An essay on the importance of the First Amendment, adapted from an analysis first prepared for the Winnebago County Board of Supervisors in 2021 to remind fellow public officials of the critical guardrails the Bill of Rights places around all of us.

A Note on Origins

What follows began as a working document, not an essay. In 2021, while serving on the Winnebago County Board, I drafted an analysis of a proposed resolution declaring the county a “First Amendment Sanctuary.” My aim was modest and practical: to help my colleagues and the constituents who had written to me understand exactly what the First Amendment protects, where its language came from, and why a body of local officials should care about it at all. Local government is where most people encounter government, in zoning hearings, library boards, county budgets, and public-comment periods. It seemed to me that the people who administer that machinery owed it to their neighbors to understand the first and most fundamental restraints the Constitution places on power.

I have returned to that document because the questions it raised have not aged. If anything, they have grown more urgent. Debates over what may be said and where, over who decides which speech is acceptable, over the line between a church and the state, and over the public’s right to criticize officials and petition for change; these are not relics of 1791 or even of 2021. They are the live wires of our present moment. The First Amendment is not self-enforcing. It survives only to the degree that each generation understands it, values it, and insists upon it. That is why I thought the original analysis was worth expanding into something more lasting. We stay free by staying vigilant, and vigilance begins with remembering what we are guarding.

Forty-Five Words

The entire First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Forty-five words, ratified as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Into that single sentence, the founders compressed five distinct freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. It is worth pausing on how much restraint is packed into so little text. The amendment does not grant these rights; it assumes they already belong to the people and forbids the government from taking them away. The grammar is a series of prohibitions aimed not at citizens but at Congress: “shall make no law.” The Bill of Rights, in other words, is a list of things the government may not do to you.

The principal architect of the amendment was James Madison, who drew on a remarkable range of contributors and predecessors, including Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Jay, and others, reaching back through English and Enlightenment thinkers such as Sir William Blackstone, John Locke, and Thomas Paine. The text did not appear from nowhere. It was the distillation of centuries of hard-won experience with governments that punished dissent, established official churches, censored printing presses, and ignored the grievances of the governed.

Why the Founders Thought This Mattered More Than Almost Anything

It is tempting to treat the Bill of Rights as boilerplate; the kind of solemn language found in every founding document. The founders did not see it that way. Several of them worried that a written list of rights might prove to be what Madison called a “parchment barrier”, or words on paper that an ambitious government could simply ignore. Others, including Jefferson, argued that a Bill of Rights was worth having precisely because it would educate the people. It would teach, in plain and memorable language, the truths a free people must never forget. As Jefferson put it, “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” The Bill of Rights was meant to be read, taught, and internalized as much as a legal instrument.

Benjamin Franklin, writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, put the stakes about as plainly as anyone ever has: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” Note Franklin’s metaphor. Free expression is not an ornament on the building of self-government; it is one of the load-bearing pillars. Pull it out, and the structure does not merely lose a feature; it collapses.

John Adams sounded a darker warning about how easily liberty, once surrendered, is lost: “A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.” Adams understood something that comfortable generations tend to forget: rights are far easier to keep than to recover. A person who lets their freedoms erode rarely gets a clean chance to win them back. And Daniel Webster reminded us that the threat does not always arrive wearing the face of a villain: “Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. . . . It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.” The most dangerous encroachments on liberty are often the ones offered for our own good.

These were not naive idealists. They had lived under a government that did the very things the First Amendment forbids, and they wrote from memory, not theory.

The Five Freedoms, One by One

Religion

The amendment opens with two clauses about religion that work together. The Establishment Clause forbids the government from setting up an official religion or favoring one faith over others. The Free Exercise Clause forbids the government from interfering with how people practice, or decline to practice their faith. Together they create something genuinely novel in the history of nations: a public square in which the government takes no side in matters of conscience, and in which a person’s standing as a citizen does not depend on what they believe about God.

It is worth noting that the familiar phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution itself. It comes from a private letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, in which he described the religion clauses as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” That image lay largely dormant in constitutional law until 1947, when Justice Hugo Black invoked it in Everson v. Board of Education, after which it became central to how courts read the Establishment Clause. History matters because it reminds us that how we talk about a right and how courts apply it can shift considerably over time, even when the text does not change. Understanding the original language and its history is the surest guard against either overreading or underreading what the founders actually wrote.

