"Religious Liberty" is the new "State's Rights"

Last week Adam Laats reminded us of why conservatives are so worked up about Harvard's tax-exempt status. It goes back to a 1980s case that tells us a lot about the moment we're living in, and why "religious liberty" is the new "state's rights."

Bob Jones University was founded as part of the culture panic wave of a century ago, a wave of right-wing anguish centered around evolution and the Scopes Trial. Bob Jones University would be a bulwark against modern naughty culture. As Laats quotes Bob Jones himself, “Fathers and mothers who place their sons and daughters in our institution can go to sleep at night with no haunting fear that some skeptical teachers will steal the faith of their precious children.”

Resisting modern evils meant, when the fifties rolled around, resisting desegregation. Bob Jones University remained stubbornly committed to keeping Black folks out, well into the 1970s refusing to bend and staying proudly unaccredited (note that college accreditation is yet another Trump/Project 2025 target) by refusing to bend and accept Black folks on its campus. 

It tried some tricks (let a Black employee register for one class) and then even accepted a few Black men as students (as long as they were married and therefor less of a threat to the purity of white co-eds). Then the Carter administration got aggressive, threatening to remove the university's tax-exempt status, as well as those of other segregated universities.

The 1980 GOP platform and candidate Reagan promised to stop this use of the IRS to attack the schools. Not that he could publicly argue in 1980 that keeping Black folks off a campus was a perfectly okay goal. Instead, using BJU's fictitious desegregation as a fig leaf, he instead declared that this was all about religious freedom.

So when Donald Trump declared the launch of a Religious Liberty Commission, he was following a well-established right wing playbook. 

What religious liberty is being protected? The freedom to discriminate.

The Supreme Court has ploughed the road for this for over a decade. From Hobby Lobby on through Masterpiece Cake Shop and up to the trinity of cases being invoked in the St. Isidore Catholic charter case, SCOTUS has been insisting that the Free Exercise clause beats the Establishment clause. And not only is Free Exercise the part that matters, but no Christian can freely exercise their religion unless they are free to A) discriminate against people they disapprove of and B) get supported by tax dollars to do it. 

There's a case from Maine working its way to decide just that-- the schools that won Carson and the right to collect voucher money for religious education now want to be free to collect that money while discriminating against LGBTQ students , a right that many other voucher states already recognize. Free Exercise for folks operating certain religious schools means the freedom to reject and degrade students of whom they disapprove.

So Trump's Anti-Christian Bias Task Force is set to root out any policies that get in the way of that Free Exercise. Martha McHardy reported on the first meeting for Newsweek:

Attorney Michael Farris, speaking on behalf of a Virginia church, said the IRS had investigated it for alleged violations of the Johnson Amendment, which requires churches to refrain from participating in political campaigns if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. Representatives from Liberty University and Grand Canyon University also claimed their institutions were unfairly fined because of their Christian worldview.

Additional allegations included the denial of religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for military personnel, biased treatment of Christian Foreign Service Officers, and efforts to suppress Christian expression in federal schools and agencies. Critics further accused the Biden administration of marginalizing Christian holidays while giving prominence to non-Christian observances, and of sidelining faith-based foster care providers.

Speakers also alleged that Christian federal employees were retaliated against for opposing DEI and LGBT-related policies that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

"Faith-based foster care providers" turn up in these complaints because of a Biden era policy that put protections in place for LGBTQ minors. But the religious freedom argument is that folks should be free to foster kids even if they believe certain types of kids are terrible sinners who need to be Straightened Out.

The claim that some folks are discriminated against for religious positions on "DEI and LGBTQ-related policies" is another way to say those folks aren't allowed to discriminate against persons on the basis of race or gender identity or sexual orientation. It's the same claim as the people who don't want to do their job issuing marriage licenses if gay marriage is involved, or who don't want to provide health care to naughty women who have sought an abortion. 

The Religious Liberty Commission edict follows a similar pattern. What's the complaint here?

Recent Federal and State policies have undermined this right by targeting conscience protections, preventing parents from sending their children to religious schools, threatening funding and non-profit status for faith-based entities, and excluding religious groups from government programs.

"Conscience protections" is another favored construction, as in "my conscience tells me that I shouldn't treat Those People like people and how dare you infringe on my right to do that."

The modern rejoinder to someone claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about state's rights is to ask, "The state's right to do what?" The answer, of course, is "The state's right to perpetuate a system of enslavement." 

When someone on the far right starts talking about religious liberty, the question is "The liberty to do what?" The answer is, "The liberty to enjoy a position of high privilege from which we can decide which people we think are worthy of civil rights." Or more simply, "The liberty to discriminate against others without consequence." 

It all makes me sad because it is the worst testimony ever for the Christian faith. It's the kind of thing that makes my non-believing friends and relatives point and say, "See? Religious people are just as awful as anyone." There are actual Christians in the world, and they deserve better than this. There are people who daily wrestle with how to live out their faith in the world in challenging situations, and they deserve better than this. If your assertion is that you can't really, truly follow Christ unless you are freely enabled to treat certain people like shit, then you are talking about some Jesus that I don't remotely recognize. You are not talking about religious liberty; you're talking about toxic politics with some sort of faux Jesus fig leaf.