The language of “religious freedom,” “religious freedom restoration” laws, and so forth makes many of us uncomfortable. What does this language mean? Who deploys it? For what reasons? Where did it come from? In this first of a two-part episode, Dan explores these issues, looking at the emergence of the idea of religious freedom and how those who deploy it on today’s political and religious right have departed from its historical meaning.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series on the podcast Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host.
As always, welcome your thoughts, insights, input, responses, ideas for this series.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj.com.
I have been out of town some this summer and have fallen behind a little bit in the email responses.
I am preparing to go out of town again, this time down to Puerto Rico.
We'll get some beach and sun and spend some time with the family, which means I will probably fall further behind in my emails, but I promise I will read them.
I will catch up to them.
I will respond to as many as I can, as I always do.
Please do keep them coming, and as always, we can't We can't do anything we do on the podcast without our listeners, and certainly this series is listener-driven.
Ideas and feedback that I get from you, so please keep those coming and look forward to seeing those.
As I say, I'm going to be gone, reposting this episode, and then we'll post again in a couple weeks.
And in between those two weeks, we'll have the 4th of July.
And I figure 4th of July is a good time to do some reflecting on some of the themes that come up a lot if you're an American around the 4th of July, Independence Day.
Themes like freedom and liberty get me thinking.
And so I wanted to spend a couple episodes, actually, on the concept of religious freedom.
This is one, as always, I hear about this idea from a lot of you.
I talk about it with colleagues.
Read about it in the press, get questions about it.
And I think a few things are sort of of interest here.
One is that while the idea of religious freedom is not new, and we're going to talk about that, I think for a lot of Americans, it feels new.
That is, unless you're somebody who happens to have studied I don't know, history of church and state in America, or the history of Western political theory, or maybe if you come from certain kinds of religious traditions or something, you probably have not spent big chunks of your life thinking about the concept or learning about the concept of religious freedom.
Instead, you've probably heard about it because you hear about it with laws that are passed in particular states guaranteeing freedom of religion, or you hear political rhetoric about religious freedom being taken away by, for example, somebody being told that if they sell wedding cakes, they need to be willing to sell one to same-sex couples who are getting married or something like that.
It probably feels new, and those uses of religious freedom, I think, have really gained a lot of cultural and certainly political visibility since around 2015.
2015 is when Mike Pence, when he was governor of Indiana, signed a religious freedom or defense of religious freedom law there that was widely criticized as basically being an anti-LGBTQ tool that was a A way of discriminating against queer folk in the name of religious freedom.
And that sort of set a trajectory that is still very much with us.
So I think lots of Americans, maybe in a way that they hadn't before, have in the last 10 years, or a little bit less, heard about religious freedom in a way that they hadn't.
It feels sort of new, and it feels highly partisan, because it has tended to be used on the political and religious right during that time.
And so I think that that's a piece of why I want to talk about this.
It's a piece of why people reach out and ask about this.
And it also opens up one of a couple things that I want to do, and one in this episode and one in a later episode, is looking at how that language is used, decoding that language, But also highlighting some of how that language is a departure from what has gone on in the past, or what that language has meant.
Because I also hear from people, and know people, and talk with people, and am now old enough that I am one of the people who have studied the history of religious freedom, or do know what religious freedom Has meant, how it's developed, and so forth.
And look at what's going on in the contemporary United States and how that language is used.
And I'm like, this is not what religious freedom is or has been or was intended to be.
And so I want to be able to sort of draw those two points together.
How it's used, what it was, how we got from where we once were to where we are now.
So let's start with some of the history and, you know, I am a college professor and today I'm going to talk like one a little bit.
You can't crack the code on the current rhetoric of religious freedom without understanding some history.
So I'll put on my professor hat, walk through some of this.
I promise it'll be pretty fast and we're not going to get into super fine-grained details.
And if you want the fine-grain details or you've got more to share, please email me.
One of the things I often get emails about are people who tell me all the details that I left out, and you're right, because I aim for this to be about, you know, 20 minutes or so, these episodes, which means I kind of have to skim over the surface.
So if you want to hear more or want to tell me more, I'd love to hear it.
Again, danielmillerswage at gmail.com.
