There are many reasons to celebrate the 250th year of American independence, but among the best is the tradition of religious liberty. Rather than merely tolerating dissent, the Founders achieved the great unshackling of human conscience. Among their number, this revolution in human sentiments may be best observed in John Adams, specifically with regard to his evolving views of Catholics.

　　The Pilgrims left England for a genuine love of liberty for themselves and their families. Yet they had an imperfect conception of liberty, one that was exclusive, not universal. While all sought to honestly and freely worship God according to the dictates of their conscience, it was a freedom to be secure in their own communities of faith—communities that were often shockingly intolerant. This is not to the disgrace of the Pilgrims or other Protestant colonists, of course. We rightfully celebrate them and their voyage as the first link in the great chain of liberty that brought us to our present moment, but it was only the first link. Essential, indispensable, but limited. The same could be said of other Protestants who came to the New World, including Puritans, Baptists, and Presbyterians.

　　A young John Adams matter-of-factly wrote it was said that these Colonies were peopled by Religion—But I should rather say that the Love of Liberty, projected conducted and accomplished the settlement of America. Yet this same John Adams saw no contradiction with excluding Roman Catholics from this liberty. John Locke defined this liberty in his Letter Concerning Toleration: it was only the majoritys toleration of a minoritys exercise of his religion in his own house. It did not extend to the public sphere. However, even this had limits if they were prejudicial to a commonwealth. Adams was so assured that a Catholic and an American were separate creatures that he would quip, A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance, as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, i.e. as rare as a Comet or an Earthquake. For John Adams, “roman Catholic Religion and civil slavery were one and the same. His cousin Samuel Adams, in his 1772 The Rights of the Colonists, staunchly defended mutual toleration as what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practised, but of course equivocated that Roman Catholics or Papists are excluded. To the colonists, toleration was a mere indulgence of the state, not a right preceding and inviolable by society.

　　By the time of his retirement back at his Braintree farm, John Adams had exemplified the revolution in religious rights America had undergone.

　　As the imperial crisis progressed and Americans were forced to join or die together to preserve their liberty, slow, subtle changes appeared in Adamss letters. He was forced to converse with those outside of his religious tradition. In 1774, as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, he travelled to Philadelphia, a Quaker city which allowed Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Deists to practice their faiths openly. This was a radical legal order to virtually all the delegates, such as Adams, whose conception of liberty was mere tolerance, not an inalienable and expansive right.

　　In this pluralist city, Adams was introduced to another member of Congress, Mr. Carrel [Carroll] of Annapolis, a very sensible Gentleman, a Roman catholic, and of the first Fortune in America. Charles Carroll was likely the first Catholic Adams had socialized with. The next month, Adams, in the company of Washington and Carroll, attended a Catholic Mass. Adams was obviously uncomfortable describing the Mass to his wife Abigail. Adams was torn between his previously expressed prejudice of Catholic rites as merely superstitious and his confession that the priest preached a sermon “founded in Justice and Charity.” Adams would soon see the Catholics of Philadelphia as “a respectable Congregation.”

　　Two years later, Adams was describing Carroll to his wife, Abigail, as a Professor of the Roman catholic Religion, yet a warm, a firm, a zealous Supporter of the Rights of America, in whose Cause he has hazarded his all. To James Warren, Adams wrote Carroll was educated in the Roman Catholic Religion, and Still continues to worship his Maker according to the Rites of that Church.” But he went on to “his Zeal Fortitude and Perseverance in the American cause. Adams was particularly impressed Carroll was ready to risk “his immense Fortune, the largest in America, and his Life” for American liberty. He concluded, “This Gentlemans Character, If I foresee aright, will hereafter make a greater Figure in America. Still, despite this newfound respect for a Catholic, Adams warned Abigail not to reveal the Continental Congresss Catholic outreach to a still hostile New England. This is not to understate his change in disposition towards a Catholic; Adams had gone from totally excluding Catholics from the name of American, to predicting his Catholic friend Carroll will hereafter make a greater Figure in America.

　　As America arched toward an independence based on self-evident truths originating in the Laws of Nature and of Natures God, the idea of mere toleration grew expansively to embrace liberty. Certainly, exclusion of any kind, and even toleration, could not support itself under the need for continental unity; only continental liberty could provide the incentive and hope that a lack of guns and supplies necessitated. Adams underwent this process in real time, for less than a month after his letters to Abigail and Warren he was writing instructions to Continental Commissioners traveling to Catholic Quebec, promising the Canadianswe hold sacred the rights of conscience, and may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion; and, to the clergy, the full, perfect, and peaceable possession and enjoyment of all their estates on the condition that all other denominations of Christians be equally entitled to hold offices, and enjoy civil privileges, and the free exercise of their religion, and be totally exempt from the payment of any tythes or taxes for the support of any religion. Adams was promising the free, public exercise of the Catholic faith as long as all other Christians were allowed the enjoyment of the same rights. Private toleration in the privacy of the home had been supplanted by an expansive, public right to preach, practice, and proselytize.

