Many Americans have little knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, a survey has found.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania has conducted its annual civics survey for the past 18 years. The survey focuses on civic knowledge and is released every year in time for Constitution Day — September 17.

The 2023 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey found disheartening statistics; many Americans are entirely unaware about the basic freedoms they enjoy and are ignorant about key facts of the U.S. Constitution.

The survey found that two-thirds of American adults can name all three branches of the federal government — executive, legislative and judicial. However, 10% can name just two; 7% can name only one; and 17% could not name any branches.

The survey found that a majority of Americans could name only one of five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When asked to name their First Amendment rights, the survey found:

• Three-quarters (77%) name freedom of speech.
• Less than half (40%) name freedom of religion.
• A third (33%) name the right to assembly.
• Just over a quarter (28%) name freedom of the press.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Michael Harrison, M.D., also known as the “Father of Fetal Surgery,” would often accompany his father, a small-town country doctor, on house calls.

“We’d sit in the car and wait for him,” he said from his San Francisco home on Tuesday, where he and his wife, Gretchen, have spent the last forty years of their lives. Now eighty years-old, Dr. Harrison is Director Emeritus of the Fetal Treatment Center, and Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences out of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

It’s been forty-two years since Michael Harrison made world headlines by performing the first fetal surgery, i.e., an operation on a preborn baby still in his mother’s womb.

At the time, Dr. Harrison called it “a first small step on the way to bigger things.” He wasn’t kidding. For the next three decades, he and his team would establish the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center. Tens of thousands of parents would travel to California from all over the world in the hope of finding help for their preborn children suffering from various adverse and often potentially fatal conditions.

Like many pioneers, Dr. Michael Harrison’s journey from childhood to medical royalty was uneven, uncertain, and surely unpredictable. Even Michael himself didn’t start out to become a doctor at all, let alone a world-famous surgeon whose mind and hands have been used by God countless times to help preserve and sustain fragile preborn life.

In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that to deny a church “an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status” is to violate the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.

In that case, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, a Missouri church that operated a licensed preschool and daycare facility applied for state “funds for qualifying organizations to purchase recycled tires to resurface playgrounds.” 

Trinity Lutheran met all the qualifications of the program, but the state informed them that a grant would violate a state constitutional provision that:

“[N]o money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, section or denomination of religion.”

Trinity Lutheran sued, claiming that because of the Free Exercise clause in the First Amendment, a government benefit cannot be withheld solely because of religion.

In his majority decision, Chief Justice Roberts agreed, writing, “the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.” 

The Trinity Lutheran case was only six years ago but, in a case of “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” Colorado is the latest state to “forget” something about which the Court has been very clear.