It's In the Code Ep. 57: Religious Freedom Part II
The language of “religious freedom” is often used as a code for the preservation of traditional White Christian privilege in the US. But it is also used as a code for efforts to use religious ideology to influence the secular government, so that the beliefs of a minority of White conservative Christians in the US is forced onto the population as a whole. Dan explores this dimension of the contemporary code of “religious freedom” in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series on the podcast Straight White American a series on the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought, your host.
Glad to be with you as always.
And as always, I want to begin by thanking those who support us, who support what we do, all the different ways that you do that.
Those of you who reach out and contact me specifically for this series, we want to keep it going.
Need the insights and thoughts and input from you.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Way behind on the emails and responding to emails.
Was in Greece earlier in the summer and just returned from Puerto Rico.
My globetrotting is over.
I am getting caught up on the emails.
I'm way behind, but continue always to value the insights that so many of you have.
Love some of the feedback from the prior episode on religious freedom, called Religious Freedom Part 1, before the 4th of July last week.
And following up with what was sort of promised in that series, Religious Freedom Part 2, today.
So, thank you for the feedback.
Always love the ideas.
Again, Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Let's dive right in here.
And I had a week off.
It's been a couple weeks since the last episode.
So just as kind of a reminder, the theme was religious freedom.
In last episode, we kind of talked about what religious freedom has been historically, where the idea comes from, talked about how it maybe sort of sounds like a new idea to some people, but it's a very old idea, well-wrought.
And noted that religious freedom was intended or took shape to protect the freedom of religious minorities.
And detailed how the idea of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, which is an idea that follows from that, were ideas that were advanced not just by critics of religion, but by a lot of different religious adherents as well.
And then we talked about how, in its contemporary usage, when people hear the phrase religious freedom, it's typically a code.
It's coded language.
And basically it is coded language aimed at preserving the historical privilege of white conservative Christians.
So it's really flipped from what it once was and is now a code for protecting the privilege, the inequalities that owe to or that stem from or that accrue to White conservative Christianity in the U.S.
That led into a topic that I promise to get into in this episode, which has to do with the idea of the relation of religious freedom and government interference in issues related to religion, and let's say religious interference in issues related to government.
And that's what we're going to take up here, okay?
So, I want to start with this.
I want to start with Thomas Jefferson.
Most people probably have some idea who Thomas Jefferson was.
He famously used the language and referenced what he called a wall of separation between church and state.
Now, that's not the language of the First Amendment.
People who oppose church-state separation will point out that that's not the language of the First Amendment, and they're correct.
But the fact that Thomas Jefferson is using this language shows that it's clearly an interpretation of the First Amendment that goes back to the founding period.
And the interesting thing to me is that Thomas Jefferson referenced this language of a separation, a wall of separation between church and state, in a letter to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, kind of my neck of the woods, so to speak.
And the reason he was sending them a letter is because they had supported the ratification of the First Amendment, and he was just sending them a letter of sort of thanks and support and so forth.
Now, that illustrates the point that the First Amendment and the language of separation of church and state, which Jefferson interpreted as a wall of separation, was something that was supported by religious adherence, at least some religious adherence, not just opponents of religion.
That's the point that we made in the last episode.
What I want to think about here, though, is what would a wall of separation look like?
What would that mean?
What does that imply?
Well, at the very least, and there are some First Amendment interpretations that go beyond this, right?
But at the very least, it would imply government neutrality toward religion.
That is, government isn't going to favor one religion over others.
And that's been one of the interpretations, a kind of, frankly, kind of minimal interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that says that Congress won't make an establishment of religion.
Saying that what that means is that the government, the federal government, the U.S.
government, and by extension state governments as well, have to treat religions equally.
They should be neutral with regard to religion.
All kinds of complicated questions about whether that means that you could have, like say, state funding of religious things, that they were all funded and so on and so forth.
But this basic idea of neutrality, right?
The idea that government wouldn't favor one religion over and above others.
The flip side of this, and this is what I'm interested in, right?
The flip side of this, the kind of logical counterpoint to this, is that religions would themselves not have an undue influence over the government, right?
A wall of separation is effective in both directions.
A government isn't supposed to meddle in religious affairs.
That goes to the free exercise clause that people can exercise their religion as they see fit.
It follows from this that adherents also shouldn't be unduly influencing government.
This is sort of a two-way street.
They should not be using secular government to enforce their religious agenda because if they did that, if the secular government was enforcing the religious agenda of one group or another, it would not be neutral to religion.
Pretty straightforward idea.
Laying this out there to just set sort of a baseline, okay?
This was the view of early champions of religious freedom, such as those Baptists that we talked about, right?
