In keeping with the Witherspoon Institutes mission to enhance public understanding of the principles of free and democratic societies, the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution is dedicated to examining church-state legal doctrines in American constitutional thought and to restoring and defending the understanding of religious liberty and the place of religion in American public life that our Nation's founders set forth in the text of the Constitution. To achieve these goals, scholars associated with the Simon Center explore historical, sociopolitical and philosophical influences on the American constitutional tradition.

The Simon Center's summer seminars bring leading scholars in the fields of law, political science, history, and philosophy together with junior faculty and with law, graduate, and postdoctoral students, to engage in intensive study of original sources and fundamental questions regarding the place of religious beliefs and moral principles in American public life.

The Simon Center's task forces unite experts from the academy and from public policy research institutions in focused efforts to examine and respond to important problems at the intersection of politics and religious belief. Meetings of the task forces, and larger consultations of the task force members with other experts, are aimed at producing policy statements, and prompting new scholarly consideration, regarding the international and domestic dimensions of religious liberty in current American political life. The Simon Center's two task forces are on International Religious Freedom, and Conscience Protection.