(RNS) — A new documentary, “Free Exercise: America’s Story of Religious Liberty,” tells the story of religious freedom through the experience of six religious groups — Quakers, Baptists, Black churches, Catholics, Mormons and Jews — and the persecutions they endured. The film shows that, far from being a principle set in stone, the First Amendment’s free exercise clause has evolved and been reinforced by groups’ efforts to gain the right to practice their faith.
Religious freedom is “a process” that “always needs to be revisited and maintained,” said the film’s host, National Review columnist Richard Brookhiser. “The documentary shows people what this story has been, what this process has been, what the principles are, how they’ve been worked out in the world.”
The documentary’s two hours are broken into six sections, each focusing on one of the religious groups and an episode from its history that marked its fight for religious rights. In two hours, the documentary takes viewers on a journey from the plains of Utah, in the segment on the 19th-century exodus by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to a Rhode Island synagogue that George Washington addressed in a letter supporting the United States’ early Jewish American community, to a sta …
