Is "religious liberty" in America already a lost cause?

Jeremiah G. Dys at Canon and Culture has written a thoughtful essay entitled, What Has Happened To Religious Liberty. If one reads his essay, and follows the numerous supporting links, the inescapable thought intrudes: is religious liberty under assault or has the battle for religious liberty, at least for American Christians, already be lost?

The answer to that, I suppose, lies in the definition of religious liberty itself. It is more than merely allowing for walls and a steeple-topped roof in which some may gather to sing about, pray to, and study the holy writings of God. Religious liberty is the idea that every man, woman, boy, and girl is permitted (indeed, created) to order their lives — every aspect of it, both private and public — according to the teachings of their faith.

Well, that’s almost the entire definition. Religious liberty has one key component at its core that is fashionably left off the end. It is so assumed that we have forgotten to restate it over the years and, as a result, it has atrophied. Most of us grew up in homes and neighborhoods that did not think twice about this part of the definition of religious liberty. Why would we? This is America, where “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof.”

That key component of religious liberty for every human being is that every human is permitted to order their lives according to the teachings of their faith and, absent the most compelling of reasons, to be free from government telling them what that faith ought to be or how it is to be practiced.

That is what we have forgotten and, in fact, what we have reversed. Now, Congress does make the laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion and few blink an eye because it furthers their socio-political agenda. Government, in the form of courts, damages centuries of jurisprudence that has broadened religious liberty by elevating perceptive rights found in outlying penumbras to the constitution above those specifically enumerated therein. Government demands our worship as the highest authority of all. It assumes too much, destroying itself from within in the process.

Read the whole essay. Dys' thoughts are worth consideration.