It’s Past Time to Strengthen Our Free-Exercise Muscles

Yes, you have freedom of conscience, we are told. But freedom of action? Not so much. The First Amendment says the government may not “prohibit the free exercise” of religion. But a parchment promise is no guarantee of actual free exercise — the license to act in furtherance of the tenets of your faith — if such action would transgress the government’s laws.

For well over a century, the Supreme Court has instructed us that, while belief is sacrosanct, religious actions — the practice of faith — must conform to government’s laws. To abide a different arrangement would “make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land.” In effect, the Court concluded in Reynolds v. United States (1879), it would enable “every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

I’ve been sympathetic to this view for a long time. It’s wrong. The fallacy can be hard to spot, but when law is unmoored from democratic legitimacy, it is government that becomes a law unto itself — a law destructive of our liberties.

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