A Religious Freedom Voting Guide
Bettina Krause September/October 2024In the coming election, if you truly care about religious freedom, you’ll vote Republican.
Unless, of course, you’re concerned about Christian nationalism and Project 2025 and its goal of Christianizing America through law, in which case you’ll vote Democrat. However, if you’re alarmed that young people in public schools are being exposed to militant secular ideology and that teachers are encouraging students to transition their gender identity without their parents’ knowledge, then you’ll vote Republican. But on the other hand, if you’re worried about public schools becoming hostile territory for students and teachers of minority faiths and no faith, with posters of the Ten Commandments on classroom walls, mandatory Bible instruction in classes, and Christian chaplains replacing school counselors, then you’ll vote Democrat. However, if you believe the LGBTQ lobby is gunning for conservative religious institutions and schools, intent on forcing them to relinquish their religious identity and ultimately change their theology of human sexuality, then please vote Republican. But if you’re concerned that Christian institutions and Christian business owners are devaluing America’s religious liberty heritage by using constitutional protections as a sword rather than a shield—as a cover for religiously inspired bigotry—then definitely vote Democrat. But whatever you do, we’re told, you must vote because religious liberty lives or dies on the outcome of this election.
The Lure of Political Talking Points
American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was an astute observer of human nature. Writing in the 1930s, a politically unsettled time in both America and Europe, he said: “Contending factions in a social struggle require morale; and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications.”
Today, on both the political left and right, “emotionally potent oversimplifications” are endemic when it comes to questions of religious liberty within American politics, law, and culture.
But here’s a point we shouldn’t miss. Just because headlines and social media memes sometimes pass for religious liberty debate these days, that doesn’t mean the challenges we face aren’t serious.
Each one of the politicized sound bites I referenced in the opening paragraph is linked to an important public policy discussion—how we educate our young people, how we protect people from discrimination, how religious organizations can maintain their religious identity and mission, how we can best protect minority religious rights within a majority Christian country. All these issues are consequential. They represent policy concerns that are politically sensitive, legally complex, and—for many Americans—religiously weighty and emotionally fraught.
During the past few years Liberty magazine has published articles exploring each of these challenging topics. Authors of these pieces have run the religious gamut—from evangelical Christians to Catholics, to Muslims, Presbyterians, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, Mennonites, and atheists. Although I haven’t asked, I’m sure these authors have also run the political spectrum, too—Republican, Democrat, independent, and everything in between. These authors have been constitutional law professors, historians, religious freedom lobbyists, public officials, lawyers, pastors, teachers, sociologists, and political consultants. Not all of them have arrived at precisely the same conclusions or agreed on every nuance of law. In fact, I can think of more than one article in which an author’s ideas haven’t lined up perfectly with my own opinions about the issue under discussion.
But regardless of all these differences, there’s a thread that links these articles and authors together. They’ve rejected “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” They’ve made a good-faith effort to grapple with complexity. Through their style of argument and tone, they’ve also demonstrated respect for others, even those they disagree with. And they’ve all begun with a simple premise: that religious liberty is a fundamental, nonnegotiable human right that that each generation must work to preserve.
Easing the Political Baggage
It can be clarifying to occasionally step outside America’s politically polarized hothouse and consider religious liberty within other contexts. Before coming to Liberty magazine, I worked in government affairs representing the Seventh-day Adventist Church. One of the situations we worked on involved a church member in Pakistan, a young man who had been sentenced to life in prison for the so-called crime of blasphemy. He was just 27 years old when he was arrested after being falsely accused of sending a text message blaspheming Islam’s prophet. His experience was not unique. Members of religious minorities in Pakistan are often targeted under that country’s blasphemy laws, sometimes falsely denounced by neighbors or acquaintances for nonreligious motives.
This young man had already spent 10 years of his sentence in a maximum-security prison, yet there were religious hard-liners in Pakistan who were lobbying to have his life sentence converted to a death sentence. And if you want to know what it can be like in a maximum-security prison in Pakistan, just google it: overcrowding, vermin, inadequate nutrition, and lack of access to medical care.
Although his sentence has since been overturned, this young man’s story stands as a clear reminder of what religious liberty really means—the simple right to live one’s faith out loud without fear. His story also reminds us that the religious liberty that we enjoy in America and other Western democracies isn’t just a historical anomaly—it’s a current anomaly, as well. Two thirds of the world’s population live in countries that regulate or restrict religious activity in ways that we, schooled in the American ideal of inclusive, expansive religious free exercise, would find intolerable.
Principled pluralism
The first 16 words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution tell me that I don’t have to give up or compromise my own deeply held moral and religious convictions to live, work, worship, and participate freely in American society. But the flip side of that coin is that others have the same privilege as well. And regardless of whether we lean politically right or left, and regardless of our own religious tradition, that kind of reciprocity often feels hard.
When legal rights collide and when religious worldviews collide, simple solutions and easily digestible sound bites become far more attractive than doing the difficult work of seeking a deeper understanding of an issue or trying to look at it through others’ eyes.
Clearly this editorial is not a religious freedom voting guide or even a voting suggestion. But it’s an appeal—for us all, whatever our political sympathies or religious commitments, to keep an eye out for “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that can lead us to dehumanize those we disagree with.
This alone won’t solve the complex religious liberty policy disputes we still need to work through together, but it’s surely a good place to start.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.