History & Religious Freedom · September 10, 2026

Benjamin Franklin, Islam, and Religious Freedom in Early America

The reel’s central point survives a source check: Muslims were contemplated in founding-era debates about American religious liberty. One book-ownership detail needs a correction.

The point of the reel

I use a surprising founding-era story to challenge the claim that Islam is outside the American tradition. My larger argument is that religious liberty was written broadly on purpose: it did not reserve freedom of conscience for one Christian denomination, or even for Christianity as a whole.

That conclusion has strong historical support. The Library of Congress says the Founders considered Islam’s place in the new republic and were prepared to include it. Founding-era writers used spellings such as “Mahometan” or “Mohammedan,” terms now considered archaic, when they discussed Muslims explicitly.

What Franklin said about religious power

Franklin’s own correspondence provides firmer ground for my broader point. Writing to Richard Price in 1780, he opposed religious tests and argued that a good religion should support itself rather than rely on civil power. In a 1773 letter to Samuel Mather, he hoped civil and religious liberty would be secured for posterity and for people arriving “from every Part of the old World.”

Those words do not prove every modern inference about Franklin’s private views, and Franklin did not write the First Amendment. They do show a repeated hostility to government-enforced religious privilege and a conception of liberty broader than a single established church.

The Constitution does not say “Christians only”

The constitutional text is direct. Article VI says no religious test may be required for federal public office. The First Amendment says Congress may neither establish religion nor prohibit its free exercise. The National Archives summarizes the amendment as protecting religious belief and practice while preventing government from creating or favoring a religion.

James Madison’s explanation during the 1789 debate is also useful: the amendment was meant to stop Congress from establishing a national religion or compelling people to worship contrary to conscience. Nothing in that federal protection creates a Christianity-only category.

Muslims were not an unimaginable future population

The Library of Congress notes that hundreds or perhaps thousands of Muslims may have lived within the United States in 1776, many of them enslaved Africans. It also documents explicit founding-era arguments for the religious liberty of Muslims alongside Jews, Christians, and people of other beliefs.

That does not make the Founding era morally consistent: slavery, unequal citizenship, and state religious restrictions coexisted with expansive language about liberty. It does mean that calling Islam inherently “un-American” requires erasing Muslims who were already here and narrowing constitutional language that was written more broadly.

Edited video text

This edited text accompanies the video and may condense the spoken material. Watch the recording for exact wording.