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Supreme Court rulings over the last two years are widely viewed by constitutional scholars as elevating individual religious rights above government regulations and laws.

Conservatives, especially Christians, see these decisions as a corrective to the anti-religious rulings of past courts, rulings they believe have eroded individual religious freedoms.

Progressives, especially Christians, see the decisions as taking, to quote Professor Kate Shaw of the Cardozo School of Law, “a sledgehammer to a set of practices and compromises that have been carefully forged over decades to balance religious freedom with other important — and sometimes countervailing — principles.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/opinion/supreme-court-religion.html)

What Shaw underscores in this statement is precedent when she refers to “a set of practices and compromises forged over decades.”

That’s how our democracy works. We establish principles and practices through compromise in order to balance order and individual freedom, and they become legal precedents.

The alternative is a demand for order that becomes tyrannical or an assertion of individual freedom that devolves into chaos. In other words, you have either a European monarchy or America’s wild, wild west. The founders wanted neither so they established a republic that balances order and freedom, state rights and federal authority.

Political evangelicals support democracy as long as it is controlled by religious beliefs and freedoms, but our democracy doesn’t function that way.

The Constitution guarantees individuals the right to be religious in their private lives and in communities. It does not allow individuals or communities to extend their religious beliefs and practices into the public square in ways that affect or alter freedoms to which all Americans are entitled. 

This means a religious individual who owns a business open to the public is required by regulations and laws enacted over time whose intent is to ensure that every customer is treated the same. That seems reasonable, sort of the price of citizenship everyone pays, including those who are religious.

Political evangelicals disagree. They insist that their religious beliefs should govern how they run their business, not the government.

Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that this point of view leads to discrimination in business practices, especially in regard to race. If you run a business, the court has said numerous times, customers are customers, period. There is no ground, none, for justified discrimination.

Thwarted by past courts, political evangelicals recently came up with a novel approach in their efforts to take the country back to pre-1950 American life. They decided to argue that they are the ones being discriminated against by a court system that refuses them the right to discriminate.

They don’t say it that way. Instead, they insist that their religious freedom is being violated, only in this instance the freedom being violated is the right to discriminate on the basis of someone’s sexual orientation or gender. 

Of course, having such a right opens the door to discrimination on the basis of numerous arguments, even the possibility of discrimination in various forms on the basis of race, but this danger doesn’t matter to political evangelicals.

Stunningly, the current conservative majority on the court agrees with political evangelicals and then proceeded to elevate their religious freedom above civic responsibility that would prevent them from discriminating against anyone for any reason in business practices. 

This claim that the one who is discriminating is actually the one being discriminated against is now the basis for most of the court cases involving a conflict between individual rights and the demands of a functioning democracy. 

It was the basis on which the court also struck down affirmative action, ruling that admission policies at colleges and universities intended to overcome the effects of past racists admission policies were discriminatory themselves.

None of this matters to political evangelicals. In their view, if living in a democracy requires them to accept the demands of citizenship in the public square when they disagree because of their beliefs, they choose theocracy over democracy.

Now they have a Supreme Court majority that says the Constitution gives them that right in spite of our nation’s history of discrimination on the basis of race or gender and even religion. Worse, the majority believes the social, political, economic, and religious playing field is now level, ignoring every sign that such a view has no basis in fact.

The irony is that both evangelicals and the current court will see respect for religion diminish because of their misguided actions.

The wisdom of the founders has proven to be a better guide than the current court to how the separation of church and state works in real life. That is because they knew both the contribution religion makes in people’s lives and also the dangers religion poses.

They were themselves largely men of faith, flawed for sure, but wise enough to create a government based on principles intended to protect democratic freedoms for all, religious or not religious alike, against any form of tyranny, even if it wore a cross and carried a Bible.

That kind of cross wearing and Bible toting tyranny is now at work in our own time in history, as if going back to pre-1950 America is the future.