The assault on religious freedom is not occurring in a vacuum. Freedoms of speech and association have also come under siege. These attacks prove a more general truth: that freedom is interconnected; when one basic freedom is undermined, all freedoms are undermined.
On the culture-and-religion front, so much has changed over the past three and a half decades. During the 1980s, the Moral Majority exercised a politically powerful voice. The term family values could dictate the future course of a politician’s career. By a wide margin, Congress in 1996 defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Popular public crusades targeted violence and graphic sexuality in the media. In 1993, an overwhelming congressional majority passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Less than twenty years later, the federal government would target a religious order of nuns who operated residential facilities for the elderly poor. Although the Little Sisters of the Poor objected on religious grounds to the contraceptive mandates in the Affordable Care Act, the federal government refused to grant them an exception, thereby forcing the nuns to either continue their religious social welfare ministry or adhere to their religious beliefs. More recently, the FBI sent armed agents into the home of Mark Houck, a pro-life activist, because he had shoved an antagonist harassing his son at an abortion protest. And just-disclosed FBI documents showed that the agency considers some traditional Catholic believers as akin to terrorists.
During the 1990s, when the term values was used, it was employed pursuant to a traditional moral values approach. Now, the term is usually used by the secular left, as when a corporation reprimand an employee for not being sufficiently sensitive to woke values.
The Moral Majority in the 1980s may have reacted against a culture that had turned away from traditional moral values during the 1960s and 1970s. But during the 2020’s, the culture has not just turned away from religion – it has turned against it. And in the midst of this shift, religion must try to figure out its role and status in society.
But it’s not alone. The assault on religious freedom is not occurring in a vacuum. Freedoms of speech and association have also come under siege. These attacks prove a more general truth: that freedom is interconnected; when one basic freedom is undermined, all freedoms are undermined.
The crisis of free speech is even more notorious than that of religious exercise. The release of the Twitter files reveal the intricate web of speech oppression existing between the federal government and big technology companies. College campuses are awash in a woke mindset intolerant of dissenting ideas. Students are afraid to speak up in class; professors are punished for diverting away from the mandated path. Hollywood, the media, and corporate culture are all, in various ways, enforcing a mandated set of beliefs and ideology.
Associational freedoms are likewise in jeopardy. A student or teacher who joins the wrong or “unacceptable” organization faces dire reprisals. Parents are punished for trying to exert a voice in their children’s schools. Business corporations seem often to be more organized around enforcing ways of thinking about sexual identity than about finding ways to produce a better product or service.
Religious believers should not think they are all alone, in terms of the wider political attack on their freedoms. Indeed, the attacks are being directed at all First Amendment freedoms. Perhaps this realization will help religious believers to learn a lesson that was not fully appreciated during the 1980s: that freedom fundamentally underlies religious belief and exercise. The latter cannot exist without the former; and therefore, adherents to the latter must commit themselves to the former. And this realization may then point believers toward their civic engagement role in the immediate future.
For any belief, the first goal is survival – to survive as a freedom or set of beliefs. Only after survival can that freedom or set of beliefs begin to stretch out to influence the larger society. For now, religious believers are in the same boat as free speech advocates. Their quest must be a constitutionally protected autonomy from an increasingly overreaching government. Without such autonomy, any attempt to influence the greater society will bound to fail or even backfire.
This is not the 1980s, when religious values were used to influence the nation’s laws and government policies. Now, being in the clear minority and subject to a government-aided assault on its very foundations, religion must operate on a cultural level. It must focus on the beliefs and values of those individuals with whom it comes in contact, hoping that this eventually extends out into the wider cultural sphere. Because in a democracy, laws and government policy ultimately flow from the society and culture.
The freedom conflicts occurring today in society are not fundamentally different from previous conflicts. It is just the players that are different.
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