The Advocate

The DOJ Just Rewrote Its Religious Liberty Rulebook. Here Is What Actually Changed.

Begin with what the memo did not do, because that is where both the celebration and the panic live. It did not create a single new right. It did not overturn anything. No court is bound by a word of it.

And yet the guidance Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued on July 23 may shape more ordinary religious lives than most Supreme Court rulings do, because it tells every federal agency how to behave before anyone ever gets to court.

The Department of Justice describes the document as the first revision of its Religious Liberty Guidelines since 2017. Nine years is a long time in this area of law. In that span the Supreme Court decided a run of cases on church autonomy, equal access to public funds, and parental rights, and the old guidance simply predated them.

So what does it mean when the federal government's own lawyers tell the federal government what religious liberty now requires of it? The answer is more interesting, and more double-edged, than the headlines suggest.

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.

Engraving of a gavel at rest on its block beside a bound volume of case reports and a furled document tied with a crimson ribbon.

A Texas Judge Just Declined to Take the Posters Down. He Did Not Say They Were Lawful.

A denied temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. The hearing that matters is August 17, and the standard at stake is one Texas Christians wrote for themselves.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

The July 30 order protecting four orders of Catholic nuns was entered by consent. That distinction is the whole story.

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