Nearly half of all Americans claim a religion — a big tent definition that includes everyone from Pagans to Hasidic Jews, and Hindis to Rastafarians. And while the United States government has a long history of negotiating which religious preferences are legally protected, in recent decades, the Supreme Court has used a simple rule to answer this question.
“For 30 years, the court felt that religious people don’t get any special treatment when it comes to ‘neutrally applied’ laws,” like work holidays or mandatory drug testing, producer Robert Jimison said. “But in this episode, we wanted to explore how this and other recent decisions from the Justices could be steering the court in a new direction.”
With the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the court, a conservative majority of justices have subsequently issued a string of rulings creating new privileges for religious groups. Now, some critics of the court’s new direction are asking whether these rulings preference a subset of religious Americans. So we asked Adam Liptak, The Times’s Supreme Court correspondent and Wednesday’s guest, and Elizabeth Dias, our national religion correspondent, which groups specifically were benefiting from, and celebrating, these rulings.
Is this really a victory for all religious Americans?
Here’s what Adam had to say:
The legal principles announced by the court in the recent cases in theory apply to all religions. But the recent run of victories for claims of religious freedom in the Supreme Court have mostly involved mainstream Christian groups. That is a change from an earlier era, a recent study found, when the court’s rulings tended to protect minority religions and dissenting Christian denominations.
And the court’s track record in cases involving Muslim plaintiffs is decidedly mixed.
On the one hand, the court ruled in favor of Muslim men who said they had been placed on the no-fly list to force them to violate their religious beliefs by spying on other Muslims. And it said that Arkansas prison officials had violated the religious liberty rights of Muslim inmates by forbidding them to grow beards.
In a much more important case, though, the court rejected a challenge to President Donald J. Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. And the court allowed the execution of a Muslim inmate who had asked that his spiritual adviser be present in the death chamber but later stayed the executions of Buddhist and Christian inmates who had made similar requests.
Who specifically is celebrating this ruling?
Here’s what Elizabeth told us:
Many conservative, white evangelicals and some Catholics opposed health-related restrictions on worship gatherings during the pandemic, and so they saw the Supreme Court’s ruling as vindication for their cause. Ever since President Trump tilted the balance of the bench to their favor, especially with his final nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, they have hoped to use the court to advance their goals on issues like ending legalized abortion or protecting their religious preferences.
Though it appears America’s conservative Christians are benefiting from the court’s course change, the number of people within these communities who count these rulings as victories might be shrinking. For example, recent studies reveal growing generational divides among white evangelicals on gay rights, with nearly double the share of younger evangelicals supporting gay marriage than older evangelicals compared with more than a decade ago.
So while The Daily’s host, Michael Barbaro, and Adam ended the episode noting that this issue is both a “legal fight and a culture wars fight,” shifts in opinion within these groups point to the potential for de-escalation — and the possibility for common ground.
