Christians, your religious liberty really is at stake this election

The threat has never been greater

If a Democrat is elected president, religious liberty will be a relic of the past.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before. A perennial favorite, this argument becomes especially shrill every four years.

I’m old enough to remember James Dobson’s hyperbolic warning in 2008. It’s a classic. Writtten in the form of a fictional “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” his 2008 diatribe appears from the vantage point of 2024 to be not just an exercise in hyperbole, but also in projection.

Here’s a taste of Dobson’s rhetorical whimsy as he imagines what might happen under an Obama presidency:

“In his first week in office, Obama fired all ninety-three U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, recruiting the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush Administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq War. Dozens of Bush officials…are in jail, and most…have been bankrupted by legal costs….

Many brave Christian men and women tried to resist these laws, and some Christian legal agencies tried to defend them, but they couldn’t resist the power of a 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court. It seems many of the bravest went to jail or were driven to bankruptcy, and the reputations of many of them have been destroyed by a relentless press and the endless repetition of false accusations. Our freedoms have been systematically taken away. We are no longer ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’ because many of ‘the brave’ are in jail.”

How the tables have turned.

Now, we have a conservative Supreme Court majority who has just granted expansive presidential immunity, along with a Republican scheme to enhance the power of the executive to unprecedented levels, to weaponize the Department of Justice against political enemies, and to fire tens of thousands of federal employees to be replaced with right-wing political loyalists.

And, we have a candidate for president who has claimed that his own political opponents are more of a threat to the country than foreign adversaries. The real threat, according to Donald Trump, are “the people with in.”

Which people, specifically?

“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” he told Fox News last week. A few days later, he added more specifics while doubling down on his comments at a Fox town hall: the enemies are “Marxists, communists, fascists,” and he named names: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff.

Trump has a plan for dealing with such enemies: “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

For those not in the know, deploying the military against political opponents on American soil is, in the words of historian Steven Levitsky, “classic authoritarian discourse.” The author of the book How Democracies Die, Levitsky has analyzed the death of democracies in twentieth-century Europe and Latin America. In an interview with ABC News, Levitsky explains:

"In each of these cases, autocrats used exactly this language: there's an enemy within that's more dangerous than our external enemies and that justifies the use of extra-constitutional measures," he said. "How many times does Trump have to use this rhetoric before we realize that this is not a normal election?"

ABC further contextualizes Trump’s comments:

Trump's "enemy from within" comments come after a history of praising authoritarian leaders in public, including Hungary's Viktor Orban and China's Xi Jinping. He's also threatened to jail election workers, pledged to take on the civil service and to enact retribution on political enemies if elected -- all of which would significantly stretch the normal limits of executive power.

This is not all. An NPR report has found more than 100 times where Trump has asserted that his rivals and critics “and even private citizens should be investigated, prosecuted, put in jail or otherwise punished.” These include promises to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Biden and Harris, calls for Obama and Liz Cheney to be sent to military tribunals, threats to prosecutors, judges, courtroom staff, and a grand juror involved in his own criminal and civil cases, and calls to jail election workers, journalists, and also private citizens who criticize SCOTUS.

What’s often lost in this litany of threats is an additional promise Trump has made to his Christian supporters.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

Why?

First of all, as David French has recently articulated, Christians are not currently facing much in the way of persecution in this country—despite frequent claims to the contrary.

French should know. He spent a significant portion of his career defending religious liberty while working for the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Here’s French’s assessment:

Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are persecuted, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. They feel like their religious liberty is slipping away. This sense of dread and despair is inflaming the culture wars and causing good people to feel unnecessary fear. 

But there’s good news—by any reasonable definition, American Christians are not persecuted, and the legal protections for religious liberty are stronger than at any time in American history. People of all faiths or no faith at all enjoy an immense amount of protection from government interference.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges or injustices, but it remains the case that the American Christian community is arguably the freest Christian community in the world. 

To understand where we are, it’s necessary to understand where we’ve been. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians.

I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false.

Yes, there have been cases of overreach at times, French explains. But “we’ve largely achieved a constitutional balance. Christians no longer possess power over people of other faiths, but we’ve gained an immense amount of freedom, and that freedom is more than enough for us to live faithful and obedient lives in the United States of America.”

To wit:

Religious Americans are protected from discrimination in the workplace. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion.  The law protects religious Americans from direct discrimination and requires employers to accommodate the religious practices of their employees.

In addition, religious Americans enjoy the protection of a federal “super statute.” I’m using Justice Neil Gorsuch’s words to describe the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that hovers over and above all other federal laws, providing extraordinary protection to people of faith…

Religious employers are completely exempt from nondiscrimination statues when hiring and firing ministerial employees. The ministerial exception may well be the key firewall protecting church from state. Put simply, and as defined by a unanimous Supreme Court in 2012, both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment work together to remove the state from the ministerial process….

If Christians’ religious liberty is so well protected, then who can we expect to be the target of this task force?

Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

courtesy of Pixabay

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves. Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

If political enemies deserve to face tribunals, what do you suppose ought to be done to religious enemies? To those undermining “Christian America,” to “enemies of God”?

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Right now, it seems that our country is divided not just between Right and Left, but also between those who are paying attention and those who might register vague concern about what’s happening but still go about their daily lives while giving only a passing thought to what might lie ahead.

If you are a Christian who values liberty of conscience, if you are a Christian who wants to preserve the space for Christians to speak into our political arena as people of faith, to critique politicians and fellow Christians as Christians—it is time to pay attention to the promises being made.

I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t take these promises seriously.