On July 19, 2024, the Religious Liberty in the States (RLS) project released its third annual report measuring how well the 50 states protect crucial dimensions of individual and institutional religious freedom. In what will likely be a surprise to many, the report ranks the state of Illinois as most protective (Florida and Montana are next) and West Virginia as the least (Alaska and California are nearly as deficient). That counterintuitive ranking, if nothing else, should encourage advocates, citizens, policymakers, and reporters to visit the project website for the downloadable brief 2024 report and the extensive web-based resources detailing the rankings, the 39 distinct types of religious freedom that have been measured, and the report’s methodology. The data reveal significant improvements in Florida and Montana, and although West Virginia remains at the bottom, it has made notable gains in religious freedom. However, the 2024 report shows that most states have enacted less than half of the possible protections available to them.
As the report notes, laws that restrict or protect religious freedom are adopted at the state and not only at the federal level. Thus, to know how well the religious freedom of people and organizations is being protected, it is essential to look closely at state policies and not only action at the federal level. Often, persons and organizations are subject to both federal and state requirements; in other policy areas, states have the primary jurisdiction. (And states determine what cities and counties may do.) However, before the Religious Liberty in the States reports began in 2022, no overview of state religious freedom provisions and trends was available. Religious Liberty in the States is a project of the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy and the First Liberty Institute.
The RLS annual reports assess how well states do on a range of important religious freedom protections, with the intent not only to measure the degree of protection in a state but also thereby to identify what each state can do to increase its protection. The web-based complete report links to the actual statutes so that policymakers, citizens, and advocates can easily determine what legislation a state can adopt in order to increase the protection it provides.
The reports document religious freedom protections ranging from the presence or absence of a state Religious Freedom Protection Act and various specific protections for health care facilities and professionals, to laws ensuring that voters unable for religious reasons to vote on election day can vote at another time and that, in a pandemic, houses of worship will not be closed if similarly situated other entities are allowed to be open. The reports also note which states include religious exemptions when insurance plans generally are required to cover contraceptives, abortion, and sterilization (most states have such exemptions) and which states protect wedding-services businesses from needing to facilitate weddings that conflict with their religious convictions (only one: Mississippi). Other important protections are also documented. The reports take account of two kinds of protection: the instances when a law requires or prohibits some action but also includes a religious exemption, and those instances when, on the same matter, there is no law in a state and thus no need for an exemption.
Each year the RLS reports have added new areas of religious-freedom restriction and protection. Still, additional research is needed. For instance, the reports do not show which states have adopted laws protecting the freedom of student organizations on public higher education campuses to use religious criteria in selecting their leaders. The 2024 report invites readers to provide feedback and to suggest additional issues to explore.
The Religious Liberty in the States reports have quickly become a vital resource, adding an important body of information to reports on religious freedom at the federal level issued by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Napa Institute Legal Foundation in 2023 issued a valuable report on state-level protections for faith-based nonprofit organizations. The First Amendment Partnership, a multi-faith alliance, advocates in states on a bipartisan basis for additional religious freedom protections, and its website includes information on some of those protections. Coming from a different angle, the Movement Advancement Project, which advocates for LGBTQ+ legal affirmation, notes religious freedom protections in its overviews of state policies against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.
What about that top score for Illinois? Check the detailed information on the RLS website to see the many religious freedom protections that Illinois has enacted. And then recall that a political jurisdiction may exhibit much social opposition to the views and practices of a religious community, and it may have adopted many laws that encode requirements that conflict with the beliefs of that community—and yet, if those laws include exemptions that allow the community to exercise its religion, that will be a political unit that well protects religious freedom. The members of the religious community may feel much opposition and yet be free, if they are bold, to live out their faith.
Stanley Carlson-Thies is the Founder and Senior Director of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance (IRFA), a program of the Center for Public Justice.
