Sessions announces a religious liberty task force

[Raven]

To combat “dangerous” secularism.

The Justice Department’s latest move is another nod to Christian nationalism by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration has consistently championed a narrow view of religious liberty in America. But the Justice Department’s latest religious liberty initiative may be the most far-reaching — and potentially troubling — one yet.

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a “Religious Liberty Task Force” that will enforce a 2017 DOJ memo ordering federal agencies to take the broadest possible interpretation of “religious liberty” when enforcing federal laws. That memo, for example, prohibits the IRS from threatening the tax-exempt status of any religious organization that actively lobbied on behalf of a political candidate, which is not allowed under the Johnson Amendment.

In a bold speech delivered at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit, Sessions characterized the task force as a necessary step in facing down the prevailing forces of secularism. “A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom,” he said, which “must be confronted and defeated.”

Sessions painted a nightmarish portrait of what he described as a lack of religious liberty protections plaguing American society. “We have gotten to the point,” he said, “where courts have held that morality cannot be a basis for law, where ministers are fearful to affirm, as they understand it, holy writ from the pulpit, and where one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a ‘hate group’ on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Here, Sessions appears to be critiquing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose broad designation of “hate groups” has at times proven controversial for including groups like the evangelical Christian Family Research Council. Sessions added, ”Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds are concerned about what this changing cultural climate means for the future of religious liberty in this country.”

While the task force will only enforce the guidelines listed by the religious liberty memo, the language in Sessions’s speech was as significant as the creation of the task force itself. Using striking rhetoric and the incendiary narrative of culture wars, Sessions characterized America as an implicitly Christian nation under attack from secularists. In so doing, he is continuing a wider pattern of the Trump administration: treating the federal government as a necessary participant in the longevity of Christian America.

Despite Sessions’s statement, religious liberty in America seems to be expanding. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a Christian baker had the right to refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, based on his religious beliefs.

Two other significant religious liberty cases — Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) and Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) — have favored religious organizations. In the former case, the Supreme Court ruled that the evangelical Christian-owned Hobby Lobby had the right to refuse to cover contraceptive care for its employees, while in the latter, it ruled that a Lutheran church could receive state funds to build a playground on its property.

Meanwhile, in May, the DOJ announced a new office to protect religious liberty: an expansive watchdog initiative whose mission was to alert the federal government to “any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law.” At the time, an unnamed White House representative told the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein that it would help the administration worry less about “where the church-state barriers are.”

Sessions’s vision of religious liberty as, fundamentally, active and interventionist government support of religious identity seems to be in line with his wider political philosophy. Last month, for example, Sessions used the Bible verse Romans 13 to justify separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border. He used it on the grounds that the verse — part of a letter written by St. Paul urging an early Christian Roman community not to participate in a political uprising — legitimized absolute submission to government authority.

(Sessions’s own religious tradition, the United Methodist Church, recently formally censured him, calling for an ecclesiastical trial against him for, among other charges, inaccurately publicly representing the Christian faith.)

Ultimately, Sessions promised listeners, the task force would restore religious liberty to America — a liberty that, he heavily implied, was a primarily Christian prerogative.

[BigP]

Sounds perfectly fine to me Raven

[sprintcyclist]

God bless Jeff Sessions

[boxy]

God save the tax exempt status!