In the America that Donald Trump built, and the Supreme Court has blessed, religious belief is no longer a personal right. It is a bludgeon. It is a cloak used to shield cruelty. It is a sword drawn against anyone who fails to conform to White Christian power.
Religious liberty was never meant to be an all-access pass to ignore civil rights. But today, that is exactly what it has become. In the hands of the MAGA faithful, it has been weaponized into something grotesque: a legal justification to discriminate, to humiliate, to segregate, and to undo generations of progress.
And the Supreme Court has become active co-conspirators in this betrayal.
The new doctrine is simple: if your god tells you to hate someone, the government will let you do it. If your church whispers that gay people are unclean, or that transgender people are a threat to children, or that books telling the truth about racism will infect young minds, then your conscience is now legally protected.
No civil rights statute will get in your way. The result is not liberty. This is state-sanctioned oppression in the language of piety. And it has spread across the American landscape like fire.
BIGOTRY IN THE VESTMENTS
When a baker refuses to serve a gay couple, we are told it is “a deeply held religious belief.” When a web designer announces she will never create a wedding site for same-sex couples, the court calls it “free expression.” When schools strip away LGBTQ books, erases Black history, or fire trans educators, we are told it is about “protecting children.”
But the language is camouflage. The intent is domination. And the consequences are brutal.
Where is the limit? There is none. If denying civil service to LGBTQ citizens is a religious right, then so is denying Muslims, Jews, atheists, liberals, teachers, immigrants, the disabled, or anyone deemed “ungodly.” That is not a slippery slope. It is the bottom of the hill, and we are already there.
The lie at the center of this movement is that Christians are under attack. But look at who is doing the suing, the censoring, the punishing, and the governing. White Christian Nationalists have commandeered public policy, school boards, libraries, courthouses, and legislatures. They are not defending themselves, they are enforcing their dominance. And when they are challenged, they cry persecution. It is gaslighting on a national scale.
FAITH AS AN EXEMPTION, BUT ONLY FOR SOME
If a MAGA supporter can cite religion to deny LGBTQ service, why can’t I cite my religion to refuse doing business with Trump voters? If their god excuses them from participation in a multiracial democracy, why doesn’t mine excuse me from funding White rural families I’ll never meet, whose politics work to erase my personal rights?
I am not a parent. I am not a rural dweller. I do not support this president. Why should I be required to subsidize federal handouts to school districts that ban books, or hospitals that refuse gender-affirming care, or police departments that act as racial militias? Or fund military aid to governments that are committing genocide?
If your religion gives you a pass to deny me civil equality, why doesn’t my faction of Christianity give me the right to disengage from your empire of hate?
I reject theocracy. My faith rejects kings. My moral code forbids association with cruelty, propaganda, and cults of authoritarian power.
So why am I compelled to pay taxes that fund Trump’s oligarch benefactors, MAGA’s surveillance state, ICE raids, or billion-dollar bailouts for red state disaster zones built on climate denial and God slogans?
If one group’s beliefs are grounds for exemption, then all beliefs must be or none are. The law cannot function if it bends to every whisper of someone claiming divine command. That is not democracy. That is clerical anarchy, in which the loudest prophet wins and the Constitution serves at the leisure of scripture.
THE COST OF SUBMISSION
What is being sold to the public as “freedom of religion” is nothing more than court-endorsed favoritism. It is not even subtle. When conservative Christians win exemptions, it is hailed as liberty. When liberal faith traditions seek recognition, they are ignored or ridiculed. If a Black pastor says White Supremacy is sin, he is lectured about unity. But if a White megachurch pastor says drag queens are demonic, his words become policy.
This asymmetry is not accidental. It is judicial design. This Supreme Court has chosen sides, not between religion and secularism, but between the powerful and the marginalized. It is not protecting conscience. It is empowering bigotry.
Decisions by the Supreme Court in recent years have gutted the intent of the First Amendment. Rather than ensuring government neutrality toward religion, they are constructing a new establishment. It is one where the state defers to evangelical Christianity as the moral arbiter of American life.
And those of us outside that fold? We are expected to pay for it, obey it, and never speak against it.
We are being told to worship at an altar we did not choose. Every tax dollar we pay is funneled into a government that now openly sides with Christian Nationalists who demand obedience, not coexistence. Every public institution they capture becomes another tool to enforce submission — to Trump, to Whiteness, to patriarchy, to state-imposed religion disguised as “values.”
This is not religious freedom. It is forced piety under threat of exclusion. And if we object, we are the ones labeled intolerant. That is the game: They use freedom as a battering ram, and when we defend ourselves, they cry victim.
Make no mistake, this movement is not organic. It is political, funded, and deliberate. Conservative legal foundations have spent decades grooming cases to rise through the judiciary, waiting for a court stacked with ideologues. Now, with a hard-right majority on the bench, they have everything they need to rewrite the First Amendment into a permission slip for cultural warfare. And that warfare is already being waged in classrooms, libraries, hospitals, courtrooms, and public life.
You want to live free in America? Then conform. Or leave.
That is the message. But we are not leaving. And we are not going to let this twisted version of religious liberty go unchallenged. Because if their beliefs allow them to deny our existence, then our beliefs must empower us to resist theirs. Otherwise, the law is not equal. It is just another sermon in disguise.
EQUAL DOES NOT MEAN COMFORTABLE
White conservatives often mistake discomfort for oppression. The moment they are asked to share power, or even tolerate the presence of others, they claim victimhood. The myth of America has always told them that they are the default race. And so any challenge to that, even one grounded in law, feels like persecution.
But equal treatment is not persecution. Being asked to follow the same rules as everyone else is not tyranny. And being required to serve someone you dislike, when you open a public business, is not a violation of conscience. It is the price of living in a pluralistic society.
If that is too high a price, then close your business. Sell to only your church. Worship in private. But the moment you enter public commerce, you are subject to civil law. That includes nondiscrimination. That includes equality. That includes dignity for every person, not just the ones who pray like you to an orange idol.
This was once a settled principle in America. But now, under a regime that values ideological loyalty over constitutional consistency, it is being dismantled piece by piece.
FREEDOM IS NOT THE RIGHT TO HATE
There is no religious liberty when one group’s faith overrides another’s humanity. There is no freedom when belief becomes a license to harm. There is no democracy when the courts privilege a single religion while criminalizing dissent.
And there is no future worth living in if the law can be bypassed every time someone cries “Jesus.”
We must stop pretending that this is a respectful disagreement. It is not. It is an authoritarian movement using religion as camouflage. It is theocratic fascism, dressed up in flag pins and Supreme Court citations.
It is not about God. It is about power. And they are willing to burn every institution to the ground to preserve it.
We should be honest. We should stop giving these rulings the benefit of the doubt. We should stop pretending that faith, in this context, is anything other than a shield for cruelty. And We should stop compromising with people who want us gone.
This is not religious liberty, it is state-sponsored bigotry. And such preferential exclusions are not the property of Trump’s cult members, who believe it belongs exclusively to them.
If they are allowed to define freedom as the right to hate, to refuse service, to erase identities, to rewrite reality, then we are already standing in the grave of American democracy.
We will not just lose rights, we will lose the very idea that rights exist at all.
© Art
Isaac Trevik
