mutual Respect", "2026-07-05", "2026", "2026-07", "Republican", "Senate", "UT", "John R. Curtis", "C001114", "www.curtis.senate.gov", "curtis", "https://www.curtis.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases", "scraper", "The Senator\u2019s remarks were delivered prior to Fourth of July celebrations and his 250-mile walk to commemorate the United States\u2019 semiquincentennial.\n\nVideo can be found here, and the remarks as prepared for delivery can be found below:\n\nAlmost two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six delegates to the Second Continental Congress affixed their signatures to the most influential document in the history of human rights\u2014the American Declaration of Independence. Over succeeding generations, more than one hundred other nations would model their own declarations of independence with statements that followed the American pattern of 1776.\n\nIt proclaimed liberty as an inalienable right, in what Walter Isaacson has called \u201cthe greatest sentence ever written.\u201d Among our inalienable rights, the document declared, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Defining \u201cliberty,\u201d giving definition, substance and legal guarantees of that right, has been one of America\u2019s greatest ongoing commitments to the betterment of humanity.\n\nAnd at the forefront of that pantheon of liberties the Declaration affirms has been the right to believe and practice religion according to the sacred dictates of 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\u2014in principle if not in fact\u2014in 97% of constitutions.\n\nWhen 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 \u201csoul conscience\u201d in 1636, and 150 years later, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson authored the pioneering Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. \u201cAlmighty God hath created the mind free,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain.\u201d The state legislation he proposed therefore decreed that no person \u201cshall \u2026 suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs \u2026 But \u2026 all [persons] shall be free to profess \u2026 their opinion in matters of religion.\u201d\n\nIt was a long journey from Jamestown and 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.\n\nOne 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 \u201ca culture of contempt.\u201d If you think you sense something alarming in the air, the statistics say you are correct. A March 2026 Pew Survey reveals the distressing fact that Americans view their fellow Americans with \u201cmore hostility and suspicion than is the case in any democracy surveyed.\u201d The United States is the only place \u2026 surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).\n\nWe can do better. We can be better.\n\nYes, as members of this national community, we have the right to espouse our values\u2014religious, moral, or political\u2014without 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 entwined with pluralism, because the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values and life orientations. The words \u201ckindness,\u201d \u201ccivility,\u201d and \u201ccharity\u201d nowhere appear in our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we will commemorate next week.\n\nThat 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 \u201ccivic charity\u201d was deeply embedded in the thought of John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; of Thomas Jefferson, America\u2019s \u201capostle of religious liberty;\u201d and of Abraham Lincoln, who so powerfully invoked the \u201cbetter angels of our nature\u201d at a time of national crisis.\n\nWe will never achieve consensus on the particulars of our religious commitments\u2014or our lack of religious commitments. Nor should we.\n\nOur pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride. However, we can honor our founding principles by returning to a particular kind of faith they did have in common. Faith in the essential goodness of one another. The psychologist Jamil Zaki has written, \u201cCynicism is the lack of faith in people; skepticism is the lack of faith in our assumptions.\u201d Charity is the only way whereby we flourish in our differences even as we work together for a more perfect union.", 1, "2026-07-06T08:59:18Z", "2026-07-06T09:01:25Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.curtis.senate.gov/press-releases/curtis-religious-liberty-relies-on-civility-mutual-respect"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.5947411302477121, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}