Why Is the Left Conflating Religious Liberty and ‘Christian Nationalism’?
The religious liberty movement is the opposite of an effort to impose theocracy on America.
With the recent inauguration of President Donald Trump, many within the religious liberty movement are now breathing a sigh of relief that robust religious liberty protections for all believers seems to be a priority of the new administration.
In recent decades, many of the fights for one of the most fundamental American freedoms have involved litigation to ensure robust religious exercise protections under the First Amendment or legislative fights to enact religious liberty protections via statute (such as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts). While it is true that many of the religious liberty advocates are Christians (which makes sense—about two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians), the fight for religious liberty is clearly a fight for religious exercise of all religions against the coercive power of the state. From George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport to the Mahmoud v. Taylor case currently pending before the Supreme Court, the religious liberty movement in America has consistently involved and defended the rights of diverse religions.
In recent years, critics of the Trump administration in particular and the religious liberty movement in general have curiously claimed that the whole religious liberty movement has been misused as a vehicle to install “Christian Nationalism” in America. The claim is strange because, as we will explain, all the major religious liberty initiatives in America—including our work at the Napa Legal Institute—are even-handedly advocating for religious exercise rights that apply equally to all non-Christian religions as well as to Christians.
Napa Legal’s Faith and Freedom Index strives to be an objective, even-handed analysis of religious liberty at the state level, analyzing whether state laws allow faith-based nonprofit organizations of every creed to be given the freedom to operate without unnecessary government interference.
When Napa Legal’s team recently reviewed a critical article published in Verdict by Professor Marci A. Hamilton, we viewed the piece with open minds and the desire to genuinely receive criticism. Yet Hamilton does not find any methodological disagreements or disputes with the way the Index interpreted statutes. The piece is rather a baffling and abstract attack on Christian Nationalism and theocracy, concepts at odds with the Index itself.
Hamilton’s article is titled “Religious Liberty Should Be Freedom For All Believers Not a Privilege for Some.” The Napa Legal Institute agrees with this statement. Indeed, every recommendation in the Index is meant to foster “freedom for all believers.” Every aspect of the index assesses religious freedom generally; no denomination or religious perspective is prioritized. Hamilton battles a strawman: Nowhere does Napa Legal, the Index, or (as far as I am aware) any other major advocate for religious liberty in America call for such a thing.
Further, Hamilton commits some apparent errors in the course of her argument. She improperly discusses the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith, which limits the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, as if its narrow definition of religious exercise is the historical, proper way that religious liberty has always been viewed.
She speaks as if the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a weapon crafted by Christian extremists rather than a bipartisan bill supported by Chuck Schumer and Bill Clinton. And she fails to acknowledge that the religious liberty advocates she criticizes, such as the Becket Fund (whose president serves on Napa Legal’s board), consistently defend the religious exercise rights of Native American tribal religions, Muslims, and Jews.
The article criticizes the fact that the Index values religious exemptions to “nondiscrimination” laws. Yes, exemptions from such laws allow religious organizations with specific beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and the human person to choose who they bring together based on their religious beliefs. But these exemptions are permissive, not compulsory, laws. They allow diversity rather than require uniformity. And, as a practical matter, the religious organizations protected by such accommodations are extremely diverse. They are certainly not exclusively Christian.
Allowing Christian foster agencies to license only married couples (one man and one woman) as foster parents in no way prevents religious plurality. Secular foster agencies or those run by progressive religious organizations remain free to license non-traditional foster families.
Preserving freedom for Catholic schools to hire fellow Catholics or Christians is hardly a heavy-handed move towards theocracy. In fact, prohibiting people from associating, whether through employment or other relationships, to carry out work based on shared religious values effectively forbids the existence of religious organizations.
Broad religious exemptions to employment laws still leave liberal religious organizations and secular organizations free to hire (or decline to hire) whoever or however they like.
So when Hamilton claims that religious liberty advocates have a secret agenda to establish conservative Christianity, the argument falls flat. The religious freedom movement, in theory and in action, obviously protects all religions against needless government overreach and in no way promotes any one religion to the exclusion of others.
Hamilton claims that “Christian Nationalism is intended to impose a very specific Christianity on the country to the detriment of the millions of believers who disagree.” The Faith and Freedom Index, in contrast, promotes and rates favorably strong protections for religious exercise, religious exemptions from “nondiscrimination” laws, protections that prevent the government from shutting down religious worship and exercise during a state of emergency, corporate governance laws that allow religious organizations to govern themselves according to their religious laws and beliefs, and religious exemptions from various state taxes and regulations.
It is hard to see how one makes the leap from these modest (almost generic) religious liberty proposals to Christian Nationalism. Notice that every one of these recommendations equally applies to and protects the religious liberty of Catholics and Episcopalians, Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Unitarians and Greek Orthodox Christians, as well as the thousands of other religious sects that exist in the United States. Hamilton never explains how these laws would “impose a very specific Christianity on the country to the detriment of millions of believers who disagree,” because the proposals in the Index also apply to the “millions of believers who disagree.” The Faith and Freedom Index whitepaper does not contain a single mention of Christianity.
Most organizations fighting for religious liberty desire a modest, historical, and diverse right for people of all religions to exercise their religions in all aspects of public life. This fight for religious liberty is totally distinct from – indeed, it opposes—the concept of Christian Nationalism criticized in Hamilton’s article. The religious liberty movement is fighting for religious liberty for all and any statement to the contrary needs to provide proof that religious liberty is merely a cover for the establishment of Christian faith in America.
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