Evangelicals who minimize the importance of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments betray a naivete about the perils to religious liberty in the United States, perils that have been growing over the past decade. Many people, outside of the relatively small group of constitutional law professors and Supreme Court and appeals courts practitioners, may not grasp the sheer number of cases on the religious clauses of the First Amendment that have reached the high court in recent years. Six of these cases illustrate the stakes. (There are scores more religious liberty cases that are resolved in federal district and circuit courts, as clashes between the world of faith and the vast administrative state in the United States accelerate.) In 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the Supreme Court decided, by a 5-to-4 vote, that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that for-profit corporations supply their employees with contraceptives – even forms of contraception violating the corporations’ owners’ beliefs – was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Had the court majority gone the other way, there is no doubt that Hobby Lobby, a company employing 32,000, would have closed. The Green family, who owns that company, was not going to […]
