Religious liberty is a paradox. While liberty (from Latin libertas) implies a lack of constraint, the word religious signals the opposite. The Latin root religio, from religare, means “to bind fast.” Religion, according to fourth-century Christian philosopher Lactantius, means that “we are tied to God and bound to Him [religati].”
The literal sense of religious liberty, then, is the freedom to be bound. It is a tethered liberty—liberty that implies an allegiance. At its root, it is not a freedom from constraint, but the freedom to honor higher loyalties and fulfill fundamental obligations.
In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison expounded on the political implications of the paradox. Man’s ultimate duty to God relativizes every other obligation, Madison wrote. So even when man enters society and submits himself to civil government, he does so “with a reservation of his duty”—a “saving of his allegiance”—to God.
In the Madisonian conception, religious liberty is a reservation of ultimate allegiance. It is freedom not to do what one wants but to do what one ought. Religious liberty is never self-referential—it is never liberty for its own sake. It has a telos. Being bound to a higher sovereign (religio) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (libertas). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of a more ultimate allegiance.
Nowhere is the paradox more vividly illustrated than in Exodus 5. Here we find the first demand for religious liberty in recorded history. Deeper reflection on the passage yields insights for our modern discourse.
After being called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, Moses and his brother Aaron approach Pharaoh with a demand: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” When Pharaoh refuses, Moses and Aaron reassert the demand, though phrased differently: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” This time, Pharaoh not only refuses but retaliates, increasing the Israelites’ workload and punishments.
From here, it’s all downhill for Egypt. Because of Pharaoh’s recalcitrance, the Egyptians suffer ten horrendous plagues, including death of their firstborn. Moses leads the Israelites out, and God miraculously delivers them from Pharaoh’s charioted army, drowning horse and rider in the sea. Thereafter at Sinai, God establishes a covenant with Israel, gives them his law, and constitutes them a nation. They will commemorate their exodus from Egypt in the yearly feast of Pesach (Passover).
Two features of Moses’s demands in Exodus 5 deserve our attention. (I will assume here that Moses rather than Aaron makes the demands, though the text itself is ambiguous.)
First, Moses specifically ties his demand for freedom to religious obligation: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to [God] in the wilderness,’” or later, “that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.” These are not demands for political liberty as such. Moses does not say, “Let my people go, that they may establish their own form of government.” This is no Jeffersonian call for Israel to “dissolve the political bands” with Egypt and “assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station,” to quote the American Declaration of Independence. While national sovereignty is in Israel’s future, here in Exodus 5, freedom isn’t justified on those grounds. Rather, it is tethered to religious worship.
Second, as conceived here, religious liberty is corporate, not individual. Moses demands that an entire people be set free in order to worship in the way God has commanded. This people will, of course, go on to found a religious faith of biblical proportions, giving rise to what we now call Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity, Islam, and other sects. At its core, religion is corporate in this way. It binds a people together, binds them to their God, and commits them to a particular way of life.
This in turn gives shape to religious liberty. It is not a mere individual liberty or a liberty of self-expression. It is, rather, the freedom to join oneself to something larger and beyond oneself, to fulfill obligations that this larger “something”—or Someone—demands. This doesn’t exhaust the concept of religious liberty, of course. Especially in its modern conception, it has a significant individual component. But Exodus teaches that before religious liberty is individual, it is first communal, even covenantal.
Both features of Moses’s demands to Pharaoh reveal what religious liberty at its core really is: libertas for the sake of religio, the freedom to bind oneself to and fulfill a higher obligation.
Thus far, we have treated Moses’s demands monolithically, but they are not the same. Reflecting on their differences yields further insights.
Rewind a couple of chapters. In Exodus 3, God himself tells Moses exactly how to approach Pharaoh and what to say: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God’” (3:18).
Despite the clarity of these instructions, Moses doesn’t quite follow them and instead adds his own glosses. When he goes to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, he doesn’t take the elders of Israel with him, only Aaron. His opening demand identifies the deity as “The Lord, the God of Israel” rather than “the God of the Hebrews.” The phrase “Let my people go” is a Mosaic innovation. And he initially portrays the religious obligation as absolute and unlimited rather than a simple three-day journey.
