"Religious Freedom in a Polarized Age"

In the last month, I've given a lecture, "Religious Freedom in a Polarized Age," as the Lin Lecture at St. Mary University Law School in San Antonio, and as the Veninga Lecture at the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service. Recordings of those lectures are, respectively, here and here. A summary paragraph:

      In [recent high-profile religious liberty] cases, divides over religious liberty increasingly trace, and even intensify, the divides over the underlying policy issues: sexual morality, health policy, immigration, national security. If you support LGBT nondiscrimination laws, you reject any religious-liberty challenges to those laws; likewise if you support immigration restrictions. Both left and right do it.

      This is a bad development: that’s my thesis today. We must renew our commitment to religious freedom for all. That proposition has two parts. First, we should place a strong value on religious freedom, which I define as the ability of people to live consistently with their religious beliefs and identity, presumptively free from government penalty for doing so. We have to balance that freedom with other values, but it should receive heavy weight in the balance. Second, that strong freedom must extend equally to all faiths. We need to protect Muslims and conservative Christians. Today more than ever, Americans need to affirm what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called “freedom for the thought we hate.”