President Trump came to the National Prayer Breakfast last week with cheering words about religious liberty. Together with his picks of Vice President Mike Pence and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, he has made strong inroads among Christian conservatives.

But Trump needs to deepen his knowledge and broaden his interest in religious liberty.

When he talks about religious liberty, he almost always brings up the sole issue of the Johnson Amendment.

The Johnson Amendment is a 1954 law that prohibits religious organizations from participating in "any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office." Trump wants to scrap that, and congressional Republicans have a bill to do it.

Great. Freedom of speech is crucial. Passing and signing the Free Speech Fairness Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Jim Lankford to repeal the Johnson Act, would be great.

But Trump needs to look wider at religious liberty, which was for years under attack by President Obama, and recognize that it is a far-reaching matter of conscience that extends to all manner of issues at the nexus of public and private life.

St. Augustine once wrote of a hypothetical man sentenced to death. "What does it really matter to a man whose days are numbered what government he must obey," Augustine asked, "so long as he is not compelled to act against God or his conscience?"

This is where the crisis is for the faithful in America today. Trump owes it to the religious conservatives who elected him to enter this fight.

The Obama administration tried to force Hobby Lobby's owners to pay for employees' morning-after birth control, which may function as abortifacients. They also fought the Little Sisters of the Poor to force the nuns to pay for birth control for convent staff. Obama's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has gone after a Catholic School that fired a gay teacher after he married another man.

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Recently the ACLU sued Catholic hospitals in an effort to force them to perform abortions.

Wedding photographers, bakers and florists have all come under fire by state governments for not facilitating gay weddings.

These are cases where people were forced to choose between the law and a conscientious wish to follow the precepts of their faith. The Obama administration proposed the novel view that First Amendment protections of a person's free exercise of religion ceased the moment he or she entered into commerce.

Obama went out of his way to restrict the First Amendment, speaking regularly of the "freedom of worship," rather than to what the amendment actually refers to, which is the "free exercise of religion." In other words, he tried to pen religious liberty in so it could be exercised only on the Sabbath.

These are the threats to religious liberty that Trump needs to assault first. He needs to protect the conscience rights of believers.

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In a marked departure from the previous administration, the Trump State Department announced a wait-and-see approach in response to a controversial Israeli settlement bill Monday.

"We are aware that the Knesset passed legislation relating to Israeli homes in the West Bank built on private Palestinian land," America's diplomatic arm said in a statement.

"We understand that according to Israeli law this legislation could face a number of legal challenges because, among other reasons, this is the first time since 1967 that Israeli civil law is being applied directly to the West Bank, and that Israel's Attorney General has stated publicly that he will not defend it in court.

02/07/17 12:04 AM

He could start by making it clear that the Obama administration's view of the First Amendment was pusillanimous and he does not accept it. The freedom of worship is just a small part of the free exercise of religion.

Trump has a good role model in Judge Neil Gorsuch, his nominee for Supreme Court. In one of his many rulings, Gorsuch quoted court precedent to say, "The 'exercise of religion' often involves not only belief and profession but the performance of (or abstention from) physical acts."

Importantly, Gorsuch's rulings don't only include Christians, but also have covered Muslims and Native Americans.

Trump could also get to work undoing Obama's birth control mandate, a gratuitous culture-war assault on conscience. The president could make it clear across the executive branch that holding a traditional view of marriage is not bigotry, and those who hold these views thus don't deserve government prosecution or persecution.

Fights over the Johnson Amendment are worthwhile, but secondary, because politics are secondary. For the religious, the things of the world are nothing compared to the eternal. That means the most important thing Trump can do for those millions of Americans for who religious faith is pre-eminently important, is to make sure government isn't coercing them to do what God forbids.

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President Trump is still popular in core Republican strongholds.

02/07/17 12:06 AM

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How Trump can shore up the First Amendment - Washington Examiner