And in this sense, this is a really, really key idea.
Freedom of religion was also freedom from religion.
And I want to be really clear on this, because you're going to run into people, I don't know how often you can get in a conversation like this with Uncle Ron at the cookout, But if you did, you're going to run into people who say, no, no, no, it's freedom of religion, this is a Christian nation, and so forth.
Sorry, folks.
Freedom of religion implies freedom from religion, the freedom not to be religious.
And this, again, is explicit in religious adherents who supported the ratification of the First Amendment, who were supporters of religious freedom.
They weren't dumb.
They did not labor under the assumption that everybody was Christian and that we were just talking about, for example, a nation where everybody's Christian but what they really meant by freedom of religion is you could be members of a different Christian denomination or something like that.
That's not what they meant.
They understood that this meant that there would be some people who were not Christians, right?
Freedom of religion has to mean freedom from religion, okay?
Again, that's sort of some historical background, some laying out.
The big takeaway point here is that the idea that religion shouldn't meddle in, or excuse me, the state, the government, shouldn't meddle in religious affairs is also the idea that religion should not have an undue influence on government.
Okay?
And again, this has not been perfectly instantiated in our history, it's been inconsistent and so forth, but I think the idea is pretty straightforward.
Jumping from that historical understanding, right, to the contemporary code of religious freedom—that is, the way that appeals to religious freedom are made in our own society and culture at present—it's obvious that this wall has been broken down by those most loudly appealing to religious freedom.
And we saw that in the last episode, right?
That's obvious on the side of activists seeking to preserve traditional Christian privilege, right?
They are clearly breaking down that wall by seeking to gain a privilege from the state, state broadly speaking, right?
From government at whatever level.
But it's also clear from this If that breaking down depends upon government support for those Christians claiming their privilege, also means that it implies the influence of conservative Christians on government.
Okay?
And this may be so obvious to people that you're like, great, Dan, thanks, waited a couple weeks, tuning into the episode, and you're telling us that there are conservative Christians who influence the government.
Wow, thanks.
That's what I'm saying, but I want us to think about how significant this is because this is a really big deal when we think about religious freedom and the way that the language of religious freedom has been kind of corrupted in present society.
So let's just take a minute.
I'll put my professor hat on for a minute here and just say a couple things about American religion.
And I should say that my numbers here, I'm going to throw out some numbers.
Come from PRRI, Public Religion Research Institute, sort of a friend of the show.
Love their work and encourage you to check out PRRI.com.
But when we talk about, for example, white evangelical Christians, and this is the largest single There are some Catholics involved in this.
There'll be some mainline Protestants involved in this.
when we tend to talk about these religious freedom claims.
There are some Catholics involved in this.
There'll be some mainline Protestants involved in this.
Sometimes there'll be some congregations of color involved in this.
But typically, when you get some governor or state representative or federal representative or something standing up in front of a crowd and talking about religious freedom, it's a mostly white crowd, and it's a mostly white crowd of evangelical Protestants.
So white evangelicals account for about 14% of the U.S.
population.
Now folks, that's significant.
I am of an age, I am now old enough, that I can remember a time when white evangelicals were a much larger percentage of the U.S.
population.
According to PRRI, again using their numbers, 2006, it was 23% of the population, and it has declined steadily since then, okay?
For a little bit of comparison, about the same number of Americans are white Catholics.
If you add white Catholics and white evangelicals together, you're at about 28% of the population, a little bit more than a quarter of the U.S.
population.
You might listen, and you might say, well, that's sizable, right?
It is.
It's a sizable group.
By way of contrast, the religiously unaffiliated—that is, people who do not affiliate with a religion, who don't claim a religious identity.
This is not Jewish people.
This is not Buddhists.
This is not people who are part of a different religion from Christianity.
This is people who don't claim a religious affiliation.
Guess what?
That's about 28% of the U.S.
population.
So, if you take all the evangelicals and all the white evangelicals, all the white Catholics, and add them together, it's about the same as the number of people who have no religious affiliation in this country, just for a little bit of perspective.
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That means, I promise this is about the end of the numbers here, okay?
That means that there are about twice as many people in this country who are not affiliated with a religion than there are who are white evangelicals, which again is the group most likely to use that contemporary code of religious freedom.
So imagine, it's a two-to-one.
White evangelicals are outnumbered by the unaffiliated two-to-one, okay?
But despite being a significant minority of the U.S.
population—again, white evangelicals, 14% means 86% of the U.S.
population are not white evangelicals—despite being a significant minority of the population, white evangelicals and their less visible Catholic and mainline Christian partners, right, they have effectively used the government at all levels to enforce their Christian values on the U.S.
population as a whole.
