Relearning Religious Tolerance Requires Restoring the Constitutional Order

In the past few years, the Supreme Court has seen a flurry of rulings on issues of religious freedom, concerning whether religious schools can receive federal funds, whether bakers can decline to design cakes for gay weddings, whether a Catholic adoption agency can insist on only placing children with heterosexual couples, and most recently whether states can restrict attendance at houses of worship to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Underlying all these cases, writes Adam White, is a conflict between two opposing views of religious tolerance. One was summed up by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her final dissent, in the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor—a group of nuns who wished to avoid paying for their employees’ contraception: