James Madison and the Moderate Origins of the Religion Clauses
Chris Beneke January/February 2026How “milk and water amendments” became America’s most cherished rights.
The First Congress had a full agenda when it convened in the spring of 1789. So much had been achieved during the past two years. A Constitution had been designed and narrowly ratified. Now Congress faced the formidable task of building a working government, including essential functions, such as a treasury and a judiciary.
Before they could complete those tasks, Virginia Representative James Madison directed their attention to another matter. The diminutive and soft-spoken statesman asked them to amend the very document he had helped create and had tirelessly defended. The proposal to add provisions safeguarding religious and other forms of personal and collective liberty met with little enthusiasm. Revisiting the Constitution so soon after its ratification struck many as both unnecessary and risky.
Madison’s path to proposing amendments at the First Congress was anything but straightforward, shaped both by years of advocacy for rights of conscience and a profound reluctance to alter the newly designed instrument. For more than a decade Madison had been one of the nation’s staunchest proponents of individual rights. In 1776 he crafted language that infused the Virginia Declaration of Rights with a pointed endorsement of religious liberty. Later he joined forces with Thomas Jefferson to pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Despite that sterling libertarian record, Madison had resisted calls for amendments—including religious exercise protections—for nearly two years.
Madison’s hesitancy stemmed from a concern about the integrity of the document itself. He told George Washington that the amendments proposed in Massachusetts’ ratifying convention would be a “blemish.” He also viewed them as superfluous. Neither the president, Congress, nor the courts had been granted the kind of authority needed to threaten vital liberties. This novel construction remained untried. It was far too early to begin dismembering it.
The pressure on Madison to embrace a religious liberty amendment mounted through the ratification process and into the election of the First Congress. Local Baptists made it known that unless he supported such an amendment, they would withhold the votes essential to his House bid. Ultimately Madison had no choice but to cede the point. It was prima facie a tactical maneuver, necessary for his political survival. Writing to a minister whose congregation’s support he needed to win, Madison acknowledged that “circumstances are now changed.”
In that same missive Madison said something that lent a seldom-remarked framing to the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses. He explained that amendments, “if pursued with a proper moderation and in a proper mode,” would “serve the double purpose of satisfying the minds of well-meaning opponents and of providing additional guards in favour of liberty.”
Madison’s remarks reveal the twofold purpose of what would become the First Amendment’s religious clauses: addressing immediate political challenges while affirming universal principles of liberty. On the one hand, the religion amendments responded to a particular circumstance. Specifically, the vulnerability that groups like the Baptists felt because of the legal persecution and mob harassment they had long endured—and might face again—and their refusal to elect someone uncommitted to a religious liberty amendment.
On the other hand, Madison expected any amendments to be congruent with shared contemporary values. While he may have doubted the necessity of codifying commonly understood principles whose fate would mostly be decided at the state level, Madison recognized that articulating them would reassure wary constituents. Amendments protecting rights of conscience and other liberties would thus serve as vital symbolic measures as well as legal safeguards, at once a conciliatory gesture and an expression of a deep-seated consensus.
Both the political maneuver and the ideal it advanced exemplify what Madison termed “moderation.” In the eighteenth century, moderation connoted stability and virtue. Contemporary leaders had few higher words of praise. Leading Americans recognized the value of moderation, a concept championed by such influential figures as the Baron von Montesquieu, who espoused a balanced government, and Adam Smith, who espoused a limited one. In The Wealth of Nations Smith argued that religious liberty flourished in the absence of a state-established church, as in Pennsylvania, where it fostered a “philosophical good temper and moderation.” Thomas Jefferson noted a similar development in Virginia, where dissenters had “risen to a degree of determination which commanded respect,” while partisans of the once-dominant Anglican Church “had subsided into moderation.”
Madison’s understanding of moderation was shaped not only by influential thinkers such as Montesquieu and Smith but also by his formative years at Princeton under the tutelage of its president, John Witherspoon. Witherspoon lectured to his impressionable pupils that when it came to “self-government,” the first of their duties was “to keep our thoughts, desires and affections, in due moderation.” Virtuous people were moderate people, exhibiting both tolerance and restraint. They acted with forbearance rather than violent impulses or bigoted attachments. Governments, the thinking went, should operate according to the same principles.
Having imbibed the lesson, Madison applied it to the case against church establishments. In 1784 he argued that a bill supporting Christian ministers would “destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced among its several sects.” Now, as Madison followed through on his promise to bring forward a slate of revisions, he anchored his argument in moderate virtues.
Madison’s opening remarks to Congress on the amendments lacked the crusading fire we might expect from the proclamation of foundational ideals. Instead, he struck a moderate tone, emphasizing conciliation rather than conviction. Apologizing for interrupting other important work (“I am sorry to be accessary to the loss of a single moment of time by the House”), he urged his fellow legislators to proceed with a “spirit of deference and concession” and make their “revisal a moderate one.” The same theme emerged again and again throughout his address. Madison described the revisions as extended “on principles of amity and moderation” and as “a like return of moderation,” reciprocating the goodwill and trust that apprehensive citizens had extended to him and his colleagues.
