A Wider Vision
Bettina Krause March/April 2026It all began with an executive order issued by the president describing in stark terms the imminent threat to America’s borders. The order declared that this extraordinary emergency required an extraordinary response. And Americans, by and large, seemed to agree. This appeal to national security reconciled us to civil liberty violations that would be unthinkable in regular times: rounding up and detaining thousands of people who fit a certain racial profile and interning many indefinitely, without due process of law and without regard to citizenship status.
I’m referring, of course, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the years-long forced detention of some 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. The constitutionality of the order was challenged by a young Japanese American man named Fred Korematsu, but it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Korematsu v. United States belongs to a small subset of decisions by the Court that Americans, regardless of their political persuasion, look back on with shame. These are cases in which constitutional protections for a vulnerable minority gave way before the interests, fears, or prejudices of the majority. Numbered among them is Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case in which the Court decided that racial segregation laws passed constitutional muster; and the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, in which the Court gave a constitutional pass to the forced sterilization of “unfit” Americans, including the intellectually disabled.
Does a case such Korematsu have any bearing on religious liberty today? I’m sometimes met with skepticism when I suggest that it does. How does a wartime executive order aimed at national security relate to the first 16 words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”?
Foundations Matter
The one misconception about religious liberty advocacy that I’d most like to dispel is this: that we can think about, talk about, and defend religious freedom rights within a vacuum. America’s 250-year experiment in religious liberty is intimately connected—often in counterintuitive ways—with how we protect other fundamental liberties as well.
For a start, constitutional guarantees of any kind, including religious liberty, are meaningless without certain foundations that allow these rights to be respected in practice.
Today, of the 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, more than 180 have an explicit constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion or belief. And this includes countries such as China, where religious expression is tightly controlled by the state, and Pakistan, where religious minorities are often targeted with blasphemy or apostasy laws that carry a potential death penalty. Many other countries, such as Vietnam, Tajikistan, and Belarus, also have beautiful constitutional language protecting religious freedom but, in practice, heavily restrict the activities of religious minorities.
Clearly, words are not enough. Without a corresponding legal, political, and social culture that’s geared toward protecting individual liberties, constitutional promises of religious freedom are merely ink on paper.
It follows, then, that a religious liberty advocate in the United States must do more than wax eloquent about the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Our portfolio also includes promoting the health of democratic institutions, created by our constitution, that work to protect the rights of minorities from the whims of majorities: separation of powers; an effective Congress; a strong, independent judiciary that’s insulated from political winds and committed to the rule of law.
But these are just the basics. There’s more. A religious liberty advocate, by default, must also be a champion for other constitutionally guaranteed liberties. Why? Because they’re all linked.
No Right Is an Island
Consider this irony: religious freedom protection in America today owes a great deal to an anti-Semite, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a vitriolic anti-gay activist. In these three landmark free speech cases, the U.S. Supreme Court protected the anti-Semitic harangue of a former Catholic priest who almost started a riot in 1949 New York; a racist rant at a 1969 Ku Klux Klan rally in Ohio; and, more recently, a Christian’s obnoxious habit of picketing military funerals and harassing mourners with anti-LGBTQ messages.
America’s constitutional regime protects speech to an extraordinary degree. And this uniquely robust protection of free speech has, in recent times, become key in the Supreme Court’s approach to certain religious liberty questions. Take, for instance, the 2023 case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. A Christian business owner successfully argued that a state anti-discrimination law couldn’t compel her to design a custom website for a same-sex wedding—because it would contradict her deeply held religious beliefs.
Or what about the “praying football coach” case decided a year earlier? Public high school coach Joe Kennedy’s practice of praying on the football field after games was substantially defended—and upheld by the Court—in terms of his constitutional free speech rights.
Regardless of whether you agree with the outcomes in either of these cases, the upshot is clear: free speech and religious freedom rights can’t be separated. They either rise together or fall together.
The same can be said of other fundamental liberties as well. When you have a moment, reread the Bill of Rights and start drawing lines between religious freedom and the other protected rights.
The First Amendment’s “right of the people peaceably to assemble”? That’s central to religious expression. The Fourth Amendment’s bar against unreasonable searches and seizures? This also protects houses of worship, religious institutions, and people of faith from government overreach. The Fifth Amendment’s due process protections? The promise of a fair legal process is as crucial to someone making a religious freedom claim as it is to someone asserting any other right.
Seeing Connections
The words of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller describing the dynamics at play in Nazi Germany are routinely quoted at religious liberty events. Perhaps, through overuse, they’ve lost some of their original power, yet they still capture an essential truth. There are many different versions, but this is the one displayed at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.:
First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Religious liberty is not a hermetically sealed, stand-alone right. If we’re to advocate for religious freedom, we must do more than just speak out for those who think like us, look like us, or worship like us. We can’t look away when the rights of other groups—religious or otherwise—are violated.
The lessons of Korematsu matter. True religious freedom advocacy has a broad vision for a society in which all fundamental liberties are respected. We may sometimes disagree on how best to do this, and that’s OK. But if we take our eyes off this constitutional North Star, we’ve already lost our way.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.