Hi, I'm John Green, and I am a lifelong learner.

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Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So listen, today we’re talking  about religious freedom  and to do that we’re going  to have to talk about drugs.

Like, is peyote, for instance, a sacred substance or an illegal drug?

Peyote is an edible type of cactus, a few centimeters in size, that’s been used for thousands of years in Native American religious ceremonies.

Many tribes think of it as an  incarnation of the Peyote spirit.

And when you ingest it, you  can speak directly to god.

But, in 1990, two men in Oregon were prosecuted and fired from their jobs for participating in this ceremony.

Which raises big questions about religious freedom — like, do we have it?

And what are the limits?

[THEME MUSIC] So okay, I believe in religious freedom.

And that’s something I’m  comfortable saying because  — it’s not a particularly controversial position, right?

But it’s when we start to try  and define religious freedom  and its limits that we find  ourselves in tricky territory.

Territory that forces us to ask hard questions.

Like: are there any cases  when a person’s religious  beliefs should exempt them from the law?

And what happens when one  person’s religious freedom  makes it harder for another  person to exercise theirs?

Or makes it harder to access government services?

These questions are both older  than my country, the United States,  and, in some ways, more topical now than they've ever been.

Religious freedom is something the United States has prided itself on since almost the beginning.

I mean, it’s right there in the  First Amendment of our Constitution  along with freedom of speech,  the press, and assembly.

It’s usually understood as the right to believe and practice – or abstain from – religion, without interference or persecution.

So, this constitutional  protection in the First Amendment  means that there can be no “official  religion” in the United States – which certainly isn’t true for all countries.

A major alternative to religious  freedom is religious nationalism,  which is super complex and can be  understood in a number of ways.

But one simple definition is: when a government recognizes one religion over others, deeming only members of that  religion to be worthy of protection,  equipped for leadership, and  essentially fully valid as citizens.

Now, of course, the U.S. was founded on the idea that this wasn’t the way to run a country, right?

The pilgrims left England and came to the New World in search of religious freedom.

Or at least that’s the story we’ve heard.

But here’s the rub: religion in the colonies had a very narrow definition at the time, right?

Like, eight of the original thirteen colonies had “official” churches, just like England did.

What I’m saying is: the Mayflower didn’t exactly  come over with, like, a  Coexist bumper sticker on it.

It wasn't until folks like  Thomas Jefferson started  talking about separation of church and state in the late 18th century  that anything resembling our  modern understanding of religious freedom existed – at least, in the United States.

And even then, we often  fell short of our promises.

In much of the South, for example, there were laws restricting African American religious practices.

Such as one policy in Georgia that made it illegal for any person of color “to preach, to exhort, or join in any religious exercise with any persons of color, either free or slave, there being more than seven  persons of color present.” Folks in power were concerned  that these religious gatherings  could lead to political organizing  and revolts by enslaved people.

After all, there were different Biblical messages happening in these spaces.

White pastors could emphasize the  Bible’s acceptance of slavery,  or Jesus’s teaching to render unto  Caesar what is Caesar’s, and so on.

While Black preachers were more likely to focus on Jesus’ teaching that the last shall be first, that all are equal in the eyes of God, and that the poor and imprisoned are especially blessed.

In any case, the founding fathers, with all of their contradictions, were largely inspired by Enlightenment ideas first brought forward in Europe.

They hoped that by protecting the freedom to worship as you pleased, in what was already becoming  a religiously diverse country, they could avoid the kinds of endless wars Europe had faced in previous centuries.

But just to be clear, religious  freedom already existed  in plenty of cultures before the Enlightenment.

Like, going back to the 3rd Century BCE in India,  Emperor Ashoka — himself a  follower of Buddhist teachings — declared freedoms for “all religious sects” to practice their own beliefs.

And you know who else offered religious freedom to just about everyone — Daoists notwithstanding?

Wait for it….

The Mongols.

[triumphant music] That’s right, this camera isn’t  just for humor and personal asides.

It’s also for shameless nostalgia grabs.

There have also been plenty of communities that just didn’t really conceive of religions as rivals with distinct claims on “the truth,”  places where religious freedom  was just kind of implied.

Like in Bengal, prior to the partition of India, Hindus and Muslims practiced overlapping customs, even meeting simultaneously  in shared spaces of worship.

And traditions like the  Bahá’í Faith have long held  that all religions extend  from the same divine origin.

So, the promise of religious  freedom is not a new idea,  and definitely not exclusive to Western society.

And yet, despite its centuries-long history, nobody’s quite mastered it yet.

In the U.S., there have been some major flashpoints in recent decades, with Supreme Court cases deciding, and re-deciding, and re-re-re-deciding how religious freedom gets  enforced, what its limits are,  and whose religious freedom trumps whose.

Some have even argued that failure is inevitable.

The legal scholar Winnifred Sullivan wrote a book  declaring religious freedom to  be “fundamentally impossible,” because it would require a definition of religion that everyone agrees on.

And as we’ve seen throughout this series… you know, that’s pretty challenging.

But for a snapshot of ways  we’ve tried religious freedom, let’s start with  the very first Supreme Court case  on religious liberty, in 1879.

The Civil War was still fresh on Americans’ minds, and many had moved west in search of new lives.

And in what was then just the territory of Utah, a man by the name of George Reynolds had been convicted of practicing polygamy, or being married to multiple people at once.

Two people, to be precise.

