Today is National Religious Freedom Day. Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, the First Amendment, and the people who fight every day to protect religious liberty, Religious Freedom Day has been proclaimed annually since 1993.

This day honors the date the Virginia General Assembly adopted Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” in 1786. Though it took seven years to get through the legislature, it provided the basis for the free exercise and establishment clauses in the First Amendment, which were eventually written into the Bill of Rights and ratified just five years later.