Breaking the cycle of today’s religious freedom fights
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About six years ago, the Supreme Court was preparing to hear two cases involving accusations of religious discrimination.
In the first, a Christian baker named Jack Phillips argued that Colorado officials unlawfully attacked his faith in the process of determining that his refusal to design a cake for a same-sex wedding violated the states’s anti-discrimination law.
In the second, those challenging then-President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from a handful of Muslim-majority countries claimed that the ban needed to be overturned because it was motivated by anti-Muslim bias, among other things.
What stood out about those cases to Thomas Berg, a professor of law and public policy at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, was that there was little-to-no overlap between the groups that filed Supreme Court briefs in support of the Christian baker and the groups that filed briefs in support of the Muslim community. People concerned about religious discrimination in one case didn’t seem to see it in the other.
To Berg, that situation was a symptom of a much bigger issue: Americans increasingly make religious freedom protections contingent on someone’s politics or religion. We’re not being consistent and, in that way, we’re putting the whole concept of religious freedom at risk.
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In his latest book, “Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age,” Berg describes this problem in detail and aims to convince readers that something needs to change. People with different politics and of different faiths don’t have to become the best of friends, he writes, but they do need to respect one another and realize that their own freedom hinges on guaranteeing freedom for others.
Last week, I spoke with Berg about his book and about the cycle of polarization that’s threatening the future of religious freedom.
Deseret News: Why did you want to write this book?
Thomas Berg: I wanted to make the case for religious freedom as a protection for people and as a good thing for society, to show that it can calm fear and reduce resentment.
I also wanted to write a book that would be detailed enough to answer academic and jurisprudential questions, but also accessible enough to help people who have an interest in the subject but aren’t lawyers.
DN: Why do people need to be reminded of religious freedom’s power right now?
TB: Particularly in the last 15 years, religious freedom disputes have become part of the cycle of polarization, part of a broader division into two mega-identities that’s affecting the whole country.
When it comes to religious freedom, we’re, in some ways, repeating the pattern of divisions seen during the Reformation era. Conflicts between Protestants and Catholics at that time gave rise to religious freedom as we know it because it was a solution to them.
In his “Memorial and Remonstrance,” James Madison wrote about the torrents of blood spilled in the old world over religious disputes. He noted that attempting to solve such disputes by imposing one side or the other through the government has never worked and actually only makes things worse.
The remedy then and now is to give full and equal freedom to all.
DN: When you mentioned religious freedom getting caught up in the cycle of polarization, what came to my mind first was political battles between Democrats and Republicans. But just like the Protestants and Catholics did, different faith groups definitely still fight about religion.
TB: Yes, like evangelical Christian attacks on Muslims. Pat Robertson, for example, has repeatedly said that Islam is not a religion, that it’s actually a political movement designed to take over the country.
Ironically, that’s the same thing being said now about evangelical Christians. That shows that when you attack the religious freedom of another group, your arguments can rebound back and hurt you.
So much of what I’m trying to do in the book is to try to emphasize that point. I’m trying to do it in a way that increases sympathy across ideological lines rather than magnifies differences.
DN: In my interviews tied to Supreme Court cases, I’m often struck by the lack of sympathy for conservative Christians. Some people have decided that they had enough time in power and should let other people win now.
TB: Yes, even if people don’t openly say that, sometimes that feeling is what’s driving the dynamics.
Of course, when their opponents have that attitude, it impels conservative Christians to hang on even more tightly to whatever power they have and to try to leverage that power in as many ways as possible. It’s a recipe for continued conflict.
It’s like in the Reformation era, when Protestants would say that the government had been the tool of the Catholic Church for too long and that it was time to undo that, but then Catholics would say we have to get government back because the Protestants are going to use it against us.
It’s a feature of the cycle of polarization that you just continuously respond to what somebody else did to you before as they respond to what you did to them before.
DN: So how do we break the cycle?
TB: It’s important to affirm a degree of freedom for the other side and to try to do so based on sympathy not necessarily for that side’s views but for the predicament they find themselves in as a result of holding those views.
In other words, conservative Christians do not have to accept same-sex marriage as theologically or morally sound in order to make some room for nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people.
And progressives and gay rights advocates do not have to agree with conservative Christians’ theological views in order to say that members of conservative faiths should be allowed to follow their beliefs when operating social service organizations and other institutions.
DN: In our current political and religious landscape, who needs to make the first move to heal religious freedom debates? Is this something that politicians need to model?
TB: It’s not so much who makes the first move that matters. What matters is that people see that healing is possible, because the immediate, reflexive reaction that many people have is that it’s not possible to reach bipartisan solutions here.
We shouldn’t forget that in Utah, one of the deepest red states, lawmakers (in 2015) passed a state-wide LGBTQ rights law with substantial religious protections. It was quite remarkable. People said it couldn’t happen.
I finished the book with some quotes from the head of Equality Utah who said the legislation really did improve the culture of dialogue between conservatives and LGBTQ people in Utah, that it made a difference.
A step like that won’t solve every issue, but it can make the atmosphere much better.
After Utah, people said that Utah is unique, and that something like that could never happen at the federal level.
But in December, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which secured, legislatively, the right of same-sex couples to marry. At the same time, the bill included I think signifiant religious liberty protections for traditional organizations. That law made it through the filibuster threat and passed only because of those religious liberty protections.
In the book, I analogize our current polarization to a really tight knot in a rope or in your shoelaces. You have to pick at the knot in one specific place at a time to free it up a little bit.
DN: I love that knot analogy. Is there anything else you want to add?
TB: I want to be clear that I don’t argue for religious freedom solely as a means to reduce conflict and make the American government work better.
It does reduce conflict and make the government work better, but, at the heart of it, religious freedom is the right of the human person to pursue the deepest questions of life and to pursue a relationship with the divine however one understands that concept. It’s a central aspect of human dignity.
There’s a full chapter in the book about religious freedom as a matter of personal dignity and person identity.
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