Girls Gone Bible is on tour in the US, touting a regressive ideal of femininity through discussions of abstinence and mental health struggles
At first glance, the crowd gathering outside a music venue in Red Bank, New Jersey, could have passed for a group of sorority rush hopefuls – or Ella Langley fans on their way to the country star’s show. Most of them were under the age of 30. They wore cowboy boots, maxi sundresses and soft, bouncy blowouts, scrolling on their phones outside the doors as they waited for friends to arrive.
But one accessory gave them away: the Bibles they toted. These women were there to pray.
Mike Rogers isn’t merely campaigning alongside a controversial supporter. His campaign put an extremist on its faith leadership team
Hasan Piker.
Turn on cable news. Pick up a newspaper. Log on to Twitter. It doesn’t seem to matter where you get your political news: for the past month, the leftist Twitch streamer has become one of the dominant subjects of coverage, conversation and controversy surrounding the crucial Michigan Senate race between the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and the Republican Mike Rogers.
The non-profit Leaving Maga is built on the premise that abandoning the Trump-built movement is like fighting a disease or breaking an addiction
Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as you can shoot unto the Lord. She shot five. “They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said.
But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and state Attorney General Letitia James at a press conference on August 12, 2026, in New York City. | Selcu Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
On Tuesday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about an upcoming appearance by Mohan Bhagwat, a leader of a Hindu nationalist organization, at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.
“I don’t support the rally, but I don’t know if the city has any jurisdiction on canceling a private event,” he said at a press conference. “It has been incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country, frankly, and so it is one that I find myself in deep opposition to.”
His statement has led to a flurry of controversy and allegations that Mamdani is “Hinduphobic,” biased toward Muslims, and picking a fight with another religious and ethnic group. The mayor has continued to make headlines this year for his vocal criticism of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leading to tensions with Jewish leaders and communities in New York.
First the Jews. Then the Italians. Now Hindus.
Zohran Mamdani has found yet another New York community to target, opposing a Hindu celebration at Madison Square Garden because he objects to its politics. The mayor of America’s most diverse city seems determined to divide it one…
But Mamdani was far from the only critic of the event; other Hindu, Muslim, interfaith, and human rights activists protested the event and demanded it be canceled this week.
What’s actually going on here?
Bhagwat is the leader of the Indian organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (or RSS for short), a Hindu nationalist group affiliated with India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Bhagwat is not a politician or an officeholder in India, but is frequently described as being one of the most influential men in that country, primarily because of his role in leading RSS, which describes itself as a “Hindu-centric civilisational, cultural movement.”
Yet plenty of activists, academics, experts, and critics contest that description of RSS, instead casting it as a right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, accused of fueling intolerance, endorsing discrimination, or inciting violence against minorities in the subcontinent, particularly Muslims — essentially promoting an ideology that “amounts to ‘an Indian version of fascism,’” as one India scholar told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in 2023.
And one of the most vocal recent critics is Mamdani, who is himself Muslim and of Hindu descent on his mother’s side.
To better understand the RSS, Bhagwat, and the reasons for Mamdani’s criticism, I turned to Nishant Upadhyay, an associate professor in Asian American studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Upadhyay has done extensive research on the intersection of race and caste, as well as Hindu nationalism in both India and diaspora communities.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you explain to me what these groups behind Saturday’s event are?
Mohan Bhagwat is the president of this Hindu nationalist organization, RSS, which loosely translates to National Volunteer Corps. The group that’s organizing this event in the US is called American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue. In choosing someone like Bhagwat, who has been the president of this organization since 2009, which is perhaps the largest paramilitary religious nationalist organization in the world, it’s very concerning and shocking.
American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue say they’re all about fostering understanding, building bridges, strengthening communities, but the Hindu nationalist project in India is anything but that. In the diaspora, for them to say that we believe in diversity, we believe in building bridges, we believe in a vision of multiculturalism, it shows the contradiction between what Hindu nationalists are doing in India versus what they pretend to do in the diaspora.
Does RSS have a long history in India?
It was founded in 1925, when India was under British colonial rule, with the idea that India should only be for Hindus. And who is “Hindu” changes, but mostly the violence we see has been put on Muslim and Christian communities. And over the last hundred years, that violence just keeps escalating. Muslims are the primary target, but across the country, Christian communities have also become a big target.
The whole idea is that India should be for Hindus and religions that have originated in South Asia. So Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism — they can be part of the Hindu nation as long as they identify themselves as Hindu, because these religions have some similarities with Hinduism. But all of them actually came as anti-caste critiques of Hinduism. Practitioners of these religions assert a very separate identity than Hindu because of what their scriptures have been grounded in: a very anti-casteist and anti-patriarchal critique of what we understand as Hinduism now.
