I have been hard on my own side — conservative Christians — who have behaved lately as if Trump were some sort of political messiah. The frankly seditious rhetoric of some of these people (the quote is in this blog post of mine from yesterday) is going to give the Left the excuse they need to crack down on people like us. Here is a tweet from a (Canadian) Catholic academic who teaches at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana:

Well, I think that Covid is real and that Trump lost, but you know what? People who disagree are simply wrong, not evil, and they don’t need to be imprisoned. Those who think otherwise are no better than the extremists who want Trump to declare martial law and become an American Caesar, to keep the Bad People from taking over.

Writing in The Atlantic recently, the journalist Ronald Brownstein considers the meaning of religious liberty in a country that is growing more progressive and more secular. Excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning New York State’s limits on religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak previewed what will likely become one of the coming decade’s defining collisions between law and demography.

The ruling continued the conservative majority’s sustained drive to provide religious organizations more leeway to claim exemptions from civil laws on the grounds of protecting “religious liberty.” These cases have become a top priority for conservative religious groups, usually led by white Christians and sometimes joined by other religiously traditional denominations. In this case, Orthodox Jewish synagogues allied with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn to oppose New York’s restrictions on religious services.

But this legal offensive to elevate “religious liberty” over other civic goals is coming even as the share of Americans who ascribe to no religious faith is steadily rising, and as white Christians have fallen to a minority share of the population.

That contrast increases the likelihood of a GOP-appointed Court majority sympathetic to the most conservative religious denominations colliding with the priorities of a society growing both more secular and more religiously diverse, especially among younger generations.

More:

“What we are seeing today is this effort to turn religious freedom into religious privilege,” Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me. Religious institutions and individuals are being given “the right to wield religious freedom as a sword to harm others, and frankly to dial back social progress in light of our changing demographics and progress toward greater equality.”

Indeed, the succession of recent religious-liberty rulings by the conservative Court majority may represent another manifestation of the fear of cultural and religious displacement that helped Donald Trump amass huge margins among white Christian voters in both of his campaigns. “We are dealing with a majority-conservative Court that suffers from the same Christian-fragility disease as we are seeing in Trump’s base—as though Christianity is what’s under attack when others are asking for equal treatment,” Laser said.

Read it all. Brownstein advances the current Democratic Party line that “religious liberty” is code for “we hate the LGBTs.” He makes the reasonable point that as America grows less religious, it will be harder to defend religious liberty, because fewer people will grasp why it matters. But he posits conservatives on the Supreme Court who are defenders of religious liberty as in some sense anti-democratic advocates of privilege. The obvious answer here is that religious liberty, like free speech, is never more important to defend than when the practice of it offends the majority. This is Classical Liberalism 101, but it’s an increasingly disfavored opinion on the Left.

Religious freedom, like freedom of speech, is an important Constitutional right to defend even if it gets in the way of “social progress” and “greater equality.” It is chilling to think that liberals who would understand clearly what it would mean if conservatives criticized free speech and/or religious freedom as standing in the way of “patriotism” or “the free market” lose their ability to defend constitutional rights when they interfere with progressive goals. Besides which, you wouldn’t know it from Brownstein’s piece, but “religious conservative” is not a synonym for “white right-wing Christian.” There are non-white conservative Christians, as well as conservative Muslims and Orthodox Jews whose views do not line up with intersectional doctrine.

Brownstein’s piece, and the liberals quoted in it, are exactly why conservative Christians like me vote Republican in national elections, in hopes of getting judges in place who understand why in America, it’s important to protect the rights of dissenting religious minorities. Brownstein writes as if it is illegitimate for religious conservatives to assert the constitutional rights guaranteed to all Americans. It really will be harder to do in irreligious America, which is why I’m glad there is a conservative majority that will sit on the Court for a long time to come. It will be up to them to contain the anti-Christian hatred that we are certain to see in the years and decades to come, cultivated and advocated by academic, media, and political elites.

I also think, though, that it is important for us religious conservatives to speak up when we believe our own side is acting unreasonably — this, for the same reason it’s important for people on the Left to speak out against illiberal progressives. We do it because it might have a positive political effect, but we also do it because it is the right thing to do, even if it makes no difference. My fear is that the Left will consider all of us to be Deplorable.

I know some of you readers will say, “If you believe that the Left is probably going to behave that way sooner or later towards us, why would you oppose standing with Trump now, and preventing the Left from gaining power while we can?”

Here’s what I would say:

1. As a conservative, I fear the devil we don’t know. The creation of liberal democracy took many generations, and lots of bloodshed. It may not last, but given the alternatives, we should not be quick to abandon it;
2. The Left may not behave this way, in the end; we might pull back from the brink; in 1930s Spain, the Left was literally burning down churches and convents, and killing priests and religious; right-wing autocracy was arguably the only thing standing between Christians and death; we are not remotely close to that here;
3. There’s the William Roper challenge, from “A Man For All Seasons”; when Sir Thomas More’s son in law, Roper, says he would cut down all the laws in England to get at the devil, More responds: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” The idea that Christian conservatives would need to overthrow the Constitution to protect ourselves from the devil of whatever the Left has in mind for us would open ourselves up to persecution, with no place left to hide.
4. Besides, a Trump dictatorship? Really? This is what some of us want to overthrow the Constitutional order for?

In the end, if the constitutional order became so unjust that it was impossible to work for true justice within it, we would be justified in taking revolutionary means of redress. But again, we are nowhere close to that. The Republicans did well in the House and Senate races. It is quite possible that with a better candidate, Republicans could retake the White House in 2024, and continue putting in place judges that care about things like religious liberty. The point is, we are far from defeated. The idea that some people would destroy the system, flawed though it may be, to protect Trump’s hold on power is incredibly self-destructive — especially given that Christians, especially conservative Christians, are a minority now, and will be an increasingly unpopular one.

Unless conservative American Christians are prepared to stand behind an American version of Bashar al-Assad — and hey, the day may come when that may be necessary; if Assad goes, Islamic radicals are going to cut the throats of Syrian Christians — we had better be prepared to work within the system to fight the Left’s anti-religious bigotries.