How the Supreme Court remade religious liberty in the Christian right’s image
In a Court eager to move fast and break things, the justices are moving fastest in religion cases.
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The procurement angle that never gets covered: government contractors claiming religious exemptions from anti-discrimination requirements in federal contracts. That's public money. Taxpayer dollars flowing to vendors who can now, under this Court's framework, assert religious liberty as a shield against equal employment obligations. The 2021 Philadelphia foster care ruling was the opening bid. What's followed is a systematic expansion where "religious liberty" now functions as a carve-out from laws that apply to everyone else. That's not liberty, that's preference. The government isn't compelling anyone's beliefs. It's saying if you take the contract, you follow the contract terms. This Court collapsed that distinction on purpose.
The Court expanding free exercise jurisprudence after decades of Employment Division's near-total exemption waivers is not "remaking liberty in the Christian right's image," it's correcting an overcorrection. Vox wants constitutional equilibrium to stay frozen at the 1990 line because that line happened to favor secular institutions. OJ was innocent and even he could tell you selective outrage about judicial activism depends entirely on whose ox is getting gored.
Vox calling this "remaking" religious liberty assumes there is a fixed, correct version of the doctrine that existed before and is now being distorted. The Court has been oscillating on free exercise since Sherbert. Employment Division in 1990 was its own sharp departure. What you actually have is a Court moving the line back in a direction Vox does not prefer, which is a legitimate criticism to make, but "remaking in the Christian right's image" is not the same as that criticism. One is about doctrine and consistency. The other is about whose team is winning.
The faster pace is worth attention. When any Court moves fast and confident, on any issue, that is when errors get locked in for decades. That concern does not require you to think every expansion of free exercise is wrong. It just requires you to care about institutional stability more than the outcome of any given case.
Kamala warned us these MAGATs would install six culture warriors in robes and call it a judiciary, and now every non-Christian in this country gets to watch their rights dissolve one "religious freedom" ruling at a time. The same people screaming about sharia law have handed a theocracy to the Christian right and are PROUD of it. RFK is out here giving dangerous medical advice as HHS secretary and nobody bats an eye, but somehow THAT crowd gets to define religious liberty for 330 million people.
Six unelected justices with lifetime appointments are systematically converting the First Amendment into a Christian nationalist carve-out and nobody in mainstream media wants to say it that plainly.
they'll say it eventually, right after it affects enough white suburban moderates to be worth ratings. the "nobody wants to say it" part is the tell. it IS being said, loudly, by every church-state separation org and constitutional scholar who isn't trying to keep a seat at some bipartisan dinner table. mainstream outlets just keep laundering it as "a divided court" or "religious freedom debate" because calling it Christian nationalist capture of the judiciary requires picking a side and god forbid Vox or anyone else actually does that consistently. six justices, three appointed by a guy who literally staged a coup attempt, systematically exempting Christianity from neutral laws that everyone else has to follow. that's the sentence. write it.
Six justices, three appointed by someone who tried to overturn an election, have spent five years building a jurisprudence where religious exemptions are available to Christianity in ways they demonstrably are not to Islam or Santeria or anyone else. The data on that is not ambiguous. The outlets calling it a "religious freedom debate" aren't being cautious, they're being cowardly, because the asymmetry is right there in the case outcomes.
The "data" you are citing comes from people who already decided the outcome and worked backward. Fulton v. Philadelphia, the coach praying at the 50-yard line, the web designer case, these were not about Christianity getting special treatment. They were about the government TARGETING religious people and trying to force them to act against their beliefs. If a Muslim baker had the same case with the same facts, the ruling would go the same way. You want to find me a case where a Muslim or Santeria practitioner was specifically singled out by a government agency and the Court sided against them, show it to me. The asymmetry you are seeing is because the left keeps going after Christian institutions specifically, so that is where the cases come from. You do not get to manufacture the conflict and then complain about who wins it.
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Vox has been running variations of this headline for three years now. "The Christian right remade X." "The Court is remaking Y." At some point you have to ask whether the framing itself tells you where the outlet sits on this question.
The actual legal shift is real and worth taking seriously. Fulton, Carson, 303 Creative, the coach prayer case. The Court has been consistent and they are not done. Whether you call that "remaking religious liberty" or "correcting thirty years of hostility to religious claimants" depends entirely on where you started.
What I do not hear from the critics is a serious answer to the underlying tension. If the government can compel participation in speech you find religiously objectionable, that is a First Amendment problem regardless of which coalition you belong to. The progressive answer keeps being "but discrimination" without engaging the compelled speech piece. That is not an argument, that is a label.
And yes, some of the religious liberty wins have gone further than I would draw the line. But the alternative that Vox implicitly prefers is a Court that was happy to tell a Native American tribe their sacred land did not count, and called that neutrality. So.