Speech

Freedom of speech is the freedom the founders returned to most often, and for good reason. In Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary, speech is defined as “the faculty of expressing thoughts by words or articulate sounds,” and Webster adds, tellingly, that “speech was given to man by his Creator for the noblest purposes.” Whatever one’s view of that last phrase, the underlying point is universal: the ability to say what we think is bound up with the ability to think at all. Freedom of speech is, in a real sense, freedom of thought made audible.

This is also the freedom that most severely tests our sincerity, because protecting speech means protecting speech we hate. The First Amendment offers nothing to a society that only tolerates agreeable opinions; every tyranny does that much. Its entire value lies in shielding the unpopular, the offensive, the heretical, and the merely annoying. As one observer put it, we must insist not only on our own right to speak but on the right of others to do the same, even when we disagree, lest we all lose the freedom to speak our minds. A right to free speech that evaporates the moment speech becomes uncomfortable is no right at all.

Press

Freedom of the press extends the logic of free speech to printed and published words and, by natural extension, to broadcasts, websites, and social media posts. Webster’s 1828 dictionary draws a sharp and still-relevant distinction: “A free press is a great blessing to a free people; a licentious press is a curse to society.” Freedom is precious precisely because it can be abused, and the founders accepted that trade-off with open eyes. A press free to inform is also free to mislead; the remedy they chose was not censorship but more speech, more scrutiny, more competing voices. The press exists, in the founders’ conception, so that citizens can keep watch on power. Franklin made the connection explicit: republics “derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.” A government that cannot be examined cannot be held accountable.

Assembly

The right “peaceably to assemble” protects our ability to gather in meetings, marches, congregations, unions, clubs, and movements. Webster defined “peaceably” as acting “without disturbance; quietly; without agitation; without interruption,” and the qualifier matters: the Constitution protects peaceful assembly, not riot. But within that boundary, the right is expansive and essential. Almost every significant reform in American history (abolition, suffrage, labor protections, and civil rights) advanced because people with little power combined their voices into a force that could not be ignored. Assembly is how the powerless become audible. Strip it away, and you have atomized the citizenry, leaving each person to face the government alone.

Petition

The fifth freedom, the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” is the oldest of all and the least discussed. Its lineage runs back through the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the colonial Declaration of Rights and Grievances of 1765, and ultimately to Magna Carta in 1215. A “grievance,” in Webster’s definition, is “that which causes grief or uneasiness; that which burdens, oppresses, or injures, implying a sense of wrong done.” To petition is to demand that the government answer for that wrong. This is the freedom that turns subjects into citizens. In a monarchy, one might beg the king’s mercy; in a republic, the people have a recognized right to confront their government, name its failures, and insist on a remedy. Every constituent email, every public-comment period, every signature on a ballot initiative is an exercise of this 800-year-old right.

Words Have Meaning, and Meanings Drift

One lesson I took from the original analysis, and want to preserve here, is that the words of the First Amendment carry specific historical meanings that repay careful attention. Jefferson advised exactly this in a 1823 letter: “On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and . . . conform to the probable [meaning] which was passed.” This is not a partisan point. Whatever one’s theory of constitutional interpretation, no honest reading can ignore what the words meant to the people who wrote and ratified them.

Consider the word “establishment.” To us, it may suggest something vague. In Webster’s 1828 dictionary, it means “the act of establishing, founding, ratifying, or ordaining”, a “settled law” or “fundamental principle,” from the Latin stabilire, “to make firm.” An “establishment of religion,” then, was the act of the state firmly founding an official church, as England had done. Or take “free”: Webster’s first definition is “being at liberty; not being under necessity or restraint, physical or moral,” and in the context of government, “not subject to the arbitrary will of a sovereign or lord . . . subject only to fixed laws, made by consent.” Freedom, to the founders, was not the absence of all rules but the absence of arbitrary rule, government by consent, and fixed law rather than by the whim of the powerful. Recovering these meanings does not settle every modern dispute, but it disciplines the conversation. It keeps us honest about what the text says and protects us from squeezing, in Jefferson’s phrase, whatever meaning we wish were there out of it.

The Deep Roots of a Young Republic’s Rights

Though the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, none of its five freedoms was invented in 1791. Each had a long pedigree in English and colonial law, and the founders knew it. The right of petition traces to Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689). The American colonies wrote these protections into their own founding documents long before the federal Constitution existed: free exercise of religion appeared in Maryland’s Act Concerning Religion and Virginia’s Declaration of Rights; free speech in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641; free press and assembly in the Pennsylvania and Virginia declarations of rights. The framers were not drafting on a blank page. They were gathering up the best of a centuries-long tradition and binding it into the supreme law of a new nation, so that what earlier generations had won by struggle could not be casually taken back.

