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On my office wall hangs a framed copy of George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, R.I. In it, America’s first president promised that the new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It was more than a gesture of tolerance. It was a radical pledge that this country would never criminalize belief.

More than two centuries later, that promise is being tested again — this time not in a church or a synagogue, but in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn.

In the United States vs. Cherwitz et al., federal prosecutors cited the Trafficking Victims Protection Act — a law designed to stop modern slavery — to convict members of a spirit

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