Is religious liberty truly under threat in America? Many Christians are convinced that their freedom is slipping away, but is that fear grounded in reality? David French dives into the history of religious liberty in the United States and how the Constitution’s protections have evolved over time. While there are challenges, the truth is that religious freedom in America is stronger today than ever. From landmark Supreme Court victories to federal protections, Christians and people of all faiths enjoy more liberty than most realize. So, what should we be concerned about, and what role does religious liberty play in our culture today?
Transcript:
"Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Is religious liberty truly under threat? The answer might surprise you.
Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are persecuted, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. They feel like their religious liberty is slipping away. This sense of dread and despair is inflaming the culture wars and causing good people to feel unnecessary fear.
But there’s good news—by any reasonable definition, American Christians are not persecuted, and the legal protections for religious liberty are stronger than at any time in American history. People of all faiths or no faith at all enjoy an immense amount of protection from government interference.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges or injustices, but it remains the case that the American Christian community is arguably the freest Christian community in the world.
To understand where we are, it’s necessary to understand where we’ve been. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.
When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians.
I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed an established church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.
This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.
In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.
The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.
The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years. Congress got involved as well, passing key statutes that protect religious freedom.
As a result, we’ve largely achieved a constitutional balance. Christians no longer possess power over people of other faiths, but we’ve gained an immense amount of freedom, and that freedom is more than enough for us to live faithful and obedient lives in the United States of America.
For example, religious organizations enjoy a right of equal access to public facilities. Many younger Americans might be shocked to find out that it was once an open question whether Christian groups had a right to meet in empty classrooms or gymnasiums on the same basis and with the same access as secular groups.
A series of cases blasted open access at every level of education, from elementary schools to colleges and universities. And now tens of thousands of student groups and even churches meet (often for free or for nominal fees) and preach the Gospel from public lands.
Religious Americans are protected from discrimination in the workplace. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion. The law protects religious Americans from direct discrimination and requires employers to accommodate the religious practices of their employees.
In addition, religious Americans enjoy the protection of a federal “super statute.” I’m using Justice Neil Gorsuch’s words to describe the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that hovers over and above all other federal laws, providing extraordinary protection to people of faith.
And speaking of super statutes, there’s also the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law passed in the last year of the Clinton administration that has granted countless local congregations special protection from hostile zoning boards and planning commissions.
Religious employers are completely exempt from nondiscrimination statues when hiring and firing ministerial employees. The ministerial exception may well be the key firewall protecting church from state. Put simply, and as defined by a unanimous Supreme Court in 2012, both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment work together to remove the state from the ministerial process.
Religious employers are completely exempt from nondiscrimination statutes when hiring and firing “ministerial” employees. The ministerial exception may well be the key firewall protecting church from state. Put simply, and as defined by a unanimous Supreme Court in 2012, both the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment work together to remove the state—including all nondiscrimination laws—from the ministerial selection process.
Religious organizations (including religious schools) increasingly have a right of equal access to public funds. Faith-based schools even now have access to the public funds through voucher programs or other tuition assistance measures, and faith-based institutions can compete on an equal footing with secular organizations for public funding.
Yes, it is true that in some respects religious liberty is “under attack.” There are activists and lawmakers who want to push back at multiple doctrines and some radicals even dream of revoking tax exemptions from religious organizations that maintain traditional teachings on sex and marriage. But if these attacks are real, then so is America’s religious freedom citadel. People of faith in the United States of America enjoy more liberty and more real political power than any faith community in the developed world.
In spite of legal successes many people of faith face profound cultural headwinds. But those headwinds do not exist because the law failed us. The law has given every religious American, every religious organization, and every church or synagogue or mosque all of the liberty they need to speak words of truth and grace into the fallen culture.
The question for America’s religious community, then, is not whether we have liberty—or will have liberty for the foreseeable future—but rather what we do with that liberty. As John Adams declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We have been given the gift of liberty. It is our responsibility to exercise that liberty for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors.
To learn more, check out the resources in the notes and follow us at Holypost.com"
Resources:
This video was based off of David French's recent NY Times article, "The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/opinion/christianity-evangelicals-persecution-faith.html
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