Much like my great nieces and nephews who will never know a world without the technologies of our age, I grew up just past the fringe of a time before freedom of conscience, religious liberty and the rise of amicable interfaith relationships were taken for granted by the Catholic Church. What, you say? Wasn’t the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights promulgated in 1791? True, but amazingly (to me) it took the Catholic Church another 175 years to recognize its wisdom.
A newsletter published recently by my congregation’s Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Committee (JPIC) reminded me of this. It included a reference to U.S Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, who in the mid-20th century championed the genius of the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
No time here for a long history, but briefly, it took the Church so long to catch up because it operated from a frame that recognized the Church as God’s temporal kingdom-on-earth. Separation of church and state, despite a long history of conflict over this very issue, could not be conceived. Some might say we are still struggling with this challenge, and I’m inclined to agree that, at the very least, this worldview has a long tail still trailing through the 21st century.
When Murray began his work on the theological underpinnings of the non-establishment clause, he understood it as a political and pragmatic necessity for a nascent republic forged from 13 colonies with unique religious histories. He called it “an article of peace” adopted by the colonists out of necessity born of the religious pluralism that was a fact of life in the colonies. Murray was quick to say that the clause itself possesses “no religious content” – and that is as it should be – giving no quarter to those who might try to imbue it with such content on the way to eroding the rights of conscience that belong to all people – in the U.S. and everywhere else.
This is something I’ve taken for granted all my life, yet even in my young lifetime it was still considered suspect by much of the Catholic hierarchy. In fact, Murray’s democratic theological perspective, developed beginning in the mid-1940s, was not universally embraced.
In an essay in the American Ecclesiastical Review in 1950 – published in response to another theologian highly critical of Murray’s position – he wrote that it wasn’t “a permanent and unalterable” legal requirement that Catholicism be the official church of any state. He made the case that it wasn’t the church’s job to create social order and it wasn’t the government’s job to “save souls.” This, among other writings, got him silenced by his Jesuit superiors and the Vatican in 1954.
When the sanction was lifted by Pope John XXII just before the council, another of his essays, The Return to Tribalism, shared wisdom we would do well to heed today.
He began by recognizing the reality of religious diversity in the U.S., which he considered “regrettable.” That would not be the characterization most Catholic theologians would use today. Crucially, Murray acknowledged that, as regrettable as “disunity” may be, the alternative is more so. “These religious divisions are not to be blurred, they are not to be transcended in the name of some common secular democratic faith and they are not to be reduced to some religious common denominator. This would, of course, be the end.”
“The end” – which Murray recognized would come at an untenable cost – seems now, at times, to be the very desire of certain politically powerful persons and organizations today. What he recognized, and what we could profitably remember, is that the cost of such unity is a state religion, or state-as-religion, coercion of conscience, and ultimately, a failure to recognize the foundational principle of justice – the profound, irreducible dignity and freedom of conscience that belongs to each person.
Finally, almost 175 years after the Bill of Rights, Murray and other theologians who were writing about religious liberty, the primacy of conscience, and the role of the Church within the state, were ultimately persuasive, leading to the promulgation, in 1965, of the Declaration on Religious Liberty.
Along with Murray, the most well-known of the group were the French Dominican Yves Congar who championed the primacy of conscience, and a young Polish theologian who knew first-hand the soul-depleting consequences of the state-as-religion under Stalin, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II.
Using the expected gendered language of the times, they wrote in the declaration “Contemporary man is becoming increasingly conscious of the dignity of the human person; more and more people are demanding that men should exercise fully their own judgment and a responsible freedom in their actions and should not be subject to the pressure of coercion …”
Then, a few paragraphs later: “… to deny man the free exercise of religion in society … is to do an injustice to the human person and the very order establish by God for men.” In this is our strength.
Springfield Dominican Sister Beth Murphy is, as of this month, the international columns editor for Global Sisters Report, a digital publication of National Catholic Reporter.
This article appears in October 1-7, 2026.
