Freedom of religious expression is under constant assault and has been for a long time. As a recent example, the Supreme Court decision in CLS v. Martinez stopped just short of purging any group with a faith-driven mission from equal access to college campuses (and the funding that comes with it).
And just today, I received word that the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit to stop Augusta State University from requiring a counseling student to change her religious beliefs (or self-censor those beliefs) or face expulsion from the program.
Since the infamous “wall of separation” between Church and State was declared by the Supreme Court in the case of Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, we have seen a slow but unrelenting assault on religious expression in all areas of public life.
If you’re like me, you agree with the Founders who wanted to prevent the government from imposing a single, state-sponsored religion on anyone.
However, you probably also recognize that the true meaning of the First Amendment has been twisted into an excuse to remove any form of religious expression from public life. This is happening in our courts at times, as in the CLS case, but is most often happening more quietly in university speech codes, public school restrictions on student religious expression, and by government agencies through administrative rules.
Court cases get a lot of attention but subtle (and not so subtle) pressures from school administrators and other government employees can have a stifling affect on expression of all types and religious expression in particular. These subtle pressures, while less noticed, amount to open hostility toward people of faith.
And the result of this quiet suppression of religious expression is that those without a particular faith are free to express their opinions while those professing a faith are not. The net effect of these policies is a showing of favoritism toward the speech of the faithless (or those professing faith in secularism) over that of the faithful, a situation our Bill of Rights certainly does not countenance.