By Matthew Brown / Deseret News
This is an abbreviated version of the story. For the full story, click here.
Baptists have long been the dominant Protestant faith in America. The church’s more prominent forbears are credited with championing the ideal of religious freedom that would later be enshrined in the First Amendment’s religious protections.
That legacy of persecution and defending religious freedom is ingrained in most followers of the faith, who call it “soul freedom.” And it’s a big reason the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty was founded 80 years ago to provide “reliable leadership on church-state issues as it leads coalitions of groups striving to protect both the free exercise of religion and to defend against its establishment by government,” according to its website. …
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Deseret News: What have been the top three precedent-setting religious liberty cases/events in your careers?
Brent Walker: Taking them together, I would first point to RFRA and RLUIPA. Those protections for religious liberty, in the aftermath of the 1990 Native American peyote decision that gutted the (First Amendment’s) Free Exercise Clause of any meaningful protection, have proven to be invaluable. …
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Amanda Tyler: My BJC career has been much shorter than Brent’s, but I am most proud of the work we did on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000 when I was first on staff. Passed without a dissenting vote, RLUIPA remains an important tool to protect against encroachment by the government on the free exercise of religion in two narrow areas. Just recently, a judge ruled that a New Jersey town violated RLUIPA when its planning board treated a mosque’s application differently than applications from churches and synagogues. …
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