How does India’s current government fit into this?
RSS is the biggest umbrella organization of all Hindu nationalist organizations in India and the diaspora. And BJP, the ruling party in India, is seen as the political wing. So RSS does not necessarily participate in elections and government, but provides the spiritual, religious, and intellectual foundation for a political party like BJP that does come to power.
They have this really massive network of RSS followers across the country who are then mobilized for elections, who are mobilized to support BJP, who are mobilized to then commit violence against Muslims. Some people come from the RSS and become leaders in the BJP, though BJP also has other people who might not be directly affiliated with RSS, but it’s the main political organization.
For the last 12-ish years, Narendra Modi, who’s the prime minister of India, has been in power with the BJP, which has drastically changed the social, political, and economic landscape of the country. The Hindu nationalist agenda has become more and more frontline and mainstreamed and normalized. Religious minorities like Muslims and Christians face constant violence, everyday surveillance, everyday policing, from the minutiae to extreme violence on a regular basis across the country. If Hindu nationalists had their way, they would either take away citizenship rights from Muslim communities or render them nationless and kick them out of the country.
It’s also caste-oppressed communities, Indigenous communities, ethnic communities like Kashmiri and Manipuri communities. We have just seen drastic escalation and violence against everyone who’s not a Hindu and everyone who’s not a dominant caste, or caste-privileged Hindus across the country.
So this group’s leader is coming to the US — how do Indians in the American diaspora feel about all this? When Modi came to the US in 2019, he had massive crowds, and Donald Trump joined him. Do folks here feel the same way about someone like Bhagwat?
It’s complicated, and there isn’t just one view. For context: Modi was banned from coming into the US until about 2014, because he was accused of encouraging genocide against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where over a thousand people were killed.
But since being elected prime minister, he’s visited the US multiple times and has often had huge gatherings in cities like New York and Houston. He won a third election two years ago, and his closeness with Trump…he’s projected often as a world leader. But there is, in the diaspora, along with human rights organizations in the US, active work against RSS and BJP for the last 20, 25 years. They are doing the consciousness-raising work of saying how this is a fascist ideology, anti-Muslim ideology and that we should not be in cahoots with them.
But what we’ve also seen is, especially in the last 15 years since Modi has come into power, that the Hindu right-wing diaspora has also become very active and mobilized. And so there used to be a more secular diaspora, which in some ways was the mainstream, that has been taken over by [the] Hindu right-wing diaspora now because of how they’re in alignment with both the Democrat and the Republican Party. They’re also working with Indian millionaires and billionaires in the US economy, and so they’ve started gaining this economic and political power in the US where they’re becoming more dominant.
And they’re able to do these things at a much larger scale now and counter the critiques of nationalism in the diaspora. There is power in the Hindu diaspora, and now, in some ways, the right-wing diaspora. That ideology works very well with Trump’s ideology and actually also works with Democrats in many ways because Modi has also allowed more and more American corporate interests to come into the Indian economy.
But that’s not to say that the majority of the Indian diaspora is Hindu and the dominant caste; there are many who are non-dominant-caste and many who are not Hindus, and many who are Hindus and dominant-caste and critical of Hindu nationalism because we see the violence that is happening under the name of our religion in many ways.
And that’s where the conversation heats up, because Zohran Mamdani’s family also comes from a much more secular, pluralist, anti-Hindutva [the RSS/BJP ideology that defines Indian identity through Hindu identity] ideology. And a place like New York has many amazing diasporic groups who are working every day to fight against fascism in India and the US.
Every time this erupts in the mainstream, we see this conflict between the much more conservative Hindu right-wing voices versus the much more liberal, secular, pluralist Indian diaspora.
So let’s talk about Mamdani’s critique. What’s the context we need to know that explains why he would speak up?
He is such a curious figure to have someone in the public realm like that. So he is Muslim, but his mother is Hindu, and his mother is from India. His mother has been a very renowned progressive filmmaker who’s made films about different forms of structural violence in India for a long time. So he is Muslim, but also someone from a progressive Hindu background. He can see the violence in the Indian state in ways that are not accessible to many others.
I would not say it’s just because he’s Muslim. I think because he’s Muslim and has a progressive anti-violence kind of approach that for him then these are very important issues. That kind of outlook is not targeting Hindus, he’s specifically talking about the violences of Hindu nationalism. It’s not a blanket statement against all Hindus, that they are like that. And he’s also Hindu, comes from a Hindu-heritage family as well.
How does this compare to his comments and criticisms of Netanyahu? Some on the American right have cast him as having it out against Jewish people, or Israel, and now he’s moving on to Hindus.