But the long and short of it is this, for most of the history of the West, for most of the history of most places in the world, it was largely taken for granted that what we call religion and politics or religion and state, that they were naturally related.
And among other things, it was typically held to just basically be sort of a natural fact that the unity of a nation or a state or a people required shared religious adherence And also that the state, the political authorities, had at least some role in maintaining that adherence within the population.
Well, in Europe, during what philosophers and historians might call the early modern period, and for those of you who aren't into sort of, you know, historical periodizations, think roughly, you know, the Reformation period, the period of time right before that, following that, and so forth, if you want to kind of shorthand.
During the early modern period, the religious unity of Europe broke down.
And of course, that's part of what the Reformation was.
You get this rejection of Catholic authority in some places and the emergence of new Christian denominations and so forth.
And this also included challenges to the idea that everyone in a state needed to have the same religious practices.
And challenges to the idea that the role of the state was to enforce adherence to those practices.
And some of those ideas came from critics of religion, philosophers and others, so-called free thinkers who were beginning to sort of break out of constraints of theological thought to approach thinking about the world and politics and society in other ways.
Some of them raised these questions, but there were also critiques of those ideas from many people who were religious.
And often the critiques from within religion were even more radical than some of the critiques from those who were outside of religion.
And again, skimming over the surface, I know there are other nuances to this, but one of the most significant places that this took place was in England by a group that was known as English separatists.
They didn't necessarily call themselves English Separatists, that's what historians call them.
But they argued that they should be able to separate from or worship in a manner separate from the established Church of England and practice their Christian religion as they saw fit.
So, in other words, they were English, they were Christians, but they did not accept elements of the teaching and practice and institutions of the official Church of England.
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England.
They advanced arguments that said religion should be a matter of individual conscience and that it was meaningless to talk about religion and for them specifically Christianity apart from sort of individuals choosing to be Christian.
And so they argued that religion should not be compelled by the state.
They disagreed with doctrines and practices within the Church of England.
They argued they should be able to practice their religion differently.
And so they struggled with British political and religious authorities.
Laws were passed prohibiting their practices, banning them from meeting and so forth, jailing them, all kinds of penalties.
And they responded in different ways.
Eventually, some of those laws would change.
But one way that a lot of them responded is they left Britain for other places, including the American colonies, and strands of English separatism took root in parts of the Americas, especially places like Rhode Island.
And those who've studied American religious history will know that Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and parts of its history, these were places where really, especially for the time, extensive religious liberty was practiced.
They were very influenced by these movements arguing there should not be a state-required religion and the different kinds of religion should be practiced.
And I want to be clear, this was not always just an argument about different kinds of Christianity.
There were early thinkers in these movements, many of whom would emerge among the Baptists.
The first Baptists in America tended to have these views.
We're very clear that this should apply to Jewish people, this should apply to Muslims, this should apply even to atheists.
So for the times, we're talking, you know, 18th century here and sometimes before, 17th and 18th centuries, these were very, very radical ideas, okay?
So you take all of that, this kind of foment that has American roots that are important for us, and groups like these Baptists and other like-minded groups were a driving force behind the First Amendment religious guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
Know that the First Amendment reads like this.
The first part of it says, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
And this is the so-called Establishment Clause.
Congress won't establish religion.
The Free Exercise Clause, Congress won't limit our free exercise.
If you've listened to the main or sort of weekly roundups, you've heard me talk about this before.
These religious groups, and lots of non-religious folks as well, including Baptists with a capital B, they were a driving force behind the inclusion of this language into the Constitution, right?
Now, that's where the idea of religious freedom sort of takes root in the United States, in the Constitution, and so forth, okay?
Obviously, the history of how that idea is applied and practiced, pretty checkered in the U.S.
For example, it took decades for it to be determined that the Constitution applied to individual states as well.
So, again, if you know your American history, you know that for a long time after the formation of the United States, there were states where there was still an establishment of religion.
I live in Massachusetts, known for being a progressive and sort of liberal state now, but it was one of the states that still had a mandated state religion well past the founding of the U.S.
So it took time to sort of settle that issue, to determine that the states also had to hold to the Constitution.
