5 FACTS You Need to Know About Religious Liberty in America Today

Organizations including the ACLU, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, government officials, and many more are spending millions each year to destroy your religious freedom in courts across America—from local jurisdictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court!

It’s a daunting situation for people of faith in this ongoing battle.

That’s why we want you to know these five facts about the current state of religious liberty in America:

FACT #1: Hostility against people of faith is at an all-time high.

A war is currently raging in our nation that threatens to eradicate our religious freedoms. Hostility against religious liberty has reached an all-time high, and those attacks are increasing at an unprecedented rate.

A few years ago, Liberty Institute sensed that the attacks on religious liberty in our country were dramatically increasing, so we decided to catalog these attacks on religious liberty. In 2012, we released our first edition of The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America that documented nearly 600 incidents. Every incident was sourced to either a reported court decision or media source.

FACT #2: The assault on the religious liberty rights of our children and teachers in public schools is led by misinformation and disregard of established precedent.

Outside anti-religion groups like the ACLU and Freedom From Religion Foundation—which alone sends out approximately 1,000 demand letters each year, yet only filed three lawsuits in 2014—are intent on intimidating and bullying school districts and others seeking to suppress religion in our public schools. More times than not, these demand letters misinform and misstate the law, and even more troubling is that lawyers who represent school districts often are uniformed about the current state of the law.

FACT #3: Powerful and well-funded forces are seeking to purge religion
from public life.

There are those who are fully committed to remove any mention of God or religion from our public life.

– Groups like the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, American Atheists, American Humanists and other secularists and ant-religion groups.
– Even our own government—the current administration in Washington, D.C.—has been hostile, if not the most hostile administration to religious liberty in our nation’s history!

Leaders such as President Obama and Hillary Clinton speak of “Freedom of Worship.” This is a deliberate choice of words, not an accident. Freedom of Worship refers to what we do in the four walls of our churches and places of worship. It seeks to restrict us to inside those four walls. Our Founders did not choose “freedom of worship.” Instead, our Constitution grants us “Free Exercise.”

We not only have a right to believe, but we can live and act upon our beliefs.

ACT #4: The attacks on faith and religious expression are now occurring even against members of our military and veterans.

Veterans memorials are under attack:

– Maryland WWI Veterans Memorial
– Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial
– Tenth Mountain Division Veterans Memorial
– Coos Bay Vietnam Veterans Memorial

We are fighting to protect these memorials which contain religious imagery that honor the selfless sacrifice and service of those who served.

What’s more, even service members are also under attack.

FACT #5: There is hope. When we stand up for religious liberty we win.

We can and do win. We win over 90 percent of our cases, because we are right on the law and we have a proven method that leads to success.

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