# Theodore Roosevelt — "an outrage against … liberty of conscience" > [!quote] "To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like [[Abraham Lincoln]], he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life." > — Theodore Roosevelt, letter to J. C. Martin, November 6, 1908 ## Context Written days after the 1908 election to a correspondent who had urged opposition to [[William Howard Taft]] because of Taft's Unitarianism and his family's Catholic ties. Roosevelt, leaving office, used the reply to repudiate any religious test for public office — citing Lincoln, who never joined a church, as a man who would fail such a test. ## Why this matters A direct presidential rejection of the religious test — the principle written into Article VI of the Constitution ("no religious Test shall ever be required") and central to church-state separation. Roosevelt frames judging candidates by creed as "an outrage against … liberty of conscience," a foundation of American life. The position is the opposite of any movement that treats public office as properly reserved for, or owed to, professed Christians, and it comes from a Republican president invoking a Republican icon. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [Theodore Roosevelt Center, "Complete Religious Liberty" (Roosevelt to J. C. Martin, 1908)](https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o308040/); manuscript at the [Gilder Lehrman Institute](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc07673). - **Status:** Verbatim from the letter. Undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[James A. Garfield - absolute religious freedom]] — the earlier Republican statement of the same neutrality. - [[John F. Kennedy - separation of church and state is absolute]] — a candidate facing the very religious test Roosevelt condemned. - Featured in [[Presidents on the Separation of Church and State]].