Religious freedom is real and important. It is also being used right now as the legal framework for something that has nothing to do with anyone's freedom to worship. I want to talk about how that shift happened, what it's already doing to real people, and why the institutions waving the religious freedom banner the highest are not the ones you'd want to trust with that much power.
Project 2025 is explicit about this. The document's foreword frames the entire project around securing what it calls "our God-given individual rights," not constitutional rights, not rights granted through democratic process, but rights sourced from a specific religious framework. The document calls for the federal government to "maintain a biblically based" definition of marriage and family. It states that laws protecting LGBTQ people have "disrespected the religious freedom of Christians." It recommends that employers and healthcare providers be permitted to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity if their religious convictions require it. Christian nationalism, the belief that the Bible should function as the basis of law and hold primacy over public institutions, is woven through the document, and its architects have admitted this openly. Russell Vought, now Trump's Office of Management and Budget Director and one of Project 2025's main authors, was secretly recorded in 2024 by undercover journalists telling them, "I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation. And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nationalism. That's pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism." He also said conservatives have "been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we could not argue we are a Christian nation."
This is not abstract. It is already law in a growing number of states. Fourteen states currently permit state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to place children with LGBTQ families, or to deny LGBTQ youth in their care affirming support, on religious grounds, and they keep their government funding while doing it. In 2025 alone, twenty-two states passed new anti-LGBTQ legislation, much of it explicitly built around religious exemptions. Arkansas passed a law creating broad religious exemptions for nondiscrimination protections. Georgia passed a law permitting religious exemptions that can deny housing, healthcare, and equal pay to LGBTQ people. Wyoming passed a law allowing religious exemptions that can deny housing and healthcare to LGBTQ people, on top of six other anti-LGBTQ laws the same year. Louisiana passed a religious exemption law for the explicit purpose of legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people.
Nearly 118,000 children are waiting to be adopted in the United States right now, and religious exemption laws are actively shrinking the pool of qualified families allowed to take them in, not because those families are unfit, but because an agency's religious belief is now legally permitted to outweigh a child's need for a home. A federal court in Philadelphia found exactly this in a case involving Catholic Social Services, ruling there is no religious right to override child welfare placement standards while still collecting taxpayer funds to do the work. That ruling has not stopped the broader legislative push. It has only made clear how aggressively that push continues anyway.
Furthermore, the same Christian institutions being handed expanded legal power to govern who is fit to raise, teach, or care for children are the institutions with the most extensively documented record of child sexual abuse in modern history. Nearly 7,000 credibly accused Catholic clergy in the United States alone. A study of 38,000 personnel files found 4.4% of all Catholic clergy were alleged abusers. Approximately 216,000 victims of French Catholic Church clergy between 1950 and 2020. This is not a tangential detail. This is the institution being granted religious exemption to determine, by law, which families are fit to raise children and which children deserve protection.
Religious freedom, as a constitutional principle, means the government cannot tell you what to believe or force you to practice a religion against your will. What's being built right now is something else entirely: a legal mechanism that allows one specific religious framework to override the rights of everyone who doesn't share it, funded by all of our tax dollars, applied selectively to a population that has done nothing to warrant losing its rights, while the institutions wielding that power face no equivalent scrutiny for their own documented harm to children.
This is not protection. This is a permission structure, and it was built on purpose, by people who said so in their own document, in their own words. Knowing that doesn't make it less infuriating. But it does mean you can see exactly what it is, name it accurately, and refuse to let "religious freedom" do the work of disguising what it actually is.
Happy Pride. Keep showing up anyway.
