Attorney General Barr to the Defense

Barr began by noting the centrality of freedom of religious conscience to the nation’s Founders. The Declaration of Independence lists “the pursuit of happiness” among the “inalienable rights” with which all men are “endowed by their Creator.” That does not mean the right to have as much fun as possible, as modern readers might assume. Rather, as Carl Conklin argues in The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History, it refers to the freedom to live a life of virtue consonant with the recognition that G-d created the universe with both physical and moral laws that direct the universe to its ultimate perfection.

James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, described religious liberty as a “duty to the Creator… precedent in both order of time and degree of obligation to the claims of Civil Society.”

Barr went on to explain why the Founders viewed the cause of liberty as inextricably bound to the religious and moral nature of the people. As John Adams famously put it, “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made for only a moral and religious people.”

In other words, the freedom from governmental tyranny for which the Revolution was fought would be sustainable only if liberty did not give way to libertinism and rapacity. The choice to be made is between self-control and the external control by the government. Edmund Burke stated the matter clearly: “Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their dispositions to put chains upon their appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is in place somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”