Former solicitor general Ken Starr's new book, 'Religious Liberty in Crisis,' is an excellent and educational introduction to a complex topic, but fails to offer much reassurance. //

A federal lawsuit filed on March 29 against the U.S. Department of Education cites 33 current and former LGBTQ students at federally funded Christian colleges and universities for what the nonprofit Religious Exemption Accountability Project refers to as “unconstitutional discriminatory policies.”

According to the class-action suit, the religious exemption status of the 25 listed schools allows them to maintain discriminatory policies while receiving government funding. This suit, perhaps intentionally, follows the recent passage of the Equality Act in the House — effectively adding gender identity and sexuality to the groups protected under the Civil Rights Act — which is now with the Senate.

The lawsuit and the bill represent a significant escalation of attacks on religious liberty within the first 100 days of the Biden administration. Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, by former solicitor general of the United States, Baylor University president, and dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law is thus well timed. Indeed, Baylor is one of the 25 schools named in the class-action suit (perhaps surprisingly, Pepperdine, which also has strong evangelical chops, is not). //

Starr recognizes these threats to religious liberty. His practical suggestions to combat them are threefold: get elected, vote your faith, and become a genuine friend of freedom. However, those with antipathies towards many forms of Christianity and other religious traditions believe it is precisely those religions that are the opponents of true freedom.

What is more important: one’s religious belief, which many characterize as simply a subjective choice; or one’s racial, sexual, or gender identity, which many define as a biological given? Or perhaps even more sinister, what if American civil religion finds its fulfillment not in some generic Judaeo-Christian ethic, but racial, sexual, and gender identitarianism?

As Pecknold observes: “The ‘Great Awokening’ is an attempt to give civil religion some real doctrines, real moral claims on lives. It’s both a parasite on the old underdetermined civil religion, and a brand new, bolder civil religion.”

Federal American law and jurisprudence have never sought to coherently and consistently define what constitutes legitimate religion — apart from such acts as once demanding that conscientious-objector emanate from belief in a “supreme being” — largely because of the influence of disestablishmentarianism and indifferentism. Perhaps that worked when the majority of Americans adhered to a shared, coherent ethical and cultural framework that owed its character to Christianity. Those days are increasingly behind us.

Classical liberalism, its adherents often argue, is designed to accommodate all religions and none. But, says Pecknold, “this amounts to a non-answer which insists on toleration while the Woke Hierarchy establishes its church.”

In an America increasingly antagonistic to many traditional forms of religious practice, especially those who are suspicious of the sexual revolution, it’s worth questioning the strength of our legal and jurisprudential levees against the progressivist flood. As a person of religious conviction, I confess I have my doubts.