The Limits of Religious Liberty

‘‘I can’t. It’s against my religion.’’ Americans tend to handle religious objections with care, personally and politically. When a guest says, for example, that he can’t eat the food being served because it’s not kosher or halal, the host usually hastens to find an alternative. And when people resist following a law on the basis of faith, the government and the courts may try to accommodate them. It’s an American legacy that dates back to before the founding, when some of the original colonies were set up as havens for religious dissenters. Under the banner of belief, Quakers and Mennonites in the 18th century won the right not to join state militias. The first conscientious objectors were religious objectors, and from there, the category expanded to include moral opponents of war. The same pattern holds for home-schoolers. It was an Amish father, not a hippie mother, who first got the Supreme Court’s permission to take his children out of school in 1972, based on his religious commitment to ‘‘life aloof from the world,’’ as the justices respectfully put it.