It’s very similar, in the sense that criticizing an ideology or a nation’s policies is not the same thing as saying all people are responsible. The conversation that criticizing Netanyahu or Israel is not antisemitic is a similar conversation: it’s actually not a critique of Hinduism or Judaism, it’s a critique of hyper-nationalist politics that can come out of Zionism and Hindu nationalism and what the Indian state and the Israeli state does.
His critique and my critique and many of us in the US, our critiques are saying, no, actually let’s look at what Hindu nationalism and Zionism does. And that’s where I think Mamdani comes from.
Anything Mamdani says and does or his wife says and does becomes news anyway, but these are much more grounded in politics that his and his family have been grounded in for a long time, to fight against violence and fascism and stand up for minoritized communities here and globally.
He does have a track record of speaking up about Hindu nationalism. I believe he has called Modi a “war criminal.”
Yes, he’s been doing this even before he became mayor or before he came into US politics. If you see his track record when he was a younger organizer, he has always been consistent on standing up for Palestinians, standing up for Muslims, standing up against all forms of fascism here and globally.
He’s very openly spoken about what is happening to Muslims in India in the last 10-plus years. Quite recently, he has spoken up about an Indian Muslim PhD scholar, Umar Khalid, who was critical of BJP and was arrested and has been detained in Delhi for six years. So Mamdani has shown solidarity to many Muslim folks in India who get unjustly incarcerated or face violence.
So it’s not surprising that Mamdani would weigh in now. But is it significant?
I’m wondering now with your question, if Mamdani hadn’t said anything, would this have been an issue? Or if Mohan Bhagwat had gone somewhere else in the US, if the mayor would have not said anything, or if it would have sparked any interest.
I want to emphasize that this is beyond players like Zohran Mamdani and Mohan Bhagwat, and more about the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalist ideology in the US. It is really scary and we need to be very attentive to it even when they use the language of pluralism and dialogue and building bridges.
Even Indian Americans who are Muslims and Kashmiris and Dalit and Manipuri and others get attacked on a very regular basis. So many academics in the US academy and grassroots-level organizers, who are mostly women and who are mostly Muslim or mostly Dalit, are publicly hounded. They get threats, threats against their children in their inboxes, in their phone calls, on their social media feeds. And this has been going on for the last 10 years and more. And so it is when we give power to people like Mohan Bhagwat that these violences escalate more.
Pontiff, who has caught the eye in trainers and a baseball cap, praised for taking dress to ‘heavenly heights’
For the first time in a decade, Vanity Fair has released a best-dressed list. Featuring 70 names, the list ranks the most fashionable people in the world in 2026. The lineup includes the usual suspects spanning Hollywood actors and global pop stars but nestled among the Hollywood stars is an unexpected entrant. Pope Leo XIV.
The 70-year-old head of the Catholic church has been praised by the magazine for taking papal style “to heavenly heights”. His most memorable look? A simple white cassock styled with a pair of Nike trainers.
Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, speaks at a CPAC panel to discuss the threat of Islam in Texas. | Eleanor Dearman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Great American Conflict, a 75-minute documentary produced by a Texas-based organization dedicated to converting Iran to Christianity, declares its goal right at the beginning: “to reveal the true Islam to all people, especially in the West,” Iran Alive Ministries’s founder Hormoz Shariat says. “This film is also meant to be a warning to America. There is a serious threat of Islam in our nation.”
Released at the start of summer and having premiered at a gathering of the Dallas County Republican Party, it’s an obscure film — you’ve probably never heard of it — but it has so far had a surprising political influence. It’s been shown at gatherings of local Republicans and conservative activists in Texas, where Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have played a key role in activating the Republican base, candidates, and party leaders over the course of this year’s elections. The documentary is both a symptom and a cause of a larger trend unfolding in American politics in 2026 that is picking up steam now: the rise of a new iteration of blatant Islamophobia paired with Christian nationalist sentiment on the American right.
Iran Alive Ministries did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s no surprise who some of the backers and voices of this documentary are: Some members of this collection of right-wing, conservative, and evangelical activists are a throwback to early-2000s and 2010s Islamophobia, when some of the same figures spoke out against “radical Islamism” and “radical Islamic terror.” One of them, for instance, is the activist Brigitte Gabriel, the controversial founder of ACT for America, an early-2000s anti-Islamic extremism group. As the film makes clear, this latest version of Islamophobia in America has its roots in this post-9/11 era and borrows heavily from it, while making some modern-day tweaks.
What’s different now is how mainstream this stance is becoming in politics and how it appears to be getting only more mainstream.
