Grant Asked About Neutrality

 Grant asked a great question yesterday about the First Amendment goal of neutrality and whether protecting free exercise is consistent with neutrality. Here are some deeper thoughts of mine.

Perfect neutrality is not possible between the enforcement of secular laws and the protection of religious liberty. Religious freedom seeks to balance the power of secular laws against the free exercise of religion. The idea is to lift a government-imposed burden off the backs of religious exercise to avoid persecution of religious citizens and religious institutions.

Thus, sometimes it seems as though religious citizens get a bit extra, get burdens lifted that secular citizens must still bear. See, e.g.,  Yoder and Holt v. Hobbs.

But sometimes the opposite is true under the Establishment Clause--sometimes secular preferences are allowed and religious preferences are forbidden. For example, secular philosophies, such as environmentalism, feminism, and critical race theory, can be endorsed and taught as moral truths in public schools. But under the Establishment Clause, religious moral truths may not be endorsed nor taught as such in the public schools. 

So, the goal is to get as close to neutrality as possible, but also to recognize that sometimes secularism wins and sometimes religious liberty wins under one clause or the other.