　　Soon enough, John Adams was sent away to serve as the American ambassador to France and then to England for the next decade. Adams negotiated trade agreements that opened American markets to French Catholic merchants, seamen, manufacturers, and subjects. He was opening an overwhelmingly Protestant polity to friendly commercial and cultural intercourse with a Catholic state. In conversation with Europeans, Adams was forced to confront the reality of religious intolerance. He witnessed in France how a religious establishment made men prideful and haughty, traits inconsistent with a free republican people. These experiences he brought back with him during his brief return to America, where he helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

　　At the State Convention, Adams fought delegates who proposed language in the oath of office he thought could be interpreted as subtly anti-Catholic. Article II of the Constitution legalized the public worship of Catholics for the first time in the history of Massachusetts, securing “worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” In retirement, when reviewing how the Massachusetts colonial charter secured toleration “of conscience to all Christians except Papists,” Adams couldn’t help but scoff at its presumption to give or take away free religious exercise: “Good God! A Grant of the King of Kings, which no Puppit of a Royalist upon Earth can give or take away?”

　　The draft of the Constitution that Adams helped frame abolished all penalties for Catholics on voting and holding office despite repeated attempts in the constitutional convention to exclude them. Adams begrudgingly accepted a compromise in Article III requiring “the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.” Adams later wrote that Article III was not “consistent with my own sentiments of perfect religious freedom.” This was a remarkable change from a decade earlier, when he celebrated the “barriers against Popery, erected by our Ancestors.” Adams had progressed from seeing mere toleration of Catholics as subversive of civil liberty to now removing barriers for Catholic political participation in American self-government.

　　Within that decade, America won the war, and then the peace by establishing a strong federal constitution, which provided no religious requirement for voting, and denied no person, no matter their faith or lack thereof, the ability to take office and swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Americans were acutely aware of the leap they had taken, and the effects were immediate. Commenting on the test clause, Oliver Ellsworth, for example, boasted that we are almost the only people in the world, who have a full enjoyment of this important right of human nature. In our country every man has a right to worship God in that way which is most agreeable to his conscience.”

　　Adams wrought in the American mind an unbreakable chain between religious freedom and individual liberty. That deserves celebration.

　　Although the Revolutionary War was over, the revolution in mores and morals continued apace. Adams was not unaffected. The phrase religious toleration, Adams said in 1786, might require replacement by “a stronger word and call it a right the first right of Mankind to worship God, according to their Consciences.” No longer did Adams equate Catholicism with slavery. He now said civil regulation of religious exercise and clergy was “inconsistent with the American Character, and with the Principles of our Constitutions.”In a remarkable progression in thought, Adams’s conception of what counts as “American” had exceptionally expanded.

　　In retirement, Adams looked back to when French navies and armies threatened an invasion of America in 1798–99. He boasted with pride at the companies of young, religiously diverse volunteers who offered their persons in the defense of their country:

　　Who composed that Army of fine young Fellows that was then before my Eyes? There were among them, Roman Catholicks, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anababtists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and “Protestans qui ne croyent rien.” Very few however of Several of these Species. Nevertheless all Educated in the General Principles of Christianity: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.

　　By the time of his retirement back at his Braintree farm, John Adams had exemplified the revolution in religious rights America had undergone. He claimed he had read away Bigotry, if not Enthusiasm. Adams was the first to donate money to the construction of the first Catholic Church in Massachusetts. Reflect on this change. John Adams had progressed from first believing no Catholic could be an American, to believing, perhaps, Catholics could be tolerated in their own homes, to now publicly affixing his name to a subscription to build a church Catholics could use for worship in public! He announced could no longer “condescend to employ the Word Tolleration: I assert that unlimitted Freedom of Religion.”

　　It is true that in Adams’s correspondence up to his death, disparaging remarks about the Catholic hierarchy regularly appear. Yet this derision was no stronger or harsher than Adams’s comments towards Protestant sects. Adams was as fiercely independent in religion as he was in politics, and he always believed any sect, Protestant or Catholic, like any one party, would inevitably degrade into despotism if left with unlimited power. He expressed to Jefferson that he had no doubt he would be reunited with many of all sects, including Catholics, in the next life. Near the top of those he most looked forward to “meet again to embrace each other in a future world,” with again was his old friend, Charles Carroll.

　　Adams felt he could confidently say: Ask me not then whether I am a Catholic or Protestant, Calvinist or Arminian? As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a Fellow Disciple with them all. His relationship with Carroll, his “unalterable friend,” proved this. As the Revolutionary generation quickly died out, Adams confided in Carroll how he increasingly looked back “on the times when you and I laboured together in a very rugged Vineyard, and I always recollect my conversations with you with great delight.” Their labors were not in vain—men like Carroll and Adams wrought in the American mind an unbreakable chain between religious freedom and individual liberty. That deserves celebration.