Remarks at James Madison High School in Vienna, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, July 17, 1995

Thank you, Secretary Riley, for the introduction but more for your outstanding leadership of the Department of Education and the work you have done not only to increase the investment of our country in education but also to lift the quality and the standards of education and to deal forthrightly with some of the more difficult but important issues in education that go to the heart of the character of the young people we build in our country.

Superintendent Spillane, congratulations on your award and the work you are doing here in this district; Dr. Clark; Ms. Lubetkin; to Danny Murphy - I thought he gave such a good speech I could imagine him on a lot of platforms in the years ahead - [laughter] - he did a very fine job; Mayor Robinson; and to the Board of Supervisors - Chair Katherine Hanley; and to all the religious leaders, parents, students who are here; the teachers; and especially to the James Madison teachers, thank you for coming today.

Last week at my alma mater, Georgetown, I had a chance to do something that I hope to do more often as President, to have a genuine conversation with the American people about the best way for us to move forward as a nation and to resolve some of the great questions that are nagging us today. I believe, as I have said repeatedly, that our Nation faces two great challenges: first of all, to restore the American dream of opportunity, and the American tradition of responsibility; and second, to bring our country together amidst all of our diversity in a stronger community so that we can find common ground and move forward together.

In my first 2 years as President, I worked harder on the first question, how to get the economy going, how to deal with the specific problems of the country, how to inspire more responsibility through things like welfare reform and child support enforcement. But I have come to believe that unless we can solve the second problem we'll never really solve the first one. Unless we can find a way to honestly and openly debate our differences and find common ground, to celebrate all the diversity of America and still give people a chance to live in the way they think is right, so that we are stronger for our differences, not weaker, we won't be able to meet the economic and other challenges before us. And therefore, I have decided that I should spend some more time in some conversations about things Americans care a lot about and that they're deeply divided over.

Today I want to talk about a subject that can provoke a fight in nearly any country town or on any city street corner in America, religion. It's a subject that should not drive us apart. And we have a mechanism as old as our Constitution for bringing us together.

This country, after all, was founded by people of profound faith who mentioned Divine Providence and the guidance of God twice in the Declaration of Independence. They were searching for a place to express their faith freely without persecution. We take it for granted today that that's so in this country, but it was not always so. And it certainly has not always been so across the world. Many of the people who were our first settlers came here primarily because they were looking for a place where they could practice their faith without being persecuted by the Government.

Here in Virginia's soil, as the Secretary of Education has said, the oldest and deepest roots of religious liberty can be found. The First Amendment was modeled on Thomas Jefferson's Statutes of Religious Liberty for Virginia. He thought so much of it that he asked that on his gravestone it be said not that he was President, not that he had been Vice President or Secretary of State but that he was the founder of the University of Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the author of the Statutes of Religious Liberty for the State of Virginia.

And of course, no one did more than James Madison to put the entire Bill of Rights in our Constitution, and especially, the first amendment. Religious freedom is literally our first freedom. It is the first thing mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. And as it opens, it says Congress cannot make a law that either establishes a religion or restricts the free exercise of religion. Now, as with every provision of our Constitution, that law has had to be interpreted over the years, and it has in various ways that some of us agree with and some of us disagree with. But one thing is indisputable: The first amendment has protected our freedom to be religious or not religious, as we choose, with the consequence that in this highly secular age the United States is clearly the most conventionally religious country in the entire world, at least the entire industrialized world. We have more than 250,000 places of worship. More people go to church here every week or to synagogue or to their mosque or other place of worship than in any other country in the world. More peoples believe religion is directly important to their lives than in any other advanced, industrialized country in the world. And it is not an accident. It is something that has always been a part of our life.