And ever since then, it is impossible to argue that the U.S.
has not, despite the First Amendment, been a nation of Christian privilege.
People often ask me, you know, is the U.S.
a Christian nation?
And my answer is not legally, not constitutionally, not if you look at the actual demographics and makeup of Americans and certainly indigenous populations before Europeans came here and so forth.
But if you're talking about a privileging of Particularly white Protestant Christianity in this nation's history, in that sense, yeah, right?
White Christian Protestantism has been highly favored and privileged in American history.
And if you want a good discussion of this that gets us some historical things and contemporary as well, I'm just going to point you to So it's impossible to argue that the U.S.
Yoshi's book, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America, who could walk you through that in ways far better than I could.
So it's impossible to argue that the US has been some utopian space with pure religious freedom and so forth.
But the First Amendment did protect the rights of religious minorities, which was the aim, And over time, those rights were increasingly recognized, and it sort of chipped away at that white Christian privilege.
And just simple examples of this.
If you're familiar with Jehovah's Witnesses who don't like to say the Pledge of Allegiance because in their religion they pay attention to the teaching of Jesus, you're not supposed to swear oaths, so they don't want to swear an oath to a national entity.
The Supreme Court decided once upon a time that people could not be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance if it went against their religious convictions.
Um, requirements for employers to make, you know, quote unquote, reasonable accommodation for employees' religious practices where possible, that's a result of legal precedents interpreting the First Amendment.
So, for example, arguing that if there's a way to not schedule a Jewish person to have to work their shift on a Saturday, on the Sabbath, if there's a way to allow a Muslim employee to be able to make prayers during the day or something like that in a way that, you know, isn't unduly disruptive and so forth, businesses are required isn't unduly disruptive and so forth, businesses are required to do that.
And we could go on and on and on if this was a podcast about like constitutional law related to church and state and religious exercise.
The examples are numerous.
But you can see this kind of trajectory of chipping away at that privilege, okay?
And for me, there's a threefold ideal to this idea of religious freedom as it relates to the First Amendment.
The first, we've already touched on this, is that like everything in the Bill of Rights, the aim is to protect the rights of minorities from being swept away by the majority.
Most people in the U.S.
are not Jehovah's Witnesses, and the idea was that you can't be forced to do something that violates your religion just because you're a Jehovah's Witness or a religious minority.
The other one is to keep the state from mandating what religion has to look like or making everybody hold to the same religious views and practices.
That's what it means by an establishment of religion.
And I think that the third piece, and we're going to pick up on this, I think, more when we get into the next episode, both the piece about a religious establishment, but also this third piece, we'll pick up on those more.
is to make sure that no particular religious group exercises undue influence over the government, that the government itself is not beholden to a particular religious group, okay?
So that's a broad sort of historical sketch of what people have meant by religious freedom, and I support all of that, okay?
If you're somebody who has only come to be aware of the idea of religious freedom or heard about things like religious freedom restoration laws in recent years, all of that might sound really foreign.
Because when people now use the language of religious freedom, they're often on the political, they're often on the religious right, it's often things like the law signed by Mike Pence that we noted earlier.
All of that, that whole historical conception of religious freedom, is often not what religious freedom means for people who appeal to it.
Playing back on this idea that the U.S.
has traditionally sort of privileged white Protestant Christianity, That has gone along with historical privilege of just being white, cisheteroprivilege, patriarchy, and the whole deal.
Those things have been sort of a package deal.
And this is the context in which current appeals of religious freedom have to be understood.
I mentioned earlier that there's a history in the U.S.
of a sort of chipping away at that Christian privilege.
Well, that has accelerated since the 1960s, as has the criticism of white privilege, of cisheteroprivilege, of patriarchy and so forth.
As the U.S.
has become a more diverse nation in terms of sexuality, in terms of gender, in terms of race and ethnicity, and in terms of religion, and I'm including in this growing numbers of Americans who don't identify as religious, Religious freedom, as it is deployed by people on the right, often is not about protecting the rights of a religious minority.
It has become a code.
A code for what?
A code for maintaining the privilege of white conservative Christianity.
Now, white conservative Christians, especially Protestants, they are a minority of the U.S.
population.
