In recent years candidates have assumed that they can win over
evangelicals by learning Christian slogans, by masking political
rallies as prayer meetings, and by basically producing a long-form new
birth certificate to prove they’ve been born again. This sort of
identity politics is a luxury of a past era when evangelicals were part
of a silent majority in the U.S., with our First Amendment freedoms
assumed and guaranteed. That is not the present situation.
Yet
the same Baptists and other evangelicals who wouldn't have let
Jefferson near their baptismal pools were willing to check his name for
president of the United States because he was willing to stand up for
religious freedom.
That’s why the most important test of 2016 may be the Thomas Jefferson
Primary —the race to see which candidates offer a clear, coherent
vision of religious liberty when the very idea is contested in American
politics.
In the past several elections, religious liberty has hardly been
mentioned. There was chatter about the sermons of the pastors of
candidates Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in 2008, and about whether
evangelicals would vote for a Mormon in 2012—they did, without much
trouble. But candidates didn't have to answer how they would protect
the legacy of religious freedom, fought so hard for by Jefferson and
his Baptist allies.
Yes, the Supreme Court handed religious-liberty advocates a victory in
the Hobby Lobby case—ruling in 2014 that certain private companies can
be exempt from aspects of the Affordable Care Act for religions
reasons. But who would have predicted a few years ago that a decision
about whether the government could force employers to pay for
abortion-causing drugs would rest on one swing vote on the court?
Even more troubling was the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor decision. Again,
religious freedom won the day in a ruling maintaining a church’s right
to hire ministers apart from government interference. But that court
victory was against a White House arguing a point that no previous
administration ever would have pursued.
In 2016, it doesn’t matter whether a candidate knows the words to
hymns. What will matter to evangelicals is how the candidate, if
elected president, will articulate and defend religious-liberty rights.
This is about more than whether the candidate will repeat clichés about
appointing Supreme Court justices who will “interpret the law, not make
the law.” We want to know how this potential president will rein in an
administrative apparatus that has plunged the country into ongoing
culture wars over, for instance, compelling virgin nuns to pay for
birth control.
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