And if we go down to lower levels, on state populations as a whole, on local populations as a whole, we look at the battles taking place in school boards.
We'll talk about this in a minute.
You're talking about the effects on every student in a school, including students who are religiously, excuse me, religiously unaffiliated, students and parents who are religiously unaffiliated, and so forth, right?
In addition to that, conservative white Protestants are radically, radically overrepresented in the Republican Party, right?
And you can poke around online, you can find numbers for this.
A majority of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, as politically conservative.
A lot of political conservatives, a lot of Republicans identify as conservative Christians, right?
There has been such a merging of religious and political identity in this country, right?
From both the political and religious right That conservative white Christian ideology has essentially become the party platform of the Republican Party.
And this is part of what we talk about when we talk about Christian nationalism.
If you have listened to the podcast at all, you have heard that.
You can read Brad Onishi's book for more about that.
You can read my book, Queer Democracy, for more about that.
You can reach out and I'm happy to link you to other sources of mine and others, on and on and on.
Whole huge literature on this at this point.
It's just this idea that to be a quote-unquote conservative in this country has merged political and religious ideology into kind of a single whole that we call Christian nationalism.
And what we see from that is we find a mainstream American political party enforcing conservative Christian white values on the nation as a whole.
We see this at the national level.
You don't have to look far to find U.S.
senators and representatives who use the language of Christian identity to articulate what it is that they propose be legal and social policies and so forth.
We see this at that level.
We see it at the state level.
We see it in attacks on queer communities.
We see it in the banning of teaching about race.
We see it in the elimination of DEI and other quote-unquote woke policies.
We see it in those school board meetings that we talk about and the elections and so forth.
And we see this aided and abetted by a conservative judiciary that is sympathetic to preserving traditional Christian privilege in America.
So this is what we see on the flip side of the appeals to religious quote-unquote freedom is a religious minority in this country using their outsized influence to impose their religious views on the country as a whole.
And that is the code of all these policies.
That is why, again, at present, when you hear people appeal to religious freedom, it is often not an appeal to the freedom of religious minorities to be able to practice as they see fit.
It is the code of a religious minority aiming to impose its views on a majority Views that target minorities and limit their freedom.
And that's the kind of Orwellian dimension to the contemporary appeals to religious freedom, is that freedom is code for one group infringing on the freedoms and rights of others.
And that's what we see.
And even when that code is inexplicit, even when you don't hear them talking about religious freedom, you often find religious legitimations for these policies and laws that are evident.
You will hear when people talk about, say, banning gender-affirming care for minors, right?
And they couch this in, we can call them secular terms, right?
In health and safety and protecting children and so forth, But look at the floor debates.
Look at how they go.
They will cite scripture.
They will sign laws and bills in churches.
They will invoke what they see as the religious heritage of the U.S., right?
So even when the language of religious freedom isn't there, the legitimations that are given for these policies are explicitly religious.
So that's what we see, and what we see in all of these cases is the effect of long-standing efforts to ensure that a religious minority in the U.S.
not only undermines any idea of government neutrality toward religion, but also the idea that the government actually enforces the religious views of a minority in the form of law and policy.
It's also why, if you're a legal observer and you watch some of the lawsuits that are taking place and beginning to come forward in this country, you will hear the argument from groups like the ACLU and others that some of these laws actually represent a state establishment of religion, that they have enforced a particular religious ideology.
All of that.
It's a lot of stuff.
All of that is what we find if we kind of lift the hood and start unpacking the coded language of religious freedom.
Because for good Americans, there's nothing we like more than freedom.
There's no better kind of American word than freedom.
But you begin decoding it, we see what contemporary appeals to religious freedom really are, how different they are from sort of the historical precedent that they come out of.
Got to wrap this up.
I'll say it one more time, kind of tie these things together, these two episodes.
We use Jefferson's language of a wall of separation.
That wall works in two different directions.
One is state neutrality religion.
The other one is, let's say, state freedom from religious coercion of its own, from being influenced unduly by religion.
What we find oftentimes in contemporary appeals to religious freedom is the breaking down of that wall.
from both directions.
An effort to preserve the Christian privilege that many have experienced in this country to the detriment of everybody who isn't part of their group, but also the ability to influence government
And create de facto establishments of religion, whether those are on a municipal scale, whether they're in a local school board, whether they are in state laws or state constitutional amendments, whether they are in efforts to legislate federally, this is what we find.
As I say, we've got to wrap this up.
I could talk about this topic for a long time.
Please keep the comments coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I could anticipate some things sort of spinning out of this that people are interested.
Love to hear what you think.
Have other things in the hopper coming up.
Again, trying to catch up on the emails.
I know that I'm behind.
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