By contrast, Moses’s second demand hews more closely to the divine instruction. And herein lies a puzzle. The second demand seems far more modest than the first. It begins with “please.” It seeks a time-limited religious accommodation. And Moses even appends “lest [God] fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword,” perhaps appealing to Pharaoh’s self-interest in productive slave labor. Yet it is the second demand that sets Pharaoh off. Pharaoh responds to the first demand with a simple, almost bored refusal. He responds to the second with furious retaliation.
Why? Why does the seemingly more modest demand infuriate Pharaoh so?
The answer lies, I think, in Moses’s verbal pivot from the “God of Israel” to the “God of the Hebrews.” The latter phrase implies a bolder political claim, even a radical one.
Put yourself in the ancient Egyptian mind. Pharaoh was a god-king—the living embodiment of Egypt’s gods, maintainer of cosmic order, and the source and summit of both civic and spiritual life. It’s no surprise, then, that Moses’s initial appeal to “the Lord, the God of Israel” landed flat. There was no such deity in the Egyptian pantheon. At best, Moses was pointing to a foreign, local god with no power in Egypt. So it was perfectly rational for Pharaoh to respond as he did: “I do not know this god. I do not answer to him.” Insert here a dismissive wave of the pharaonic hand.
But when Moses says—as he had been instructed—that “the God of the Hebrews has met with us,” that was something different. For Pharaoh, that must have been a theo-political earthquake. In the original language, the key word here, “Hebrews,” is Ivri. The literal sense is the “people from beyond” or the “people who cross over.” This is not some local deity, Moses is suddenly saying. This is a God who crosses jurisdictional boundaries, who watches over his people wherever they may be found. A God unconstrained by geographic limits must stand above a mere local pantheon. Moses is now positing a different kind of God—a God of gods, a God over all.
Pharaoh is about to learn this lesson the hard way through the experience of the plagues, each of which is intentionally designed to reverse Egyptian cosmology and demonstrate the supremacy of Israel’s God. As Moses’s father-in-law Jethro will later proclaim, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Ex. 18:11). But even before all this, in the dramatic royal court scene in Exodus 5, Pharaoh seems to instantly grasp the implications of the Mosaic argument. A local and distant “God of Israel” is one thing, but a transcendent and present “God of the Hebrews” is quite another. Pharaoh’s reaction is angry, swift, and punitive.
This brings us to a third lesson this passage teaches: religious liberty necessarily limits the power of the sovereign. Pharaoh conceived of his power as divine in origin and absolute within its realm, subject only to the geographical limits over which that power could be extended. Yet in Exodus 5, Moses is proclaiming a God who transcends those limits. Moses is not simply upending the foundations of Egyptian political order. He is forever reframing the way human beings will think about political order at all. If indeed there is a God who stands above every human authority, then there is an allegiance more ultimate than human authority can ever command.
It would have been remarkably easy for Pharaoh to permit Israel a short religious festival. Yet to grant Moses’s request, however modest it seemed, would have been to concede a more consequential principle. It would have meant accepting inherent limits on the king’s authority. It would have meant relativizing his rule. This, Pharaoh was unwilling to do. And as the biblical text makes clear, God then used that very unwillingness to demonstrate his divine power and cosmic supremacy.
Pharaoh may be the first ruler in history to bristle at divinely ordained limits on earthly power, but he will not be the last. Nearly every king, Caesar, governor, and legislator after him will chafe at the demand for religious liberty in much the same way.
This brings us back to Madison. What is remarkable about the United States—what is perhaps most distinctive about our constitutional republic—is that the very men who, at the founding, held political authority not only acknowledged limits to that authority but actually locked them in. Constitutional protection of religious liberty supplies the paradigmatic example.
Attending to Madison’s reasoning in Memorial and Remonstrance, it is impossible not to hear a Mosaic echo: “[Religious] duty is precedent … to the claims of Civil Society,” Madison asserts, because religious man is bound to something that transcends political authority. We owe ultimate allegiance to one whom Madison calls the “Universal Sovereign.”
Pharaoh, when presented with this same argument, couldn’t accept it. America’s founders, by contrast, made it a cornerstone of our system of government.