Madison’s advocacy for the amendments reflected his confidence in moderation as an agent of stability and as a means of addressing both real and imagined fears. They would, he told the House, render the new federal framework “as acceptable to the whole people of the United States, as it has been found acceptable to a majority of them.” The amendments were a concession to those with lingering apprehensions about the Constitution, a means to “remove remaining inquietudes.”
If it seemed like an uninspired way to go about such a monumental task, it was also typical of the prudent, meliorist fashion in which Madison conducted his political life. During the ensuing House debate he referred to himself “as a friend to what is attainable.” He wanted the proposed amendments to be confined “to the plain, simple, and important security that has been required.”
Legislative overload aside, the primary objection to amendments remained the assertion that they were unnecessary—not because the citizenry were undeserving of rights, but because the national government lacked the power to infringe them. Moreover, by the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified, individual states already safeguarded rights of conscience, the press, and property. A few, such as Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, had protected religious dissenters since their founding.
Madison’s fellow Federalists were even slower than he was to adopt the view that the Constitution should be amended. The House and Senate undertook the revisions with about as much enthusiasm as the original framers had greeted the suggestion to add amendments two years earlier—which is to say, not much. Members conjured a litany of metaphors to convey how insipid the proposed alterations seemed. South Carolina Senator Pierce Butler called them “milk and water amendments.” Others referred to them as “a water gruel business” or “bread pills, powder of paste.”
Once the mockery had run its course, Madison’s congressional allies begrudgingly acknowledged that the amendments posed no threat and “may do some good.” They then got to work hammering out language that would eventually become known as the Bill of Rights. The deliberations were generally brief and fragmentary, scarcely befitting the reverence we now bestow upon them. To imagine these proceedings as the labor of principled crusaders, inspired by revolutionary passion, is to seriously misread the situation.
At the same time, the amendments offered a chance to affirm values that were widely held but not yet expressly enunciated by the federal government. Adding them to the Constitution would alleviate worries without substantively modifying the basic structure. No matter how they phrased these protections, Maryland Representative Daniel Carroll averred, they “would tend more towards conciliating the minds of the people to the Government than almost any other he had heard proposed.” The amendments constituted neither radical shifts in religious policy nor drastic changes to the constitutional framework. They assured rather than disrupt.
Next to its endorsement of free exercise, the most conciliating thing about the First Amendment’s religion clauses may have been that they did not alter existing church-state establishments. Just as the free exercise clause comforted the upstart groups who feared persecution at the hands of the federal government, the establishment clause reassured those who still enjoyed state religious beneficence. The various drafts prohibiting Congress from passing laws “touching religion,” “establishing one religious society in preference to others,” and, finally, “respecting the establishment of religion” all point to a broader inclination to leave religious regimes undisturbed. The power to abolish or alter church establishments would remain with the states.
Congress’s proposed revisions to the Constitution generated little public debate or even interest. As much consternation as their absence had aroused, the finalized amendments went mostly unremarked. They seemed to have fulfilled their designers’ hopes for taking the edge off Anti-Federalist dissent without enfeebling the federal government.
At that particular moment the amendments were a moderate means to a moderate end, advanced by a man who was only half convinced of their efficacy. Neither Madison nor his fellow House members could appreciate the effect they would have, especially the First Amendment. Yet Madison proceeded upon the premise, still inchoate, that these revisions might have—as he referred to it, in his speech on behalf of amendments—a “salutary tendency.” In other words, that honorable intentions and ameliorative lawmaking would set the nation on a slightly more tolerant track. Americans were not angels, but under the right circumstances they might be nudged to act a bit more like them.
What they initially lacked in legal force, the amendments partially made up for as expressions of shared ideals. During the ensuing decades the liberties that Madison helped codify evolved far beyond their function as conciliatory gestures. They would have a much greater impact than Madison probably ever imagined, ensuring that Americans would experience less coercion and more freedom. Diffidently proposed and judiciously crafted, these guarantees became the cornerstone of American liberty.
In the end, Madison’s moderate approach reminds us that enduring change often arises from careful, considered action in response to contemporary realities. It suggests that progress requires neither radical reinvention nor nostalgic retreat—and that even the most dedicated partisans of liberty can, through symbolic acts and prudent compromise, prepare the ground for transformations they might themselves only faintly discern.
Article Author: Chris Beneke
Chris Beneke is professor of history and associate dean for the First Year Experience and the Bentley Core at Bentley University. He has written extensively about the history of religious toleration, as well as essays on politics, religion, and sports for The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and the Washington Post. This article was adapted by Professor Beneke from his book Free Exercise: Religion, The First Amendment, and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, 2024).