“Islamophobia has passed the dinner table test. You can say things about Muslims with basic impunity today,” Nathan Lean, a researcher, assistant teaching professor at North Carolina State University and author of the book The Islamophobia Industry, told me. “And it’s institutionalized in the way that prejudice that targets other marginalized communities is not.” He pointed to the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress, which is composed of 68 elected members of Congress representing 25 states. He also pointed to efforts in Texas to make eliminating “sharia” law an official stance of the Texas GOP, and then the subsequent vote to recommend Gov. Greg Abbott “ban” it on the Texas 2026 primary ballot.
Now, politicians, content creators, and politically connected advocacy groups are using films like The Great American Conflict, selectively edited clips spread on social media,and investigative-style pseudo-documentaries to spread this sentiment further and wider, power more wins of right-wing candidates, and take aim in particular at Muslim candidates and politicians.
This is all playing out as antisemitism and Islamophobia are peaking during the 2026 midterm cycle, accelerated by demographic change across America, increased Muslim visibility and engagement in politics, including elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the Senate campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and moreRepublican politicians feeling comfortable using Islam as a scapegoat and cudgel, particularly in Texas. It all paints a worrying picture of what’s to come.
What The Great American Conflict argues is coming
As a cinematic project, The Great American Conflict isn’t much of an accomplishment; it can broadly be described as a collection of testimonials from evangelical Christians and former Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity who each make a case against Islam. Though poorly organized, it starts with some rough accounting of the rise of Islam in world history, lays out the case through interviews that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, then zooms in on specific Texan communities and examples of how Muslim politicians and activists are using democratic processes to achieve “domination.”
There are broadly three core themes that these speakers come back to:
Islam is inherently violent and imperialistic: The documentary’s interview subjects argue that true believers seek to expand the faith and establish a cross-national Islamic state. They rely on some sketchy history of the prophet Muhammed and the contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran as examples of this “violence.”
Islam is incompatible with the American Constitution and Western liberalism: Speakers also argue that, as opposed to other religions, Islam does not tolerate diversity of thought and seeks to enforce its rules and guidelines on nonbelievers. They claim that Islam rejects the separation between church and state, and that mosques can function as political or military centers.
There is an ongoing effort by Muslims to infiltrate American politics and replace “Judeo-Christian” America: The rise of Muslim American politicians in Congress, in New York City, and at the state and local government level are all part of an effort to whittle away religious liberty and replace American values with “Islamic” values. Liberal and progressive allies are enabling this takeover. And they interpret public calls to prayer, halal food, school prayer rooms, Ramadan accommodations, mosque construction, and Muslim residential developments as evidence that American institutions are yielding to Islamic demands.
Interspersed throughout these testimonials are fearmongering compilations of social media clips of Muslim prayers and veiled women, and short selections of purportedly Muslim speakers making inflammatory comments about 9/11, about Jews and Christians, and about Islamic domination in the West, and violent clips of terrorist actions abroad.
And though the film’s main backer, Hormoz Shariat, says at the beginning of the film that his goal is not to inspire fear or hate, that’s precisely what the speakers seem to do for an hour.
For example, the Christian pastor Shahram Hadian, the founder of Truth in Love Ministry in Tennessee, repeatedly argues that America is at a turning point. “Western societies are right now at a critical decision point. Either they’re going to maintain, preserve, [and] fight for their Judeo-Christian values, or they’re succumbing,” he says.
And he takes a natalist turn, arguing that Muslims in the US are happy to continue to raise families as Western birth rates drop. “We continue to see the demise of Christianity, of our Judeo-Christian values, family values, family ethics, marriage — one man, one woman,” he says. “They’re just waiting us out. They’ll just wait us out. They’ll aid us in our own demise and destruction.”
To drill down on this, various speakers point to demographic change in Michigan and Texas as early signs of what they see as the capitulation of the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Islam. They point to self-segregating Muslim communities in Europe being mirrored in the US, particularly focusing on a housing developmentproject in East Plano, Texas, centered around a mosque and Islamic center, that has been a focal point for Republican politicians.
Other speakers argue against accepting Islam as a religion at all, instead casting it as a political ideology that is seeking to take over American institutions. Some, like Gabriel, allege a coordinated strategy to “infiltrate” and “dominate the West and establish an Islamic government,” tracing this back to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a supposed decades-long plan to infiltrate political parties, schools, media, and churches to use democratic institutions to establish Islamic law. She points to Mamdani as an example of this, and ropes in Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as being loyal to a foreign Islamic identity rather than to the United States.
