William Franklin “Billy” Graham (1918-2018) was the best-known Baptist evangelist of the 20th century. After earning an undergraduate degree at Wheaton University, Graham became a pastor, hosted a radio program, became involved with Youth for Christ, and briefly headed Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, before beginning a series of evangelistic crusades throughout the United

George W. Truett was a Baptist pastor and leader. His best-known speech in 1920, “Baptists and Religious Liberty,” was given on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building to a huge audience and touted the idea that religious liberty was the most important contribution made by American and Baptists to the science of government. He called the First Amendment a “pre-eminently” Baptist achievement, drawing on the founders and early Christians who desired for the church and state to be separate, neither trespassing “upon the distinctive functions of the other.”

James Gibbons’ greatest contribution to thinking about the First Amendment was that of lauding the American doctrine of separation of church and state at a time when the Roman Catholic Church prided itself on being the established church in many European nations. Gibbons was a Catholic priest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who became archbishop of Baltimore and later only the second American to be named a cardinal.

John Courtney Murray a Jesuit priest, theologian, and advocate of
interfaith cooperation, was a lifelong supporter of the principles of the
First Amendment.

In 1612, just a year after the publication of the King James Version of the Bible in English, Baptist minister Thomas Helwys published “A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity” which has come to be known as the first exposition in English of the notion of freedom of conscience or religious liberty.