Last year, IFI hosted a special forum on religious liberty, featuring Ambassador Sam Brownback, chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. Also speaking at this forum was Peter Breen from the Thomas More Law Center and Arielle Del Turco, Family Research Council ‘s Director of the Center for Religious Liberty. You can watch their presentations on the IFI YouTube by clicking on their names.
Ms. Del Turco is the co-author of the FRC’s “Hostility Against Churches” report, which has recently been updated. In 2023, they identified 436 incidents—more than double the number identified in 2022 and more than eight times the number identified in 2018. These findings suggest that hostility against U.S. churches is not only on the rise but also accelerating.
The violence manifests in a variety of ways, including acts of arson, graffiti of satanic messages, rocks and bricks thrown through windows, statues destroyed (often with heads cut off), and illegal disruptions of church services.
As our culture drifts away from God, the Bible, and Christian mores, the concept of religious freedom is quickly being sacrificed to the religion of woke-ism. There are good reasons why the Apostle Paul tells us to “walk circumspectly” or look carefully at how we live, “not as fools but as wise…because the days are evil,” and to “understand what the will of the Lord is” (Ephesians 5:15–17).
Religious liberty requires our vigilance because its degradation affects the exercise of every other constitutional right. We would do well to make it a priority.
“[T]hat the opinions of men are not the object of civil government,
nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude
his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession
or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a
dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty.”
~Thomas Jefferson, 1779~