Key Sources for Consideration: The Five Freedoms and Their Origins

The lineage can be set out at a glance. The chart below traces each of the five freedoms from its first protecting document, through its earliest American and constitutional expressions, to the ratification-era debate that surrounded it.

IN ITS ENTIRETY
Magna Carta (1215), Petition of a Right (1628), Pa. Charter of Privileges (1701), George Mason’s Objections (1787), Reasons of Dissent by Minority of Pennsylvania Convention (1787), Jefferson-Madison correspondence on bill of rights (1787-1789), Madison proposes amendments (1789), 1 Founders’ Constitution at 449 (Wilson’s speech delivered October 6, 1787).
BILL OF RIGHT / CLAUSE	FIRST DIRECT DOCUMENT PROTECTING	FIRST DIRECT AMERICAN PROTECTING	FIRST CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION	FEDERALIST / ANTI-FEDERALIST
Establishment of religion	Rights of the Colonists (Boston)	Same	N.J. Constitution, Art. XIX	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1
Free Exercise of religion	Maryland Act Concerning Religion	Same	Va. Declaration of Rights, S. 16	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1
Free Speech	Mass. Body of Liberties, S. 12	Same	Pa. Declaration of Rights, Art. XII	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1
Free Press	Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec	Same	Va. Declaration of Rights, S. 12	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1
Assembly	Declaration and Resolves, Continental Congress	Same	Pa. Declaration of Rights, Art. XVI	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1
Petition	English Bill of Rights (1689)	Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765), S. XIII	Pa. Declaration of Rights, Art. XVI	Federalist 10, 84, 85 John Dewitt No. I, II Brutus No. 1

The pattern is unmistakable. Not one of these freedoms began with the First Amendment; each was the inheritance of a long struggle, gathered up and secured in a single sentence.

This history is a source of both confidence and humility. Confidence, because our liberties rest on far more than the opinion of a single-founded generation; they are the accumulated wisdom of people who learned, often the hard way, what happens when government is left unchecked. Humility, because that same history shows how often these freedoms were denied, suspended, or clawed back, and how much effort it took to secure them. Rights are not the natural condition of human government. Tyranny is the historical default. The First Amendment is part of a long, fragile, and still-unfinished effort to make freedom the rule rather than the exception.

Why This Belongs on a County Board’s Agenda

When I first wrote about these matters, the immediate occasion was a proposed resolution declaring Winnebago County a “First Amendment Sanctuary.” While it was not my resolution, I want to be candid about what such a measure can and cannot do, because honesty about its limits is itself a form of respect for the First Amendment.

A county is the administrative arm of the state. Under Wisconsin law, a county board exercises organizational and administrative powers subject to the state constitution and to acts of the legislature; counties do not enjoy “home rule” in the way cities and villages do. A resolution of this kind is therefore largely ceremonial. It cannot override state statute or federal law, and it does not need to be meaningful. Its value is in what it declares and reaffirms: that the officials who took an oath to support the Constitution take that oath seriously, and that they intend, within their lawful authority, not to spend public funds or wield public power in ways that abridge the clearly established rights of their constituents. I noted at the time that the word “sanctuary” itself struck me as needlessly charged, and that “reaffirmation” or “renewed commitment” would better capture the intent without inviting misunderstanding. The precise wording mattered less than the underlying point.

That point is this: public officials, perhaps more than anyone, need to remember the First Amendment, because they are the ones with the power to violate it. The amendment is a restraint on government, and a county board is government. Every official who runs a meeting decides how public comment will be handled. Every board that funds a library or a public forum makes choices that raise issues of speech and religion. The temptation to silence a disruptive critic, to favor a friendly viewpoint, or to quietly defend an unpopular voice is perennial, and it usually arrives, as Daniel Webster warned, dressed in good intentions. A standing commitment to the First Amendment is a way of tying one’s own hands in advance, a promise made in calm times to honor the rules when the pressure is on.

