This two-session roundtable discusses the Montpelier Foundation’s upcoming 2028 exhibit on Freedom of Religion / Freedom of Conscience and the process of developing, researching, and planning the exhibit, which will explore Madison’s role in establishing freedom of religion, as well as the diverging experiences of that freedom for different religious and cultural groups. After achieving structural parity in 2022 with the descendants of people formerly enslaved at Montpelier, the Montpelier Foundation now strives to collaborate with the Montpelier Descendants Committee to develop programming that fosters civic engagement and reflects the shared enterprise of public history. The participants in this roundtable will discuss their roles in the multi-vocal planning process for this exhibit, which is a direct result of the collaboration between the Montpelier Foundation and the Montpelier Descendants Committee, and serves as a case study for other public history projects.

Montpelier is the lifelong home of James Madison, contributor to the Federalist Papers alongside Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Father of the Constitution, Architect of the Bill of Rights, and fourth President of the United States. As a memorial to James Madison and the Enslaved Community, a museum of American history, and a center for constitutional education, Montpelier engages the public with the enduring legacy of Madison’s most powerful idea: government by the people. With a grant award of $2.5 million Montpelier will explore Madison’s ideas about religion, thought, and government.

The roundtable will discuss two aspects of the upcoming exhibit. The first is the research entailed in developing the exhibit, finding documents, and presenting relevant objects. In this section of the roundtable, the Madisons’ religious views and the way that they organized their lives will be explored. While Madison kept his personal religious views to himself, and his wife Dolley was raised as a Quaker but was eventually baptized in the Episcopal Church, Madison espoused that church and state should be in separate spheres, supported Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, advocated for the “free exercise of religion” in the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), and was the author of Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785).

Second, the roundtable will also address the process of developing the exhibit with the input of stakeholders representing a variety of scholarly backgrounds and spiritual perspectives, as well as members of the Montpelier Descendants Committee. In this section of the roundtable, each speaker will discuss their view of Montpelier and their role in the process of producing the exhibit. The aim of this second part is to demonstrate how Montpelier offers a model for collaborating and engaging with various stakeholders in the development of public and national histories and sites.