Free Exercise: America’s Story of Religious Liberty

Directed by Leo Eaton and John Paulson; produced by Thomas D. Lehrman, Leo Eaton, and John Paulson. Virgil Films, 2024. 118 minutes. Available to stream for $3.99/rent; $9.99/buy.

In telling the story of religious liberty in America, the new documentary Free Exercise not only educates viewers about this important history, but inspires us to avoid complacency and remain ever vigilant to preserve the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. The film tells this evolving story chronologically through the struggles of six different religious groups: Quakers, Baptists, Black churches, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.

Interviews with dozens of experts, historians, professors, and religious leaders provide helpful context as we take in engaging visuals such as historical reenactments of pivotal events and presentation of archival documents, photographs, and footage. Host and narrator Richard Brookhiser acts as our guide, traveling across the country highlighting key moments, places, and people to help us better grasp the meaning and intent of the Free Exercise Clause and how it continues to shape America today.

The first section, “Quakers and the Flushing Remonstrance,” details the persecution that Friends faced both in Europe and in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The filmmakers do not hold back in recounting the torture and death that some Quakers faced due to Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s intolerance. In this first “case study,” the film reveals the response of 31 men in their 1657 letter to Governor Stuyvesant: “Our desire is to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us for our Saviour sayeth this is the law of the prophets.” These men appeal to the Dutch West India Company, and they order Stuyvesant to tolerate Quakers and other religious minorities. It is with this early Quaker group that religious freedom was granted under pragmatic pressure.

The next section tells how Baptists, too, were persecuted because of their beliefs and practices. They refused to pay a mandatory church tax. In response to this conflict, James Madison takes a stand that toleration is not the right approach, and that they should instead embrace religious diversity. He brought this stance to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia where eventually the nation’s Bill of Rights was adopted.

“Black Churches: Free at Last” recounts how and why Black churches were formed. Black parishioners were considered “second class” Christians, if allowed to attend church at all. In this landscape of prejudice and discrimination, distinct Black churches grew. They taught enslaved people to read and also promoted the reading of the Bible. Religious salvation and emancipation became intertwined. This connection between Black churches and social activism continues today.

The next section addresses the discrimination and violence Irish Catholic immigrants faced in the first part of the twentieth century. The 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan targeted Jews, Catholics, and other religious minorities as well as Black citizens. The Protestant Bible was taught in public schools, but Catholic parents wanted their children to attend schools where the Catholic Bible was used. In 1925, the courts ruled that parents had the right to send their children to a church-sponsored school instead of a public school. This ruling legally also opened the way for Quaker schools across the country.

The brutal persecution of Mormons described in the next part of the film shocked me. Shortly after their arrival in northwestern Missouri in 1838, the governor signed a “removal or extermination” order to drive them out. Here once again, the court intervened. The Fourteenth Amendment had not been applied when state and federal laws came into conflict, but in this ruling the right to religious freedom in every state became law.

Next came General Grant’s 1862 expulsion order for Jews in parts of the Civil War South. This order was appealed to President Abraham Lincoln who revoked the order. Lincoln’s statement proclaimed that the country would no longer speak of toleration as though Jews were here on sufferance from someone else. He asserted that Jews had as much right as any church to worship as their faith dictated. Again, this strengthens the right of minority religions to worship freely without fear of persecution.

The last section quickly brings the viewer into the present. The legal response by the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress to address discrimination and violence summarizes the protection of religious freedom in the last decade.

Free Exercise tells a compelling and comprehensive story. Several panel discussions and extended interviews with people from the film are available on YouTube (@FreeExerciseMovie). The PBS LearningMedia website (pbslearningmedia.org) provides free educational resources and materials aimed at high schoolers for each of the seven sections covered. The film concludes with this call to action, from legal scholar Akhil Amar: “Religious liberty will not survive and thrive unless it lives in the hearts and minds of the American people.”

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Hope Ascher is a member of Quaker Meeting of Melbourne (Fla.), an educator, an avid reader, and naturalist. She worked with issues of religious liberty in public schools in a large school district.