Envision the unmaking of religious freedom

Despite his call for unity, Joe Biden threatens to unravel a longstanding source of harmony in America — religious freedom. He is entitled to his views on religion. He would not be entitled to employ the power of government to drive traditional religious actors and their beliefs from American public life.

Our founders found a way to tap religion’s productive force and tame its potential for divisiveness. Their solution lay in the First Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion for every American and every religious community. Its genius has been on display for two centuries, as waves of religious immigrants initially met rejection but gradually experienced the benefits of “free exercise equality,” the right to engage in public life as equals.

The founders were convinced that the free exercise of religion would limit government by providing a source of public morality and of human flourishing for all Americans. As John Adams put it, “Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Free exercise equality helped solve both problems. It empowered free and equal religious citizens and their communities — not government officials — to mold public virtue and morality. In America, free exercise equality as a barrier to authoritarianism and a source of unity and human flourishing has been a major success. It is now under siege. A central goal of the Left and of Biden’s team is to increase the power of government. Another is to elevate individual sexual autonomy as the core public virtue. Both require removal of traditional religious ideas from public life.

In one sense, these goals are consistent with American democracy. Many Americans seek a greater role for government and for increased sexual autonomy. Biden believes abortion should be celebrated as a public good. He reveres same-sex “marriage” and the right to change gender. Those who hold more conservative political and moral views have the right to oppose him and his administration. Neither side has the right to silence the other.

Yet that is the goal of a Biden administration: to tar traditional religious views as hateful, even racist, and to ban them from public life. The messaging was described in a 2016 U.S. Civil Rights Commission report. There the Obama-Biden chairman wrote that religious freedom is “code” for hatred and racism. Once a restraint on government, a legitimate molder of public virtue, and a source of human flourishing, free exercise equality is now a front for bigots.

Biden will seek to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to support abortion. He supports the Equality Act, which changes the word “sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from “man and woman” to include those with same-sex attractions and those who desire to change their “gender identity.”

The Equality Act creates a cause of action against any individual or institution that rejects the government-imposed moral orthodoxy, including churches, hospitals, adoption agencies, religious orders, schools, and other nonprofits. Dissenters will be driven from public life with ruinous fines and social opprobrium. Free exercise equality will not be available as a defense.

Presidents are often not as doctrinaire in office as their election rhetoric or history might predict. Traditional believers must not be naïve, but neither should they be fatalistic in assuming nothing can be done to change what a president says he will do when in office.

The stakes will be high for religious freedom under Biden. One hopes his hand would be stayed by reasoned arguments to preserve the unity, harmony, and human flourishing that religious freedom for all has given to this great nation.

THOMAS FARR is president of the Religious Freedom Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advances religious freedom for all people as a source of human dignity, social and political flourishing, and international security. He was founding director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom (1999-2003) and of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center (2011-18). He was an associate professor of the Practice of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service from 2007-2018.