Anti-faith, anti-reality forces are driving many religious people and institutions out of American public life. 

At a deeper level, a pernicious conception of radical individual autonomy that approaches “self-apotheosis” is displacing foundational American principles of God-given human dignity and ordered liberty. 

As a result, America’s free exercise tradition is now under tremendous strain.

Until a few years ago, most Americans supported religious freedom. The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, for example, passed with overwhelming, bipartisan support. Americans would sometimes disagree over how to apply religious freedom, but they generally respected it. 

Unfortunately, those days are gone. Dissenters from the elite consensus — which redefines human sexuality, the nature of male and female, marriage, procreation, and the value of human beings at the beginning and end of life — increasingly find themselves subject to government coercion and cultural intimidation. 

What has brought us to this moment? To begin answering this question, I will draw from the work of two exceptional scholars, Carl Trueman and Abigail Favale. 

Trueman, an evangelical Christian and professor at Grove City College, recently wrote that Americans, influenced by our country’s elites, “no longer think of ourselves as subject to a world with a fixed nature [that reflects] an objective authority or meaning.” In this telling, “we can bend nature [including human nature], to our will … to make whatever meaning or reality we choose.” Trueman explores these themes further in his broadly accessible and exceptional book, Strange New World.

If we have the autonomy to decide the meaning and purpose of reality, and our lives within it, language can be deployed to that end by treating it as malleable, as well as powerful.

Our society’s elites tend to see language as a means to form our world after their own predilections. By contrast, Catholics, evangelicals, and many other religious people view language as directed to the noble task of communicating what is true. The divergence between the two can be summed up in the question: Does language help us to create reality or to comprehend it?

In her 2022 book, The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale, a Catholic convert and professor at the University of Notre Dame, reflects on the significance of language in two respects. First, the account of creation given in Genesis shows God using language to create the cosmos out of nothing. Second, she observes that “man uses language to name what God creates.” She summarizes her point by saying, “Divine speech makes reality; human speech identifies reality.” Favale continues, “Reality then exists prior to our naming it, and our language is true and meaningful when it corresponds to what exists.” (See pages 42-43.) 

Turning to our current moment, consider such weighty terms as woman and man, marriage, family, equality, medicine, discrimination, bigotry, law, and even religion. While many Americans still believe these words convey something real about the nature of the human person, morality, and the world we inhabit, their meaning is all-too-often distorted to promote a range of extreme social ends. In this process language frequently becomes untethered to reality.

Defenders of religious freedom in America are confronted by a society intent on embracing this notion of an almost infinitely malleable world in which key terms can be stretched and manipulated to shape it. The resulting religious freedom challenges are manifold in our law and culture. 

The Equality Act — this year marking 50 years since it was first introduced — is an illustrative example. The bill would amend existing federal civil rights law, such as the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, to forbid discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) in voting, public accommodations, education, employment, housing, and more. 

The precise meaning and scope of SOGI remain contested, however, and what it means to discriminate on these bases is rarely spelled out. For instance, the Equality Act of 2023 defines “gender identity” as “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” The confounding and circular logic here is evident.

Making matters worse, the Equality Act defines “sex” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity,” which, if the bill passed, would make the legal definition of “gender identity” even more inscrutable. Somehow, all at the same time: 1) “sex” would be distinct from “gender identity,” 2) “sex” would encompass “gender identity,” and 3) “gender identity” would be independent of something called “designated sex at birth.” 

However “gender identity” is understood, proponents root it in a “person’s psychological sense of self” that is “deeply felt.” The gender ideology behind all of this, therefore, is an exemplar of radical individual autonomy “bending” reality and language to its designs. But, and this is key, the ideology also demands that everyone must adopt it no matter their objections. 

Further complicating the situation, the “LGBTQ” identities that the Equality Act would insert into federal law include expressions and conduct. When enshrined as nondiscrimination rules, these identities can be wielded to require religious Americans to violate their moral convictions in ways that other protected classes, such as race, ethnicity, and national origin, simply cannot, and all under the potent banner of equality. Yet, this glaring difference is usually overlooked. 

There is a chasm between, for example, a Christian baker today who serves everyone but refuses to create custom cakes for same-sex “weddings” and a restaurant chain that categorically denied service to all Black people more than a half century ago. Nevertheless, progressive activists often contend that these cases are virtually identical. The assumption is that any refusal to affirm an exercise of autonomy in the area of sex or “gender” is an offense akin to racism. Such an assumption is false, dangerous, and an affront to religious freedom. 

Bringing the problem full circle, the anti-faith, anti-reality forces I have been outlining also undercut America’s capacity for reasoned debate. From Congress, to university campuses, to the news media, our society’s leading precincts of deliberation often prove unfit for the job. And yet, serious deliberation is just what we need to diagnose the dire religious freedom threats facing us in the Equality Act and elsewhere, and to identify the solutions necessary to preserve America’s first freedom for generations to come. 

 

David K. Trimble is the president of the Religious Freedom Institute.