The state of religious liberty in the states

As we continue to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, today marks yet another milestone. The fifth edition of the Religious Liberty in the States (RLS) report, released on Monday, shows mixed results on the current condition of federalism and the role of states in protecting religious liberty.

Reflecting on the bicentennial of the drafting of the American Constitution in 1987, legal scholar Gregory Howard Williams observed: “Too often when considering questions of individual rights, we have overlooked the true thrust of federalism. Federalism requires that protection of individual rights be both a federal and state governmental responsibility. We have tended to look almost exclusively to the federal government for the protection of our rights. However, in doing so we have failed to fully explore the states’ role in protecting its citizenry.”

If we compare federalism in the Founding Era with that of today, it is worth considering whether Williams’s contention concerning federalism still applies and, indeed, whether it ever did.

During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, the antifederalists worried about the centralization of power in the federal government. One antifederalist, writing under the name Brutus, envisioned a kind of zero-sum opposition between the states and federal government, arguing that “the tendency of the constitution” itself was “an entire subversion of the legislative, executive and judicial powers of the individual states.”

While such suspicion of the national government has been borne out in particular cases in the intervening centuries, the evidence of history and of the last five years of the RLS project demonstrates there is still a significant role for state governments in safeguarding religious liberty.

Indeed, there are many areas in which states have acted to protect religious liberty and free exercise beyond the protections codified in federal law and upheld in federal courts. In this fifth iteration of the RLS, more protections than ever have been identified and integrated into the report’s findings. When the project first began in 2022, the index tracked 29 distinct protections for free exercise that were codified into law at the state level. This year, the project tracks 50 different ways, organized into 20 categories called safeguards, in which states have acted to protect religious liberty.

Undoubtedly the single most important protection measured by the project is state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). After the 1997 Supreme Court decision in City of Boerne v. Flores limited the scope of the federal RFRA, it became necessary to pass similar laws in each state to extend these important protections. To date, only 30 of the 50 states have RFRA laws on the books, with Georgia and Wyoming being the most recent to add them in 2025.

This year also marks the first year that Arkansas tops the rankings. Arkansas includes over 89 percent of the protections tracked in this year’s index. It is also, along with neighboring Tennessee, one of only two states to include more than 80 percent of protections and to be rated as “excellent” by the project.

The news is not all rosy, however, as we look at the state of religious liberty at the semiquincentennial of the nation. Most states continue to lag, with some claiming less than 40 percent of the protections measured by the project. West Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, and New York bring up the rear, each scoring at 30 percent or under.

As the report indicates, though, there are positive trends as many states have taken action to increase their protections. Top-ranked Arkansas, for instance, achieved its status in part by passing a law in 2025 that provides significant protections for individuals and institutions from being coerced into participation in wedding ceremonies that would violate their religious convictions. Arkansas now joins Mississippi, which is ranked sixth in 2026, as the only two states that have these robust protections for religious liberty in the marketplace.

This kind of emulation has the potential to become a virtuous cycle as states learn from what has worked well in other states, adapt the protections for their state and particular contexts, and become more active in protecting and promoting the free-exercise rights of their residents. There remains room for improvement for all states. Let’s hope that the Religious Liberty in the States project will help encourage such gains as we work to protect both religious liberty and federalism for another 250 years.