And they contrast this all with an idealized “Judeo-Christian” America defined by constitutional government, traditional marriage, Christianity, and cultural assimilation. The final call to arms is to preserve and promote this Christian vision of America, on top of defending the Constitution, religious liberty, and “American” culture against what is a coming ideological and demographic conflict.
The danger of rising Islamophobia
Iran Alive Ministries itself doesn’t seem primarily dedicated to anti-Muslim American advocacy and activism. Most of its YouTube and internet presence is focused on digital Christian evangelism, particularly in Iran. It’s not entirely hard to see how a group focused on conversions would drift into Islamophobic preaching, but it does seem like a peculiar move, Lean told me.
“There is a group of people who form a faction of this sort of anti-Muslim movement in the United States who are, by their own description, evangelical Christians,” Lean said. “And it’s no surprise that a group like Iran Alive Ministries, that is formed on the basis of, as they say, transforming Iran into a Christian nation, one soul at a time, would go there.”
Emphasizing that Christian proselytism and evangelism are not inherently Islamophobic, Lean told me that there has been a more overt merging of religious convictions with Republican politics in recent years.
“The…driving mission of the group leads to a marriage of, we want a Christian world on the one hand, versus there are active agents in the world that are potentially preventing that. And who represents that biggest threat to that right now? Well, in the eyes of these people, Muslims do,” Lean said.
Lean told me that he expects to see this momentum build as midterms approach. At the local level, it’s most visible in Texas, where the New York Times recently reported on the stunning rise in Islamophobia and fearmongering across the state, and in Michigan, where cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck have seen white nationalist and anti-Islam demonstrations.
Lean said many of these lines of Islamophobic thinking sound like familiar tropes, smears, and lies of the last couple of waves of fearmongering around Muslims. Still, as opposed to the post-9/11 era, he noteda worrying difference: the scale of Islamophobia, given its increasing presence on both social and traditional media.
Much of the growth of these sentiments is happening online, too. Since Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor, and especially since El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, these kinds of views have surged online and in conservative media, while conservative activists and influencers have been pushing similar narratives of infiltration and under-the-radar Muslim “encroachment.”
A recent survey of internet discourse and activity by the research group Magnitude Media found something similar, centered on Dearborn: “Since the beginning of the month, there have been 690 posts mentioning Dearborn, generating 5.1 million engagements. Right-leaning accounts drove 88% of that engagement, compared to just 7% from left-leaning accounts,” the authors write. “The broader anti-Muslim conversation online has been substantial for months. Over the past six months, 68% of posts that either mentioned Islamophobia or contained common Islamophobic language came from right-leaning accounts. Dearborn appears less like the cause of a new Islamophobia conversation than the right’s newest focal point.”
So the documentary certainly isn’t the only cause for concern — but the fact that Texas Republicans have used it in official events, on top of strategists saying they are pivoting to “sharia” and fearmongering, suggests just how politically useful the party thinks these messages can be.
Which all suggests more ugliness to come. And as Lean told me, talking about a coming conflict and a threat to survival indicates an existential threat that should be fought by any means.
“Where does the logic of all of this take us? What’s the solution?” he said. “You can’t help but wonder when they’re issuing statements about fertility rates and these overtures are being kind of taken over, that this could very easily go to a dark place.”
Update, August 28, 11:45 amET: This piece was updated to reflect Nathan Lean’sfull job title.
The Supreme Court decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. | Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican Party’s supermajority on the Supreme Court was barely a month old when the justices handed down one of the most consequential religion decisions of the last several decades. It was Amy Coney Barrett’s first significant vote as a justice.
The issue in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) was whether churches and other houses of worship were exempt from Covid-era restrictions on attendance. At the height of the pandemic, New York imposed strict limits on how many people could attend worship services at the same time — a rule that steered straight into the emerging partisan divide over whether pandemic restrictions had gone too far — although these restrictions were actually less stringent than the rules imposed on similar secular venues like theaters and lecture halls.
But the new majority’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese rejected this restrained approach, and the decision fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. Before Republicans gained their supermajority on the Court, the justices gave states a fair amount of leeway to navigate the fraught political questions that arise when someone exercises their faith in a way that can harm other people, or limit their legal rights.
But now the justices typically make these calls themselves, and they usually do so in favor of religious conservatives. As a result, under the current Supreme Court, one of the Constitution’s most difficult balancing acts — the task of weighing when one person’s religious beliefs should overcome another person’s freedoms — has toppled over on the side of religious individuals and groups, often allowing them to violate the freedoms of others. This is especially true when lawsuits pit religious conservatives against people exercising sexual freedoms such as the right to use birth control or to marry a person of the same sex.