The Real Subject: Vigilance

Strip away the particular resolution and the county, and what remains is the question I keep returning to: how does a free people stay free? The founders’ answer was not a clever institutional mechanism that runs on its own. It was an informed and watchful citizenry. Franklin’s pillar, Adams’s warning, and Jefferson’s insistence on educating “the whole mass of the people” all point in the same direction. The Constitution is a tool; it works only in the hands of people who understand it and are willing to use it.

The historian Sean Patrick captured the spirit of the thing well: “Do not take your freedoms for granted, lest they slowly erode like an ancient parchment. They crumble at the slightest provocation. And together, despite our different political leanings, we can stand united as human beings who recognize and respect each other’s rights.” That last clause is the heart of the matter. The First Amendment is not a partisan possession. It protects the protester and the counter-protester, the believer and the skeptic, the journalist and the official the journalist criticizes. The moment we treat it as a weapon for our side rather than a shield for everyone, we have begun to lose it, because a right that protects only the people we agree with is not a right but a privilege, and privileges are revoked the instant power changes hands.

This is why I believe the subject is as worth writing about today as it was when I first put pen to paper for the county board. Free expression is contested ground right now, on campuses, on the internet, in legislatures, and in the running of public institutions large and small. Reasonable people disagree, often sharply, about where particular lines should fall. But underneath those disagreements lies a shared inheritance that we forget at our peril. The five freedoms of the First Amendment are not the property of any movement or moment. They are the common ground on which all our other arguments can take place.

The Citizen and the Christian: Why These Freedoms Matter, and How We Answer

The analysis to this point has stayed mostly on civic ground, treating the First Amendment as a restraint that public officials and citizens owe one another. That is true as far as it goes. But the deepest case for these freedoms, and the surest guide to how we ought to respond when they are threatened, reaches into an older moral and theological tradition. Three sources sharpen the point and pull this essay toward its close: the 1776 Report’s argument that self-government depends on a virtuous and educated people (Arnn, 2021); Daniel Deutschlander’s account of civil government as God’s other kingdom (Deutschlander, 1998); and the Lutheran doctrine of the lesser magistrate, which I have argued elsewhere is best understood through that two-kingdoms framework (Stafford, 2026). Read together, they explain both why the First Amendment is so critical and what a free and faithful people are called to do with it.

A Free People Must First Be a Virtuous People

The 1776 Report returns to the Declaration’s founding claim that all men are created equal, and to the conclusion that follows from it: that no one may rightly rule another without consent (Arnn, 2021). A government of consent, however, asks a great deal of the governed, because it cannot run on its own. As the report insists, “To remain a free people, we must have the knowledge, strength, and virtue of a free people,” which is why genuine national renewal depends finally on the formation of citizens rather than the mere training of skills (Arnn, 2021). This is the same conviction that runs through the founders quoted earlier in this essay, and especially through Jefferson’s plea to educate and inform the whole mass of the people. The First Amendment supplies the instruments of that self-government: speech and press, so a people can deliberate, assemble, and petition so they can act in concert, and the free exercise of religion, so that conscience can be formed at all. But the instruments work only in the hands of those trained to use them well. A people that has lost the virtues of honesty, courage, and mutual respect will not be saved by its freedoms; it will merely hold better tools with which to injure itself. This is a large part of why the amendment matters so much, and why its survival is finally a question of character as much as of law.

Government as God’s Other Kingdom

Deutschlander (1998) frames civil government within the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms. God rules the world in two distinct ways: through the church, his right-hand kingdom, where he governs by the gospel and the Word; and through the civil state, his left-hand or other kingdom, where he governs by law, reason, natural law, and the sword. The two are not enemies, but they must not be confused. Each has its own commission, and the gravest errors in the history of church and state alike have come from mixing them, whether the state reaches for the conscience or the church reaches for the sword. Seen in this light, the religion clauses of the First Amendment are a remarkably precise civil expression of that same distinction. The Establishment Clause keeps the state from seizing the things that belong to conscience, and the Free Exercise Clause keeps it from invading them. This is why a Christian can prize the First Amendment without making an idol of the government it restrains. The amendment does not ask anyone to treat the state as ultimate; it does the opposite. It marks out a boundary the state may not cross, leaving the worship of God to God’s own kingdom (Deutschlander, 1998).

