Where they stand

Most evangelicals know this year’s presidential election could be a turning point for religious liberty. In a Barna Group survey last year, 67 percent of American evangelicals said the issue would have “a lot” of influence on their pick for president, and in WORLD’s most recent unscientific survey about the 2016 campaign, evangelical leaders named domestic religious freedom as the most important issue, above Supreme Court nominations and abortion. (International religious freedom, on the other hand, was near the bottom of the leaders’ list.)

Yet, to voters more broadly, religious freedom hasn’t been a priority. The Barna poll found that just 28 percent of all adults considered the issue important, and religious liberty hasn’t appeared in other polls from Pew or Gallup. Candidates haven’t discussed it much, either.

“I think that says more about the voting public than anything,” said Faith McDonnell, the director of religious liberty programs at the Institute on Religion & Democracy. “This is not an issue that people are that interested in, unfortunately.”

Regardless of whether most voters care, the next president will make important decisions affecting domestic and international religious freedom. The government is still working out how to treat those who conscientiously object to the new federal definition of marriage—a same-sex-inclusive definition that, practically speaking, is unlikely to change even if a Republican wins the White House. Other questions: Will faith-based organizations have access to the same government benefits as other groups? How will any plans to change or replace Obamacare respect conscience? Will the next president continue the government’s current contraceptive and abortifacient mandate, which many religious organizations object to on conscience grounds? Also, some of the biggest decisions affecting domestic religious liberty in the past decade have come from the courts: The next president will appoint federal judges and quite likely at least one Supreme Court justice.

Internationally, the new administration will determine the government’s priority for defending persecuted religious minorities around the world, including Yazidis in Iraq and Christians in Iran and elsewhere. President Obama’s State Department has emphasized LGBT rights abroad more than religious rights.

Where do the candidates stand? Republican front-runner Donald Trump holds contradictory positions on domestic religious freedom. While in one breath Trump says he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act—to prohibit discrimination against individuals over their belief in heterosexual marriage—in another breath he says he would advance rights for gays and lesbians, and in yet another that Kentucky clerk Kim Davis should have issued gay marriage licenses over her conscience objections. Trump has also said he would have the government register all Muslims in a national database.

The other leading GOP contender, Sen. Ted Cruz, has expressed support for the First Amendment Defense Act, and he discusses both domestic and international religious liberty as a priority. He recently set up a religious liberty advisory committee. Many on Cruz’s religious liberty committee are pastors and professors from Christian colleges; few have government experience, and his committee lacks top legal experts on religious liberty. But it includes notables like the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, and Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper.

Neither former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nor Sen. Bernie Sanders has a religious liberty advisory team. Clinton and Sanders both have called state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the current legal standard for religious liberty disputes) discriminatory to gay people. Internationally, however, Clinton called for the government to apply the “genocide” label to the Islamic State’s extermination of Christians in the Middle East months before the Obama administration finally agreed to. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the administration's decision on March 17.

The lack of discussion of specific religious liberty issues in the campaign is “disappointing,” said Stanley Carlson-Thies, the head of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance. Carlson-Thies worked to establish George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives when he first became president, and later was an adviser to the office under Obama.

Republicans are struggling with how to address religious freedom when it is “so tied up in your view of sexuality,” he said. “It’s easier to just shut up … about those topics than say something.” And Democrats are ignoring “people of faith who don’t express their faith in explicitly progressive categories.” The bottom line, according to Carlson-Thies: For the American public, religious freedom has “gotten caught up in the same polarized thinking as everything else.”

This WORLD Magazine article has been edited to reflect Secretary of State John Kerry’s decision to label the Islamic State’s extermination of Christians in the Middle East as “genocide.” Kerry’s announcement came after the April 2 issue went to press.