Prior to Roman Catholic Diocese, the rule was that religious institutions must comply with state law, so long as the state does not single people of faith out for inferior treatment. If a state closed all venues where people gather in auditorium-like settings, that was considered constitutional, even though some of those venues are churches. The courts would only get involved if a state tried to, say, close mosques but not movie theaters.
But Roman Catholic Diocese effectively ended that regime. The new majority held that churches may only be subject to the least restrictive rules that apply to any secular business, even if that business bears little resemblance to a house of worship. Indeed, Roman Catholic Diocese indicated that churches must be treated the same as outdoor facilities like “camp grounds” or “garages” where the risk of transmission, compared to a church, was minimal.
It was a clear sign of where the Court’s new majority wanted to take its religion cases. Under this majority, lawsuits brought by plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions from the law have largely been used to resolve cultural disputes between Democratic and Republican constituencies in favor of the latter.
This Court’s religion cases, in other words, fit a pattern that is also found in its decisions on topics as diverse as voting rights, abortion, race, and the question of whether President Donald Trump is subject to US law. The Republican justices seek to advance policy goals that are popular within their political party and unpopular among Democrats, and they aren’t afraid to overrule a wide range of foundational Supreme Court precedents in order to do so.
More broadly, the Court’s new approach to religion threatens to disrupt public schools’ ability to operate, undercut many anti-discrimination laws, and potentially turn every future conflict between cultural liberals and the religious right into a constitutional case that must be resolved by the Supreme Court.
Conflicts between religious and secular visions of America are inevitable under the Constitution
Many of theSupreme Court’s religion cases are driven by two separate clauses in the Constitutionthat often pull in opposing directions. The First Amendment contains two provisions governing religion, the clause protecting “free exercise” of faith, and a clause prohibiting the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The first provision guarantees everyone the right to practice their faith, while the latter was historically understood to prohibit the government from trying to advance a particular religious belief.
As the Supreme Court said in 1971, there is an “internal tension” between these two provisions — in part because it is inevitable that the government will make decisions that conflict with many people’s sincere religious beliefs. Taxes fund wars that many Americans believe are sinful. Public schools teach values that may be at odds with what their students hear in their temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Not long after Congress prohibited racial discrimination by restaurants in 1964, the owner of a South Carolina barbecue joint claimed that he could not comply because serving Black people violated his white supremacist religion (he lost in the Supreme Court).
Before Roberts was crowned as leader of America’s judiciary, the Court often resolved this tension by deferring to democratically elected officials. The Court permitted states to subsidize religious schools, but did not require it. It gave people who object to laws on religious grounds some exemptions from those laws, but did not allow these exemptions to give religious business owners an unfair advantage against their competitors. As the Court said in Locke v. Davey (2004), there must be some “play in the joints” between the competing values espoused by the Constitution’s two religion clauses.
But the current Court, which often seeks to centralize power within itself, has pushed hard to take away states’ ability to resolve some of these tensions, and instead resolves them itself. Under the old regime, blue states would sometimes operate their schools, or otherwise conduct their affairs, in ways that upset religious conservatives. And that was okay because that’s how things work in a multistate democracy.
The Republican justices, in other words, have taken two vague constitutional provisions that espouse sometimes-conflicting values, and that reasonably can be read in many ways, and used them to impose their own values on the entire nation. The primary effects of these decisions are twofold: This Court often elevates religious freedom over other kinds of freedom, and it is rapidly tearing down the wall between church and state.
Religious freedom vs. others’ rights: The tug-of-war over the free exercise clause
The 20th-century Court cases that laid the groundwork for many modern debates over the Constitution’s free exercise clause are a bit of a muddle.
In the 1960s, the Court used expansive language to describe the scope of this clause, and how easy it should be for religious plaintiffs to seek exemptions from complying with the law. Sherbert v. Verner (1963) held that laws that burden someone’s faith must “be justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’” As any law student who has passed their first semester of constitutional law will recognize, this “compelling state interest” language is associated with a legal test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding standard that courts apply in constitutional cases. Thus, Sherbert seemed to hold that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption from a state or federal law should receive one.
But the Court soon grew uncomfortable with the implications of this broad language — should people who claim that God does not want them to pay taxes, for example, really be exempt from the obligation to do so? — and began to place limits on who could get exemptions.
The Court has ruled at least three times in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The expansive and easily available religious exemptions that Sherbert seemed to call for never actually came about. A 1992 study by legal scholar James Ryan found that federal appeals courts heard 97 free exercise of religion cases that applied Sherbert’s compelling interest test between 1980 and 1990, and they rejected 85 of those cases.
In United States v. Lee (1982), the Supreme Court rejected an employer’s demand for a religious exemption from paying Social Security taxes. And, in Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), it ruled against a religious cult whose members worked in commercial businesses for no pay — the cult claimed that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws.
