This week, Kelly Shackelford, First Liberty Institute president, CEO and chief counsel, debates Melissa Rogers, author, visiting professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and former director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. We hope you enjoy the exchange.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek opinion editor and a syndicated columnist.
The number of violent attacks on churches and church gatherings witnessed in recent months is unsettling. Protesters and rioters across the country have decapitated statues of Jesus, desecrated images of the Virgin Mary and vandalized monuments to a Jesuit priest. Churches—in Washington, D.C. and California—have been set ablaze as “symbols of oppression.” Fire, chain and boot are the tool and trade of a culture laying siege to religious freedom.
The American record on religious freedom is disfigured by grievous errors, but its legal framework not only repudiates such persecution and discrimination, it also bans governmental establishments of religion and affirms the equal right of individuals to practice their faith. That framework has produced remarkable religious freedom for people of all faiths and none. It also has helped create a country where people with vastly different faiths and beliefs live together peacefully, and often with mutual respect and levels of interfaith cooperation that are unprecedented in human history.
