The twisted history Trump’s White House is using to redefine religious freedom

Is religious freedom on the retreat in America? A Trump commission certainly believes that to be true.

When the Founding Fathers began their work to unify the colonies, America’s religious landscape looked nothing like today’s marketplace of ideas. Mainline Protestants — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Puritans, Quakers, and Lutherans — dominated the budding nation, and Protestant Christianity was fused with public life.

To talk of religious liberty back then was a question of how to handle these various Protestant denominations and, essentially, keep them from killing or oppressing each other. There were hardly any Catholics; there were very few Jewish people; there were essentially no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. What the Founding Fathers eventually arrived at was a plan for tolerance — an early version of freedom from official religions and a freedom to exercise faith without being punished.

The Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission submitted its draft report last week, arguing that the federal government has gone too far in endorsing secular liberalism and the separation of church and state.

It proposed dozens of new commendations for policy and legal changes to promote its interpretation of how the Founding Fathers believed in religious liberty: to promote religiosity as much and wherever it can flourish.

But the history it presents differs from how historians say the founders actually thought of religious liberty — and how secularism evolved to welcome and protect more religious diversity, not just Protestant Christians.

Yet a new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life.

Late last week, the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, housed within the Department of Justice, released a draft 224-page report pushing the idea that belief in God should be the bedrock of American law and society, and proposing dozens of policy proposals and legal recommendations to restore the place of religion in daily life. It argues that when the Founders chose to declare independence, drafted up the Constitution, and debated the Bill of Rights, they “drew from religious traditions of man being made in the image of God,” and that belief in a Christian God was the starting point for individual rights. “The uniquely American approach to religious liberty,” they argue, is one “in which religion is not merely indulged by the government, but rather honored as a natural right, fundamental to the flourishing of a free society.”

It’s this privileged position for religion that was corrupted in the 20th century by “a new [European] philosophy,” which “laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty which persist even today.” In this telling, it’s philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre who rejected God, inspired American thinkers and leaders to embrace relativism, and constructed a “‘Berlin wall’ of separation” that restricts religious life today and must be corrected. As a result, the government took an “increasingly hostile view towards those who embrace Judeo-Christian values” and interpreted the law to shut down practices like school prayer and open displays of religious texts in public buildings.

Using this history, the commission calls for the creation of a national religious liberty violation hotline, creating a DOJ task force to enforce freedom and hear claims of violations, and appointing federal judges who err on the side of religious liberty, as they define it.

They cite examples of religious oppression and anti-Christian bias in schools, workplaces, the military, and the healthcare system: restrictions on teachers, coaches, and students leading prayers, limits on students wearing religious symbols and delivering religious speech, limits on displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools, the pushing of “gender ideology” on Christian students, and requirements for faith-based college groups to........

© Vox