Gilead
Evangelical Protestants
I’m late getting to this[1] and it should be read in tandem with an earlier article about religious privilege.[2] We are here at an inescapable conflict between Samuel Alito on the one hand, embracing the evangelical position that to proselytize[3] and then to impose their own beliefs on others is essential to their practice and therefore to be protected under so-called “religious freedom,”[4] and, on the other, the necessity of freedom from religion to the protection of actual religious liberty. There remains no way to reconcile these contradictory perspectives,[5] particularly when the Christian perspective is taken as absolute truth in an adamant rejection of relative truth, that is, the very real truths of people in different situations at different times.[6]
Matt Ford, “Samuel Alito Believes That Christians Are Oppressed in America,” New Republic, August 2, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/167266/samuel-alito-religious-freedom-doctrine
- [1]Matt Ford, “Samuel Alito Believes That Christians Are Oppressed in America,” New Republic, August 2, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/167266/samuel-alito-religious-freedom-doctrine↩
- [2]Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson, “Bill Barr Thinks America Is Going to Hell,” New York Times, December 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/opinion/william-barr-trump.html↩
- [3]Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use,” Washington Post, December 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/after-trump-and-moore-some-evangelicals-are-finding-their-own-label-too-toxic-to-use/2017/12/14/b034034c-e020-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html↩
- [4]Matt Ford, “Samuel Alito Believes That Christians Are Oppressed in America,” New Republic, August 2, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/167266/samuel-alito-religious-freedom-doctrine; Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson, “Bill Barr Thinks America Is Going to Hell,” New York Times, December 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/opinion/william-barr-trump.html↩
- [5]David Benfell, “Freedom of religion,” Not Housebroken, December 31, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/12/28/freedom-of-religion/↩
- [6]David Benfell, “A theory of conservative epistemology,” Not Housebroken, August 6, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/06/a-theory-of-conservative-epistemology/↩