The Citizen as a Distributed Magistrate

The doctrine of the lesser magistrate, articulated most fully in the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, holds that a lower authority may lawfully resist a higher one that has compelled sin or set itself against God, acting not as a revolutionary but as a servant within his own civil office (Stafford, 2026). What makes the doctrine speak to us is a feature of republics that the sixteenth century lacked. In a republic, ordinary citizenship is itself a kind of distributed magistracy. Through the ballot, the jury, the petition, and the holding of office, each citizen carries a genuine, if modest, share of civil authority that he did not seize but received (Stafford, 2026). And the instruments of that office are very nearly the freedoms named in the First Amendment. Speech and press are how the citizen-magistrate informs himself and others; assembly is how he joins his small authority to the authority of his neighbors; petition is how he calls the government to answer for a wrong. The amendment, on this reading, is not a list of private indulgences but the working toolkit of a self-governing people. It is what allows a free people to correct its government by lawful and peaceable means rather than by force, and to let these freedoms erode is therefore to disarm the citizen in his own office.

How a Free, and Faithful, People Responds

If that is what the First Amendment is for, then the response it calls for is reasonably clear, and it matches the posture that the lesser-magistrate tradition counsels for the Christian citizen (Stafford, 2026). The default is honor and obedience rather than suspicion, because government is a gift and a free society depends on a basic willingness to live within its lawful order. When something is wrong, the first instruments are the peaceable ones the First Amendment secures: speech, press, assembly, petition, the vote, and the courts. These are the ordinary means by which grievances are aired and remedied, and they are very nearly always sufficient. Refusal is reserved for the true boundary, the rare case in which an authority would compel a person to sin or would silence conscience itself; there, and only there, does the old line hold that we must obey God rather than men (Stafford, 2026). Through all of it the two kingdoms must be kept distinct. The believer is called to be a vigorous citizen without turning the church into a faction or a political party into a confession, and without surrendering to the anxiety that drives so much of public life, since the outcome rests in hands higher than our own (Deutschlander, 1998; Stafford, 2026). This is also why the First Amendment can never be a weapon for one side. It is the legal space in which the citizen’s vocation and the believer’s witness can both be carried out in peace, and it guards the neighbor’s conscience exactly as it guards our own.

The relationship can be set out simply. Each of the five freedoms corresponds to an instrument of the citizen’s office and to a fitting response from a free and faithful people.

The Five Freedoms as the Instruments of a Citizen’s Office

First Amendment Freedom	The Citizen’s Vocational Instrument	How a Free and Faithful People Responds
Religion	The forming of conscience and the boundary the state may not cross	Worship freely, keep church and state distinct, and render to God what is God’s
Speech	Public deliberation and the testing of ideas	Speak honestly, protect even the speech we hate, and argue rather than silence
Press	Scrutiny of those who hold power	Inform and be informed, hold officials to account, and answer error with more speech
Assembly	Joining one’s small authority to the authority of others	Gather peaceably, build lawful movements, and never trade assembly for riot
Petition	Calling government to answer for a wrong	Press grievances by lawful means: vote, petition, and seek redress in the courts

Taken together, these are not five separate privileges but a single discipline of self-government, the means by which a free people, and a faithful one, keeps watch over its own liberty.

Conclusion: The Habit of Freedom

The First Amendment is forty-five words long. It can be read aloud in under thirty seconds. And yet it carries an enormous weight: it is the reason we can worship as we choose, say what we think, publish what we learn, gather with whom we please, and demand answers from those who govern us. Without it, religious minorities could be persecuted by the state, the press could be silenced for criticizing officials, citizens could be forbidden to organize for change, and the government could simply ignore the grievances of the governed. With it, we live in an open, argumentative, noisy, sometimes offensive, but free society.

That freedom is not a possession we own outright. It is closer to a habit we have to keep practicing, or a garden we have to keep tending. The founders did not believe a Bill of Rights would protect itself; they believed it would survive only if each generation taught it to the next and insisted upon it in their own time. I wrote my original analysis to remind a roomful of public officials of exactly that. I offer this expanded version in the same spirit, to a wider audience, with the same conviction: the price of these forty-five words is that we never stop paying attention to them. We stay free by remembering, out loud and on purpose, what freedom requires. The work is never finished. It was never meant to be.

References

Arnn, L. P. (Chair). (2021). The 1776 report. The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.

Deutschlander, D. M. (1998). Civil government: God’s other kingdom. Northwestern Publishing House.

Stafford, B. (2026). The lesser magistrate in God’s other kingdom: A confessional Lutheran synthesis of resistance, the two kingdoms, and Christian citizenship (Version 3) [Unpublished manuscript].