Both decisions were animated by a concern that a too-expansive reading of Sherbert would allow businesses that claimed religious exemptions to gain unfair advantages over their competitors. As the Court held in Lee, “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”
But then the Supreme Court went too far.
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the objectors were two Native American men who lost their jobs and were denied employment benefits by the state of Oregon, because they used the drug peyote during a religious ceremony. The Court said that no one was exempt from any law so long as it applied equally to religious and nonreligious people alike.
The decision triggered instant backlash, with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) warning that Smith could lead to the government controlling “the selection of priests and ministers” and barring “the use of wine in communion service.”It’s likely that Smith was so widely disliked because the justices picked the worst possible case to put their foot down against religious objectors. The two men’s participation in a religious ritual did not injure anyone else. And the Court’s suggestion that the government may ban Native American religious practices smacked of colonialism.
RFRA sought to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert … and Wisconsin v. Yoder,” a 1972 case establishing that Amish communities may educate their own teenage children instead of sending them to public high schools.The law, in other words, was intended to be a reset button, returning to the pre-Smith status quo when plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions were more likely to prevail.
But achieving that goal required answering a difficult question: What did the Religious Freedom Restoration Act actually seek to restore? Was it the expansive reading of Sherbert that courts never actually implemented — ie., that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption should get one — or the actual practice that existed prior to Smith, which was far more restrained?
By the time Burwell v. Hobby Lobby(2014) reached the justices, the two major political parties both had divergent answers to this question. That case asked whether employers who object to contraception on religious grounds could refuse to provide their employees with health plans that cover birth control — despite a federal regulation establishing that these workers had a right to contraceptive coverage. The central question in Hobby Lobby, in other words, was whether one person’s religion may be invoked to diminish another person’s rights.
Most of the justices, the ones appointed by Republican presidents, answered this question with a resounding “yes.”
Dissenting in Hobby Lobby, DemocraticJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out her political party’s concern that one person’s rights should not be used to diminish another’s. She rejected the view that “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.”
But there were five Republicans and only four Democrats on the Court when Hobby Lobby was decided, so Ginsburg’s view did not prevail. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion says that RFRA imposes an “exceptionally demanding” burden on the government when it wishes to enforce a law against a religious objector, and it ruled that a federal regulation requiring employers to offer contraceptive care in their health plans does not overcome this burden.
Yet even Alito seemed to recoil at the most expansive reading of Sherbert. His opinion concedes that “allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious grounds would lead to chaos.” So at least some aspects of Lee, the decision holding that private businesses must follow the same laws as their competitors, remain good law.
After Hobby Lobby, the Republican Party’s position appears to be that religious objections trump laws that embrace a more liberal view of sexuality, or that otherwise resolve cultural conflicts between Democratic and Republican constituencies, but people of faith may not claim an exemption from literally every single law. At the very least, everyone still has to pay taxes.
Since Hobby Lobby, this agenda has come to define the Court’s religious liberty cases, including a number of recent ones that limitstate governments’ ability to navigate political conflicts between religious conservatives and gay or trans people.While these cases are technically distinct from Hobby Lobby because RFRA only benefits plaintiffs who object to federal (that is, not state) laws, they also track the result in Hobby Lobby.
The Court has ruled at leastthreetimes, for example, in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The Roberts Court, in other words, inherited a muddled mess of precedents governing when religious objectors may seek exemptions from the law, and much of this area of the law remains fairly muddled. Thus far, for example, this Court has not revealed whether it wishes to overrule cases like Alamo Foundation, that protect the rights of workers — though when it took up a case in 2025 that could have called Alamo Foundation into question, the Court did not do so.
But one bit of clarity that the current Court has provided is that, when the interests of religious conservatives conflict with the interests of queer people, queer people lose.
The Roberts Court has used education cases to tear down the wall separating church and state
Many of the Court’s cases involving religion in public schools also empower religious conservatives in cultural fights against LGBTQ Americans. In Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), for example, the Republican majority held that religious parents who object to books with gay or trans characters must be allowed to opt their children out of lessons that use such books. And, in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), the Republican justices appeared to hold that the Constitution requires public school teachers to out trans students to their parents, even if those students ask the teachers to keep their gender identity a secret.
But this Court has also advanced another project concerning religion, particularly in its cases about religion and education — dismantling the very idea that church and state must be separated.
The First Amendment’s establishment clause — which prohibits the government from making any law establishing a religion — was long understood to require a degree of separation between government and religion. The Roberts Court hasn’t simply abandoned this reading of the establishment clause; it’s indicated that the very idea of separation between church and state is unconstitutional.
