Remarks from Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Jared Huffman
Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Jared Huffman received the Religious Liberty Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. The award honors individuals who demonstrate exceptional dedication to religious freedom, tolerance and diverse beliefs, celebrating those who courageously defend the rights to practice any faith or no faith at all, and who foster understanding and respect and peaceful coexistence among diverse belief systems.
Congressman Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fourth Term at the start of the 118th Congress on January 6, 2023. He co-chairs the Congressional Freethought Caucus and is a co-founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. As Chair of the Oversight Committee’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee Raskin has said, “I’ve helped lead the Oversight Committee’s painstaking investigation into violent white supremacy over the last two years. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declared domestic violent extremism the number one security threat in the country. We saw that threat explode right in front of our eyes at the Capitol on January 6.”
This text is excerpted from Rep. Raskin’s acceptance speech at the Conference.
Rep. Jamie Raskin: We Look Forward to Continuing Our Work
HELLO, TO ALL MY FRIENDS out at the American Humanist Association. Thanks for this very cool honor of receiving the Religious Freedom Award with my very close friend Jared Huffman from California. This is exciting for us.
We held hands and jumped into the deep end of the pool when we created the Congressional Freethought Caucus. But we’re picking up a lot of steam now, and we have tons of people who want to join and we obviously have an important role to play in the Congress, where the theocratic majority continues to trample basic constitutional principles. So it’s an honor to receive this Religious Freedom Award.
Sometimes the right wing talks about the Establishment Clause of the Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause as being in tension with each other, and that’s because they want to establish more and more religion, and they think that the Establishment Clause and preventing an establishment of religion is actually impeding their free exercise of religion. But, of course, as Madison and Jefferson imagined it, your free exercise of religion does not depend upon imposing on anyone else your beliefs or your theocratic code. That is not what free exercise means. It means that you have the right to worship exactly as you please and to ascribe the contents of your own beliefs—that’s between you and your God, or your gods or your ethical or philosophical system, whatever it is, that’s a matter for you to decide, and not for the government.
It’s only when they think that free exercise means you’ve got the right to read a prayer to your students in the classroom in a public school and compel them all to participate. Or free exercise means you want to take money from the taxpayers and give it to churches. That’s not free exercise, but it does violate the Establishment Clause. And so we are trying to get that balance right, and we are trying to remind people that the Free Exercise Clause and Establishment Clause stand best when they stand together.
And a very important reason we have the Establishment Clause is to keep one religious church, or sect or cult from seizing state power and then violating everybody else’s religious freedom. And so many of the cases we’ve seen in American history, like Engel v. Vitale or Stone v. Graham, about the Ten Commandments resolutions, or about prayer in the schools, they’re about one group seizing governmental power and then imposing religious orthodoxy on everybody else. That’s why we say the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause stand best when they stand together. They stand for the same principle, which is the right of each person, every man, every woman, every child, to make their own decisions and not to be imposed upon and coerced by an establishment church. The value of religious freedom is one that’s critical to the First Amendment and a free society. In this free society, the American founders were rebelling against millennia of established churches, religious warfare between the Catholics and the Protestants, Holy Crusades, inquisitions, witchcraft trials, you name it. They wanted to break from the nightmare of theocratic rule and the imposition of religious orthodoxy and doctrine on free citizens.
So, thank you for this recognition, and we look forward to continuing in our work with you and with millions of Americans across the country on behalf of the separation of church and state and religious freedom in America. Thanks so much.
Congressman Jared Huffman represents California’s 2nd Congressional District. He was first elected to Congress in November 2012 and currently serves on the Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Huffman also co-founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which he co-chairs, to promote sound public policy based on reason, science and moral values, while protecting the secular character of government and championing the value of freedom of thought worldwide.
During his time in Congress, Huffman has built a reputation as a progressive leader and an environmental expert who focuses on making a difference. He is also committed to ensuring our communities are resilient to the effects of climate change, including wildfires and droughts. He has been instrumental in defending America’s coastlines from offshore oil and gas drilling, introducing legislation to protect the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as part of a coordinated, nationwide effort to protect oceanic ecosystems and coastal economies, while reducing our unhealthy dependency on fossil fuels.
This text is excerpted from Rep. Huffman’s acceptance speech at the Conference.
Congressman Jared Huffman: We Have a Lot More Work to Do
THANK YOU VERY MUCH. And, hello, humanists, it’s great to be with you. I am honored to work so closely with the American Humanist Association, just an incredibly essential ally of mine and of Jamie Raskin’s as we do what we can to protect church-state separation. Receiving this award jointly with my pal Jamie Raskin is also really special, because he and I have just become incredibly great allies and fast friends. He’s a superstar. You all know that the only lousy thing about working with Jamie is I sometimes have to be part of the same program or on the same stage, and that’s really hard to do because he’s so good, and sometimes I have to actually follow him. I’ll be the junior partner in that relationship any day, because I’m just delighted to work with him.
I’m also just really honored to be part of a program that includes an award that you’re later going to give to Amy Goodman. Congratulations to her and everyone else who has received the Humanist of the Year Award. I feel like I am really in rarefied air here.
I am the only open humanist in the United States Congress, and I’m really proud of that. I mean, I just can’t imagine a better moral and ethical framework, especially in this day and age, than trying to live your life based on facts and science and critical thinking and reason. Jamie Raskin talked about this theocracy agenda that he and I and our Freethought Caucus colleagues are battling. It is coming at us with a lot of force and desperation, really these days, because religious fundamentalists and Christian Nationalists do sense that the country is slipping away from them. They can look at the Pew Research and everything else that says that people are fleeing traditional religious denominations in record numbers. This trend has been going on for decades.
But the truth is, you know, some of these ancient dogmas, and especially this extreme combat Christianity that these folks are trying to force on everyone lately, it just doesn’t have appeal to people in the modern era, especially to young people. The numbers should be no surprise to anyone. But Jamie’s not exaggerating when he talks about this being the modern equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials. In fact, literally today, some of these leading Christian Nationalist pastors are out there—people very close to Donald Trump are out there—calling Taylor Swift a satanic witch for the crime of not endorsing Donald Trump. This is the madness and insanity that we are up against.
It’s bad enough when it’s just craziness swirling around on the internet, but this stuff has gotten real traction at the highest levels of our government. You know this. You know that the Christian Nationalist movement has been seated in top positions of leadership, from state legislatures, throughout the judiciary at every level, all the way to the Supreme Court and even in the United States Congress. There are estimates that as many as 100 members of the Republican Party are followers of this Dominionist Christianity led by the New Apostolic Reformation.
This is not compatible with democracy. This is the imposition of these ancient moral codes and religious dogmas in fundamentally anti-democratic ways. It certainly is unconstitutional in this country. It’s un-American to most of us, and it’s something that we need to take very, very seriously.
But we’ve got a lot going for us, folks, starting with facts and the fact that most people, even people of faith, very sincere people of faith, don’t want to live in a theocracy, let alone a Christian equivalent to what the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan right now.
I am ready for this fight. I know all of you are, too. We’re going to keep doing everything we can to defend true religious freedom, which includes the freedom to not exercise any religion. And increasingly, people are getting it. People are respecting us.
Our Congressional Freethought Caucus is now up to two dozen members and growing. We are respected significantly throughout the Democratic caucus, we are making waves, and we have a lot more work to do in the months and years ahead, in close partnership with the American Humanist Association. Thanks so much for this award.