Probably not enough for a TLC show.

But enough for a Supreme Court case.

Reynolds argued that, as a Mormon man,  his religion compelled him  to marry more than one woman – a practice that was illegal under U.S. law.

Reynolds took his case all  the way to the Supreme Court,  arguing that the law violated  his First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

But ultimately, the court ruled that the First Amendment protected religious belief – but not necessarily religious  actions, if they violated the law.

And with that, a new legal precedent was set, one that would go on to influence decades of religious freedom cases to come: the belief-action dichotomy.

The ruling established that the First Amendment’s guarantee to the free exercise of religion did not exempt religious people from the law.

Reynolds had the right to believe in  polygamy, just not to practice it.

So according to the belief-action dichotomy, I can worship Diet Dr Pepper if it becomes illegal, I just can’t drink it.

Still, there were a lot of kinks to  work out in how to apply this rule.

Like, in the 1960s, a Seventh-day Adventist named  Adell Sherbert was fired for  refusing to work on Saturdays, a day of rest in her religion, and she had trouble  finding another job that didn’t  hold the same requirement.

So, she filed for unemployment benefits, which were denied on the basis that she hadn’t accepted, quote, “suitable work when offered.” But then, in what would  become a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the unemployment policy violated Sherbert’s religious freedom.

And this wasn’t just her freedom to believe that Saturdays should be a day of rest, but also her freedom to act on that belief.

And more to the point, her freedom to receive the same government benefits as any other citizen while also staying true to her religion.

The Sherbert v. Verner case introduced a new precedent: compelling interest.

Basically, if a government isn’t going to make accommodations for religious actions, it better have a good, compelling reason.

What is the good, compelling  reason for polygamy being illegal?

Too many TLC shows.

They would take over.

But listen, I don’t always have  good reasons for things, do you?

Like, people don’t make any sense.

And governments, are made out of people.

So, there were more kinks to work out.

Which brings us back to peyote.

In 1990, Alfred Smith and Galen  Black were fired from their jobs for taking the hallucinogen as part of a Native American religious ceremony.

And, like Sherbert, they, too, were denied unemployment benefits — in this case, because they  had been fired for misconduct.

But this time, the Supreme  Court ruled against them.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote  that the First Amendment, quote, “does not insulate religiously  motivated actions from laws,  unless the laws single out  religion for disfavored treatment.” It was kind of the opposite of the Sherbert case.

And there are dozens of cases like this, where rulings on religious freedom bounce back and forth over this very fuzzy line between belief and action.

Now, a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle felt the Smith case was unfair, and they wanted more cases to  be ruled like the Sherbert one, so that freedom of religious practice and  freedom of religious beliefs  could be better protected.

So, a few years later, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which tried to make the  whole “compelling interest”  thing less of a vibe and more of a law.

But this continued to not exactly clarify things.

Because what did our friend Winnifred tell us?

Perfecting religious freedoms is impossible!

And yet, like Sisyphus, we  gotta keep doing the thing.

So, RFRA aimed to strengthen  religious freedom claims,  and, starting in the early aughts, more conservative Supreme  Court justices were appointed.

And then, we started to see  a pretty significant shift.

For most of the 20th century,  the Supreme Court tended  to rule in favor of about half  of religious freedom claims.

But in 2005, they upheld 81 percent  of religious freedom claims.

After that, religious freedom claims started clashing with a wider variety of rights.

Like, in 2014, the court  ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, a company whose Christian ownership disputed a law  requiring them to provide  employee health insurance with guaranteed birth control coverage.

And that raised big questions  about what was more important — an employer’s right to exercise  religious beliefs against birth control, or an employee’s right to access birth control.

And in 2018, the court ruled in favor of a baker  who refused to make a wedding  cake for a same-sex couple on the basis of religious  beliefs against homosexuality.

Which raised big questions about discrimination.

Beyond that, contemporary  legal scholars have argued  there’s an imbalance of  religious freedom in our country, with conservative Christianity  often getting special treatment.

One oft-cited example: In a  2019 case, the court ruled  against a Muslim inmate who  wished to have an Imam present during his execution–despite permitting Christian inmates to have pastors at theirs.

Or, in a much broader case from 2018, the court upheld former President Donald Trump’s blanket ban of travelers from Muslim-majority countries.

Importantly, the ban was created, as stated by the  then-president himself, as a  ban on Muslims specifically.

Although justified by the court  as a matter of national security, many opponents have claimed that   the case never would  have stood a chance if it were  attempting to ban Christians.

So, where does that leave us today?

Are we any closer to understanding  the limits of religious freedom?

It’s hard to say.

Freedom of  religion is a constitutional right,  but it can’t be enshrined without limits.

If, say, your religious traditions  necessitate killing people,  that conflicts with other people’s rights.

That’s an obvious example, but there are plenty of less obvious ones as we’ve seen.

Throughout history, religious freedom has been used as a tool of oppression, to uphold the rights of some  religions more than others.

But it’s also provided a space for  the articulation of minority rights, making room for more people  to live out their beliefs.

We may not ever get it perfect, but maybe that’s exactly the point.

Keeping a flexible and nuanced  view of religion and the law  lets us hang onto a flexible  and nuanced view of each other.

The second we think we’ve reached a stable answer, we’ve boxed things in.

So maybe the trick is just to keep going.

In our next and last episode,  we’re going to switch  gears a bit and talk about  pop culture and religion.