What Is Kinsley so Worried About?

Michael Kinsley’s recent Bloomberg View column, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer as “Bishops are not exactly oppressed” (Nov. 23), makes a number of basic mistakes concerning law as it relates to religious freedom that we, as lawyers and law professors, wish to correct.

Kinsley begins by usefully calling attention to the recent warnings by Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia that there is a drive by some to marginalize religion. Honest observers can no longer blink what Dolan, Chaput, and other religious voices have warned against for years: our law and culture are increasingly hostile to the possibility of living out one’s faith. Civil authority is finding more and more excuses to interfere in the life of believing communities.