How Democrats Turned on Religious Freedom

Today’s Democratic Party rejects the central claim of the Declaration of Independence—that inalienable rights are given by God, not by government. Last year, Democratic senator Tim Kaine, outraged by a Republican nominee who defended the claim, insisted that rights come from government, not God. Those who “believe that . . . natural rights are from their Creator,” he averred, are no different than Iranian theocrats. 

Although you won’t find this idea in the Democratic platform, its underlying logic is not hard to discern. Today’s Democrats revere the government-manufactured abortion and LGBTQ “rights” above all other moral tenets. These are the privileges of radically autonomous human beings accountable only to themselves. 

The last remaining obstacle to this not-so-hidden platform is, well, God. The right of all Americans to the “free exercise” of religion in public life endangers the entire project. This is why Democrats have decided that our “first freedom” is a front for bigots, haters, and racists.

Where did this idea originate? The precursors are many, but the assault on religious liberty emerged in American politics under the second Clinton administration and became deeply embedded in Democratic political culture under Presidents Obama and Biden. 

In 1993, Clinton was publicly proclaiming the traditional American understanding of free exercise when he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That law, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, was intended, as Clinton put it, to “reverse” the weakening of our first freedom in a 1990 Supreme Court decision. In his signing speech, Clinton explained: “The free exercise of religion has been called the first freedom. . . . Our Founders cared a lot about religion. And one of the reasons they worked so hard to get the first amendment into the Bill of Rights . . . [is] they knew that religion helps to give our people the character without which a democracy cannot survive, [and] that there needed to be a space of freedom between Government and people of faith that otherwise Government might usurp.” 

Clinton was speaking for Democrats and Republicans, and for most Americans, in ratifying the Founders’ view. Free exercise is vital for America because religion is a source of character and a profound limit on government power.  

At the time, Clinton’s views created some unease on the left but were generally considered mainstream. But the Democratic position was soon to change. In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke for the president in declaring that a pending religious freedom bill created “an artificial hierarchy of rights,” illicitly placing religious freedom above the others. 

This was the debut of the Democrats’ new approach to human rights and their assault on religious liberty.

Ironically, despite his change of heart, Clinton signed the bill—the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which mandated the advancement of religious freedom in American foreign policy. Looming Congressional elections apparently convinced him not to become the president who killed religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. 

His Democratic successors have had no such qualms.

Presidents Obama and Biden increased Democratic enthusiasm for abortion rights and same-sex marriage, while attacking religious liberty for standing in the way. In 2011, Obama issued a memorandum on LGBT rights declaring that “no country should deny people their rights because of who they love.” By 2021, Biden had upped the ante by issuing a national security memorandum, now with a broadened category of LGBTQI+ rights. 

These initiatives were accompanied by growing Democratic opposition to traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who opposed the new rights. This manifested as a cynical contempt for the First Amendment right of religious free exercise. 

President Obama’s chairman of the Commission on Civil Rights, Martin Castro, nicely captured the contempt: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.” 

In implementing the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration required religious employers to provide sterilizations and abortifacients. The free exercise rights of objectors such as the Little Sisters of the Poor were simply ignored. 

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” if they stand in the way of abortions.

The first Trump administration tried to retrieve religious freedom as an inalienable right. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a report pointing out that “religious liberty enjoys . . . primacy in the American political tradition—as an unalienable right, an enduring limit on state power, and a protector of seedbeds of civic virtue.”

But the election of President Biden in 2020 led to a return of the Democratic agenda with a vengeance. Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally repudiated the Pompeo report and the idea that there are unalienable rights given by God. “Human rights,” he said, are “co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.” 

During the next four years, President Biden showed how this ideology requires coercion against traditional religions. A report of the Trump Department of Justice focused on Biden-era treatment of Christians, but the impact is on all traditional American religions. A small sampling shows how far we have come from Clinton’s 1993 signing statement. 

Christian families were denied the right to foster children because they rejected LGBTQ ideology. The IRS investigated churches to determine what their sermons taught, and denied a Christian group nonprofit status because its moral teachings were “aligned with the Republican party.” 

The Education Department, the report notes, supported Democratic state and school board policies that “silenced [parental] dissent at school board meetings . . . regulated the use of preferred pronouns, allowed boys in girls’ spaces, and . . . tried to eliminate Christian influence or presence from the classroom, curriculum, and extracurriculars.”

The Biden administration went to extraordinary lengths to silence pro-life Americans. They kept FBI dossiers on them and their children. They arrested peaceful protesters and treated them like thugs. They required pro-life students to remove their religious symbols when they entered a federal building. 

The administration also supported the ill-named “Equality Act,” which “would fully eliminate statutory religious protections for Christians and other religions that hold traditional social values.” Every Democratic leader supports passage of this assault on religious liberty.

Religious freedom is the first of our inalienable rights because it protects those who wish to live the truth about God and human purpose. As the Founders intended, the free exercise of religion has benefited America and the world. 

America’s unity and moral leadership flow from our fidelity to the truths of the Declaration of Independence. Embracing those truths made us who we are: the only nation on earth that has believed in, practiced, and proposed to others the meaning and value of inalienable rights, including the free exercise of religion, for everyone.