Dangerous Nostalgia
Bettina Krause November/December 2025Our ongoing national confusion about religious liberty was showcased again in news reporting on Vice President J. D. Vance’s recent event at the University of Mississippi.
“Vance Says He Hopes His Wife Embraces Christianity, Setting Off Backlash,” declared the New York Times, with similar headlines appearing on hundreds of other news sites nationwide.
Vance was responding to a student who asked how Vance and his Hindu wife, Usha, manage an interfaith household, especially when it comes to raising their three young children. Vance, a relatively recent convert from Evangelical Christianity to Roman Catholicism, spoke about his deep respect and love for his wife, but also about his love for his faith.
“Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in the church?” he mused. “Yeah, I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Was this, as many commentators suggested, an outrageous wish—a shocking display of Christian bigotry?
Religious Liberty 101
In the world of international religious liberty advocacy, you quickly learn that the most religiously repressive nations generally have one thing in common—apostasy laws. In these places a nationally endorsed religion is paired with criminal penalties for changing religious affiliation or inducing someone else to do so. In countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, or the United Arab Emirates, abandoning Islam—or encouraging someone along that path—can land you, at best, with a long jail sentence or, at worst, with a death sentence.
Or in some states in Hindu-majority India, and in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and Bhutan, anti-conversion laws also carry various legal penalties for “proselytism”—a term that tends to throw all faith-sharing attempts, indiscriminately, into a single bucket labeled “coercive.”
Inevitably, countries with apostasy or anti-conversion laws also come with significant social hostility toward religious dissenters or minorities. At a U.S. State Department event a few years back, I talked with a Bangladeshi woman—an author and atheist—who, together with her husband, was knifed by a mob in a Dhaka marketplace after a book signing event. Her husband did not survive.
Next time you’re irritated by the noise of a street preacher or by a knock at your door from folks wanting to share religious literature—consider the alternatives.
Vance’s comments were neither bigoted nor outrageous. The right to change your own religious beliefs, or to invite others to change theirs, is simply religious liberty 101. (Now, whether Vance was wise to air private marital concerns in front of thousands of students and the national media is a separate question entirely!)
What Religious Liberty Isn’t
The overlooked news story of the day, however, came later, when a young man asked Vance to weigh in on the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The questioner suggested that perhaps separation between church and state should continue at a national level, but that this separation should become progressively blurrier the closer you move toward local community levels.
In other words: the federal government shouldn’t choose religious favorites or set up a national church, but state and local authorities could prefer, fund, or otherwise support one religion over others based on the majority preferences of each state or community.
Vance agreed. “If you go back to the founding time, there were actually a number of states that had formally recognized churches,” he said, pointing to the Anglican Church of Virginia and the Roman Catholic Church in the early years of the colony of Maryland.
Vance then briefly lamented the interpretation of the First Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court, which since the landmark 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education has read the establishment clause as restraining not just Congress but states and local authorities, as well.
“But if you were to undo that,” Vance continued, “if you were to get back to a system actually meant by the Founders, where Congress is not setting up an established religion, but people in their local communities can kind of do whatever it is that they want to do, I think that would be a better system than what we have today.”
This isn’t a novel idea. What’s novel, however, is a serving vice president advocating for a pre-Everson America.
For most of our history as a republic, local and state authorities were indeed free to “make laws respecting an establishment of religion.” And they did, with unfortunate legal and social consequences for such religious dissenters as Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jews. In fact, it was in response to state hostility toward religious minorities that Liberty magazine was founded in 1906. Liberty spent the following four decades, until Everson, recording discrimination, arbitrary prosecutions, and targeted state hostility toward religious minorities.
What would winding back the clock to a pre-Everson constitutional standard look like in today’s religiously diverse America? It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination. It would achieve precisely what our country’s Founders feared and tried to prevent—a republic in which religious differences become flashpoints for political turmoil.
Vance isn’t alone in his nostalgia for a pre-Everson America. A growing number of legal scholars are making an originalist case for “disincorporation” of the establishment clause, with Justice Clarence Thomas as their standard bearer on the Court. It’s an idea that’s catching on, also, outside of legal circles. At the 2024 NatCon—the National Conservatism Conference—in Washington, D.C., Timon Cline, editor of the American Reformer, delivered a speech explaining why Everson must fall. He spoke nostalgically of a pre-Everson America, where “states had robust blasphemy, Sabbath, and obscenity laws. Proselytizing was not a free-for-all. Morals were as regulated as health and safety.”
From this perspective, reversing Everson would provide a neat “solution” to today’s protracted legal battles over the constitutionality of state laws mandating the Ten Commandments on the walls of public school classrooms, or state efforts to fund religious charter schools.
Does Vance see the irony in his nostalgia for a pre-Everson America? It’s Everson that has shaped a society where Usha Vance can live, work, practice her Hindu faith, and participate equally in civic life without discrimination or fear. It’s Everson that has helped create the rich, extraordinary religious liberty we enjoy in America; a place where Vance can casually speculate about his wife one day, perhaps, changing her religious identity—an option denied to countless millions less-fortunate men and women around the globe today.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.