The Argument Continues

Elena calls the compromise fatally naive about religious power. The “tiered framework” still allows religiously affiliated hospitals – which control roughly one in six hospital beds in the United States and are often the only option in underserved areas – to deny reproductive healthcare on the basis of doctrine. This is not hypothetical: Catholic hospital systems already refuse to perform abortions even in medical emergencies, refuse to provide contraception, and refuse to perform tubal ligations. Telling a woman in a rural community with one hospital to go somewhere else is not “reasonable accommodation” – it is abandonment dressed up in the language of conscience. And the compromise’s treatment of secular hostility and religious hostility as equivalent threats is a false equivalence that serves the powerful. Secular opposition to religion has produced no inquisitions, no pogroms, no forced conversions. Religious opposition to civil rights has produced and continues to produce real, measurable harm. She also demands full financial transparency: churches receive an estimated $71 billion per year in tax exemptions yet, unlike every other 501(c)(3) organization, file no public financial disclosures. This lack of accountability has enabled everything from megachurch pastors flying private jets to the Catholic Church’s systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse, financed in part by tax-deductible donations.

Marcus finds the compromise generally sound but worries about the unworkable distinction between government speech and private speech. When a football coach leads players in prayer at the fifty-yard line – as in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District – is that private expression or government endorsement? The Supreme Court said the former, but any reasonable student on the team understands that participation is expected, not optional. The coach’s religious expression is inseparable from his authority. Marcus also questions the invitation for secularists to respect religious reasoning in public discourse. A senator who argues against marriage equality because “God created marriage as the union of one man and one woman” is making a claim that cannot be evaluated, debated, or falsified by citizens who do not share her theology. Democratic deliberation requires a shared language of reasons, and the policies citizens advocate must ultimately be justifiable in secular terms.

Sarah offers a gentler objection: the compromise may be too prescriptive for a framework meant to guide a diverse and evolving society. The tiered approach will inevitably produce hard cases at the boundaries – is a Christian-owned catering company that primarily serves weddings a “for-profit business” or a “closely held business with religious convictions”? She would prefer more flexibility, guided by general principles but not bound by rigid categories. She also notes that in a nation as diverse as the United States, the appropriate balance may look different in Salt Lake City than in San Francisco, and a federalist approach allowing communities some latitude might be more effective than a one-size-fits-all national framework.

James says the compromise, for all its language of balance, tilts decisively toward the secular side. The principle that exemptions cannot “impose significant burdens on third parties” sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it has been used to crush religious conscience at every turn. A Christian baker who declines to create a custom cake for a same-sex wedding is not “imposing” anything – the couple can easily obtain a cake elsewhere – yet the baker has been dragged through years of litigation and publicly vilified. The “burden on third parties” test treats the mildest inconvenience to the claimant as sufficient reason to override the deepest convictions of the believer. Requiring religious schools and agencies to comply with “public nondiscrimination standards” as a condition of funding forces them to choose between their mission and their existence. And until there is genuine tolerance for religious viewpoints in academia, media, and corporate America – until a professor can state that there are two biological sexes without being fired, until a corporate employee can express traditional views on marriage without being terminated – the compromise is asking believers to disarm unilaterally.

Ruth rejects the entire framework’s premise: that religion and secularism are symmetrical positions deserving equal treatment. They are not. America was founded on the recognition of God-given rights. Secularism is not a neutral backdrop; it is a substantive worldview that denies the reality of God, and its ascendancy represents civilizational decline. The compromise asks Christians to accept that their nation’s laws will not reflect their moral convictions – but this is precisely what Christians cannot accept, because moral law is not optional, and a society that abandons it destroys itself. She points to rising rates of depression, suicide, drug addiction, family breakdown, and social isolation as evidence. The compromise’s protection of “religious pluralism” is a Trojan horse for the relativistic claim that all religions are equally valid. They are not. Christianity is true. Ruth does not advocate persecution of non-Christians, but she insists that the public life of a Christian nation must reflect its Christian character.

The objections do not cancel each other out. They reveal the true shape of the problem – a problem that is not, at bottom, political at all.