But appeals to the protection of their quote-unquote religious freedom, they're not really aimed at protecting the rights of white conservative Christians.
They're aimed at preserving their privilege.
They are aimed at maintaining what they see as America's authentic Christian identity.
They are often aimed at targeting and punishing and taking away the rights of other minorities.
And this is where you can look at how these things are deployed so often to allow discrimination against LGBTQ plus people, to argue in sort of roundabout ways to be able to discriminate against people of color.
This is often the aim.
And understand this, nobody has argued that, for example, if With marriage equality, that a church that doesn't agree with that has to perform same-sex marriages.
Nobody's argued that.
Nobody has said you have to individually affirm the equality of queer folk and so forth.
But what has happened is people have said, well, if you run a business and it's a private business and you make money doing that and so forth, you have to treat everybody equally, regardless of your personal views.
And this is where these religious freedom laws have come by expanding the concept of religious freedom beyond individual practice, beyond the practice of clergy.
Beyond sort of religious institutions, right, to businesses, to, you know, the entire corporation of Hobby Lobby was basically considered a religious actor because its founder was religious and argued that they were opposed to providing contraception for their workers.
This is different from like a Catholic relief agency, which is a religious organization.
You get this kind of expansion.
And what happens is, that appeals to religious freedom, as they are often articulated now, are aims to take that minority white Christian identity and impose it on the rest of society to maintain a privilege that has been threatened through religious equality.
So that's what's happened.
So oftentimes, if you're somebody who says, man, every time I hear somebody talk about religious freedom, I cringe, or I find my hackles getting up, or it makes me really angry, this is probably why.
You know the code.
You know that the code for religious freedom, quote unquote, as it's typically used in the U.S., is not that historical sense.
The religious minorities ought to be protected in their practice of religion from sort of the tyranny of the majority, as One famous quasi-critic of democracy would call it.
It's because that's not how it operates now.
It is code for Christian supremacy.
It is code for the imposition of a particular kind of Christian order on society.
It is a code for what is now a religious minority in the U.S.
Trying to nonetheless shape the U.S.
according to its own ideology, often with the help of the courts in doing so and conservative judges and so on.
That's what people pick up on when they sort of find themselves up in arms or angry or uneasy with the use of religious freedom language.
It's also why people like me who study the history of religious freedom See these gaps between what it has traditionally been and what it is now, the way that it's, you know, if you decode the language now, it's very different from what it once was, so much so that advocates of that traditional model of religious freedom, we can find ourselves reticent to use that phrase because it has become so sort of loaded on the front end of the political and religious right.
So that's the piece of sort of decoding for this episode, is when you hear people on the religious or political right use the language of religious freedom or restoring religious freedom and so forth, at present, that's typically what it means.
It's typically code for essentially Christian supremacy, Christian nationalism, a view that the U.S.
in some sense should be a Christian nation with Christian values and morals and so forth.
Understood in this particular way.
It's not the only way it's used.
Our weekly roundup last week, we talked about the way that religious progressives are now trying to use these laws to advance access to abortion and different kinds of issues like this.
So, there's no lock on this language, but it is, I think at present, a code that is largely deployed by the political and religious right.
There's another dimension to this.
And I mentioned that the kind of sort of third element of that First Amendment sense of religious freedom was the idea that there should not be undue influence over the government by any group, and tied in with the idea of the establishment that the government should not establish a religion.
This is the other piece of what we see with a lot of this language coming out, especially when it comes from lawmakers.
We're going to dive into that in the next episode.
Today, again, the takeaway is that when you hear the language of religious freedom in the U.S., very often at present, it is coming from people on the religious and political right, and it is code for Christian supremacy, Christian nationalism, the privileging of conservative white Christianity as a kind of American norm.
Got to wrap this up.
We're out of time.
As always, again, thank you for your comments, your feedback, your input, the ideas.
Keep them coming.
As I say, I'm taking some time off this summer, so I've lagged a bit on the emails, but I am getting caught up in them.
Will continue to do so.
Value so much the ideas and insights that you have.
Look forward to hearing those.
Please keep those coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
And as always, until we meet again here in a couple weeks, please be well.
