Religious liberty across the United States is being threatened by laws and regulations that attempt to impose requirements regarding abortion, contraception, sexual orientation, and gender identity. That’s a key finding of a new report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“Religious freedom is at the heart of the American founding and vital to a diverse and free people living in harmony,” said Will Bloomfield, General Counsel for the Diocese of Lansing, January 18, 2024.
“Sadly, the federal and state governments have for years been steadily advancing false and dangerous sexual ideologies and ignoring the autonomy of religious institutions and the religious freedom of families and individuals.”
“This report from the U.S. Bishops helpful identifies these threats and highlights the importance of religious freedom — not just for Catholics, but for all Americans.”
The report, entitled “State of Religious Liberty in the United States”, is released annually by the USCCB’s Committee for Religious Liberty which is led by Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana.
This report summarizes developments in religious liberty at the federal or national level in the United States in 2023. After previewing likely developments in 2024, it then identifies the five greatest threats to religious liberty in the coming year and recommends responses to each threat. Those threats are as follows:
1. Attacks against houses of worship, especially in relation to the Israel-Hamas conflict;
2. The Section 1557 regulation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will likely impose a mandate on doctors to perform gender transition procedures and possibly abortions;
3. Threats to religious charities serving newcomers, which will likely increase as the issue of immigration gains prominence in the election;
4. Suppression of religious speech on marriage and sexual difference;
5. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Pregnant Workers Fairness Act regulations, which aim to require religious employers to be complicit in abortion in an unprecedented way.
The report says that while the committee “was founded in response to increasing legal threats to the free exercise of religion,” the bishops felt “compelled to decry foreseeable threats to the very lives of people of faith here in the United States.”
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the June 2022, the report notes that attacks against Catholic churches and pro-life organizations have risen considerably. The bishops observe that annual hate crime statistics gathered by the F.B.I. in 2022 reported anti-Catholic crimes as nearly 75% higher than for any other bias. All this is compounded with, the bishops said, a “general failure” on the part of the “federal government to apprehend and prosecute the perpetrators of such attacks.”
The report says that the administration of President Joe Biden has effectuated the “most consequential actions” on religious liberty primarily through several key regulations issued in 2023. Among these were the Health and Human Services’ contraceptive mandate and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s regulations that threaten to require religious employers to make accommodations for abortion, contraception, and sterilization.
Regarding another federal law, the report notes the effort by some Republicans to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which, the bishops say, “has been used almost exclusively to protect abortion clinics and has never been used to protect a church.”
“The lopsided enforcement of the FACE Act has long been noted but received renewed attention in 2023, as increasing attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers went largely unpunished, while some actions brought against protesters outside abortion clinics seemed unjustifiably severe,” the bishops say citing the case of the Catholic father and pro-lifer, Mark Houck, whose family home in Pennsylvania was raided by armed agents.
The bishops’ report also mentions the F.B.I.’s “Richmond Memo,” leaked in January 2023, that revealed evidence that several F.B.I. offices were investigating and surveilling certain Catholic parishes that were described in the memo as “radical traditionalist Catholics” sympathetic to “extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”
More hopefully, the report notes two victories for religious liberty in the Supreme Court. Groff v. DeJoy and 303 Creative v. Elenis, which helped to solidify religious rights in the public square.
In conclusion, the bishops say that the coming year holds some significant threats to the religious rights of religious Americans that will likely be further exacerbated by the election year, most especially because of the emphasis on abortion, gender ideology, and immigration.
* To read the report in full, go to: https://www.usccb.org/.../religious.../2024-annual-report
* Additional reporting courtesy of the Catholic News Agency: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/
* Image: Freedom of Worship by Norman Rockwell (1894 - 1978)