• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Current
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Reviews
  • 🔎
  • Way of Improvement

The Supreme Court is far more likely to rule in favor of religious rights

John Fea   |  April 6, 2021

Perhaps those concerned about religious liberty as it relates to The Equality Act should consider this. Here is a taste of Adam Liptak’s parsing of a recent essay to be published in The Supreme Court Review:

“For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, in November. “It pains me to say this, but, in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.”

Those quarters do not include the Supreme Court, which has become far more likely to rule in favor of religious rights in recent years, according to a new study that considered 70 years of data.

The study, to be published in The Supreme Court Review, documented a 35-percentage-point increase in the rate of rulings in favor of religion in orally argued cases, culminating in an 81 percent success rate in the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“Plainly, the Roberts court has ruled in favor of religious organizations, including mainstream Christian organizations, more frequently than its predecessors,” wrote the study’s authors, Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Eric A. Posner of the University of Chicago. “With the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, this trend will not end soon and may accelerate.”

Read the rest at The New York Times.

John Fea
+ postsBio
  • John Fea
    That’s a wrap!
  • John Fea
    The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog has moved
  • John Fea
    Pamela Paul’s last New York Times column
  • John Fea
    Evangelicals and politics roundup: Wisconsin, Cory Booker, spiritual warfare, refugees, and more.
  • John Fea
    Goodbye to a Four-Year Labor of Love
  • John Fea
    Wisconsin sends Trump-Musk a message
  • John Fea
    “Would you want your doctors not to be revisionists?”
  • John Fea
    All four #1 seeds made the Final Four this year. What happened to Cinderella?
  • John Fea
    It’s the last week of CURRENT
  • John Fea
    Sunday night odds and ends
  • John Fea
    Trump’s executive order on American history has little to do with history
  • John Fea
    Should Jeffrey Goldberg have “left the room?”
  • John Fea
    What an ending!
  • John Fea
    “You can’t hold onto anything in this world. That doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze it all so tightly to your heart that it hurts.”
  • John Fea
    Is Trump capitulation “on the way out?”
  • John Fea
    Did Patrick Henry really say “Give me liberty or give me death?”
  • John Fea
    Hey Silicon Valley, “Christianity…is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be.”
  • John Fea
    The second Trump presidency is two months old. What are evangelical saying?
  • John Fea
    We need more democrats
  • John Fea
    “What if the Mets are actually good now?”

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Equality Act, first amendment, John Roberts, religious freedom, religious liberty, Samuel Alito, Supreme Court