For much of the 20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the wall separating church and state was quite high. In Everson v. Board of Education(1947), for example, the Court declared that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
The Court abandoned this approach nearly a quarter century ago, in its 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). But Zelman merely held that states could offer vouchers that can pay for tuition at private religious schools if they want to, not that they were required to do so.
One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive.
Similarly, before Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, the Court generally insisted that public schools must remain neutral on religion. When schools promote a religious view, according to Lee v. Weisman (1992), that places “subtle and indirect” pressure on students to conform to that view, and leaves the student with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”
Yet, while Lee was consistent with mid-20th-century precedents regarding religion in schools, the consensus favoring government neutrality on religion was already fading by the early 1990s. Lee was a 5-4 decision, and its author, the moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, often argued that his more liberal colleagues read the establishment clause too expansively. Three years before Lee, for example, Kennedy dissented from a decision barring a county from displaying a Nativity scene in its courthouse. This decision, Kennedy wrote, “reflects an unjustified hostility toward religion.”
This idea — that government neutrality toward religion is itself a form of hostility against people of faith — could often be found in conservative critiques of the Court’s establishment clause decisions from this era. In a 1989 essay that foreshadowed many of the Roberts Court’s later decisions, legal scholar (and future federal judge) Michael McConnell made the then-audacious argument that the Constitution requires the government to subsidize religious schools.
The idea is that states typically tax all of their residents to pay for public schooling, but only some children actually attend these schools. Other families choose to pay out of their own pockets for private religious education, while still other families would prefer to send their children to a religious school but cannot afford it. This familiar system, where public schools are available to everyone and private schools are only available to people who can pay the tuition, McConnell claimed, is a form of discrimination against religious people.
“That some parents wish their children to receive education in a religious environment should not deprive them of their fair share of the public resources devoted to education,” McConnell wrote. They pay the same taxes as families who send their kids to public schools. And so, McConnell argued, these religious families should be allowed to use that tax revenue to pay for their child’s private religious education.
Something close to the vision McConnell laid out in this 1989 essay is now the law. The seminal case is Carson v. Makin (2022), which involved a Maine program that provides private school vouchers for students in sparsely populated areas where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school.
Maine law provides that these vouchers may only be used at “nonsectarian” schools, and not religious ones. But, according to Roberts’s majority opinion inthe decision, a system that “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious” is “discrimination against religion.” Carson, in other words, turns the old rule from Everson on its head. What was once forbidden is now mandated.
More broadly, the Court’s Republicans have ground the establishment clause down to such a tiny nub that little of it remains. For many years, the Court read that clause to forbid the government from advancing a particular religious view, but the Court overruled the older cases prohibiting government endorsements of religion inKennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), and they replaced them with something much narrower. Under this Court’s new test, the government can only violate the establishment clause by making “a religious observance compulsory” or otherwise coercing nonbelievers to engage in a “formal religious exercise.”
So the government cannot arrest you if you skip church services. Nor can a government official hold a gun to your head and force you to declare that Jesus is your personal lord and savior. But it is not clear that, under this Court’s approach to the establishment clause, anything else is forbidden. One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court — indeed, under cases like Carson, it is now required in many states — is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive.
McConnell criticized the old regime for taxing religious parents to pay for secular education they find objectionable, but the converse is also true about the current regime — it taxes secular parents to pay for religious education that many Americans also find objectionable.
One nationwide solution
The unfortunate reality is that, in a pluralistic society, it is impossible to come up with a legal regime that won’t impose obligations on anyone that they object to on religious grounds. If a nation taxes citizens, some of them will object to how that money is spent. If it provides public schools, some families will object to the values taught in those schools. And if it changes which values are taught, some other families will object to the new lessons.
The Roberts Court’s solution to these inevitable conflicts has largely been to resolve them in ways that favor members of the Republican Party’s coalition, such as religious conservatives, that burden members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, such as LGBTQ people, and that advance longtime Republican Party goals such as making private school vouchers widely available.
That’s certainly one way to do constitutional law. The GOP controls the Supreme Court, and to the victor go the spoils.
But it is far from clear why many of these decisions should be made by a handful of unelected lawyers in black robes, especially in a nation that purports to be a democracy — and that also purports to be a federation of many diverse states. There was a lot of wisdom in Zelman’s approach, which allowed Maine to devise an education policy that makes sense for Maine and Alabama to devise an education policy that makes sense for Alabama.
At the very least, cases like Zelman did not claim that the Constitution, with its two vague and often-contradictory approaches to religion, calls for one nationwide solution to the question of how to run a country made up of people of many faiths.
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