This week marked a rather symbolic anniversary for my national “On Religion” column, which I have been writing now for (#GULP) a third of a century.

As you would imagine, I spend some time thinking about the subject for this week’s column: “Why 'religious liberty' has ended up inside quotation marks.” This column was also the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Anyone who has followed my work with GetReligion and “On Religion” will not be surprised that I chose to write about the First Amendment and and a highly symbolic religious liberty case (no scare quotes there) at the U.S. Supreme Court.

But hold that thought. I’d like to walk through what are, for me, four symbolic columns I have written in the past, as I head into year No. 34.

That first column in 1988 was rather newsy: “Pat Robertson, evangelicals and the White House.” Here’s the lede on that:

On the morning before Easter, Pat Robertson stood in a pulpit under an American flag and a banner that read, "King of Kings, Lord of Lords."

Alas, change the name of the candidate and that still sounds rather relevant, considering the state of warfare inside American evangelicalism these days (see this must-read Richard Ostling post).

On the 10th anniversary of the column — that seemed like a long time, back then — I focused on a classic book by sociologist James Davison Hunter (“Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America”) that has greatly influenced my work as a journalist and as a professor. The column opened by describing an interesting trend at political and religious rallies at that time:

I kept seeing a fascinating cast of characters at events centering on faith, politics and morality. A pro-life rally, for example, would feature a Baptist, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox rabbi and a cluster of conservative Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans. Then, the pro-choice counter-rally would feature a "moderate" Baptist, a Catholic activist or two, a Reform rabbi and mainline Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans.

This led to Hunter’s observation that, in courtroom battles over religious liberty, he was seeing a “fundamental realignment in American religious pluralism."

Here is a long passage describing his thesis. Again, I don’t think there is a single word in this that I would need to change today:

The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority. …

Hunter began writing "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," in which he declared that America now contains two basic worldviews, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."

That's what I was seeing at all of those rallies and marches. And that's why, whenever I covered separate meetings of Catholics, Jews, Baptists, Episcopalians or whatever, I almost always found two distinct camps of people fighting about the same subjects. …

Ask any big question and this issue looms in the background. Is the Bible an infallible source of truth? Is papal authority unique? Do women and men have God-given roles in the home and the church? Can centuries of Jewish traditions survive in the modern world? Can marriage be redefined? Is abortion wrong? Can traditionalists proclaim that sex outside of marriage is sin? Are heaven and hell real? Do all religious roads lead to the same end? Is there one God, or many? What is his or her name or names?

A decade of so later, I began asking myself: What are the odds that I can keep writing this column for 25 years, for a quarter of a century?

Soon after I passed that hurdle, the news broke that the Scripps Howard News Service — which began syndicating my column while I worked at The Rocky Mountain News — would be closing.

I assumed that this would be the end. Thus, I wrote a kind of farewell column about a question that religion-beat pros (and other journalists) get asked all the time:

Who is the most remarkable person you've met while covering religion? That's a tough one. The Rev. Billy Graham or novelist Madeleine L'Engle? Who was the more charismatic positive thinker, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale or actor Denzel Washington? What was more amazing, seeing Chuck Colson preach inside a prison on Easter or Bono lead a Bible-study group at the U.S. Capitol?

I went with a press-conference encounter with Mother Teresa, which was followed by a short interview that ended up making headlines (creating a first-person narrative that was awkward, to say the least). Click here for that column: “Eye to eye with Mother Teresa (farewell to Scripps Howard).”

And that brings us up to 2022, and my column about the recent SCOTUS decision about the rights of prisoners to have chaplains audibly prayer for them, and even perform Last Rites (or lay hands on them), at the time of executions.

What was unusual, in this case, was the praise — from left and right — that greeted this decision and the celebratory nature of the press coverage (totally valid, in my opinion). Thus, I wrote:

This was a rare moment in which activists on both sides of America's culture wars cheered for "religious liberty" - a freedom that until recently didn't require cynical "scare quotes" that suggest uncertainty.

This trend in First Amendment discourse has, for me, become the most important story I have covered during the third of a century - as of this week - in which I have written this national "On Religion" column.

The big question: Why did appeals to centuries of tradition work this time?

Later, there was this:

Unity of this kind was common as recently as the 1990s and the landmark 97-3 U.S. Senate vote backing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

But church-state activists now find it much easier to agree when affirming the First Amendment claims of prisoners than those of religious believers — think bakers, photographers and florists — hesitant to affirm, with words and deeds, the doctrines of the Sexual Revolution.

During the podcast, we discussed a fascinating MSNBC commentary by Jessica Levinson that offered a dissent from the progressive (I hesitate to say “liberal”) side of American political culture: “How a correct ruling from the Supreme Court might be used to take America backwards.” Here are two key passages:

Ramirez’s case followed a duo of seemingly inconsistent rulings by the court in 2019 regarding the rights of death row inmates to have access to their spiritual advisers in the death chamber. …

One way to square these rulings is to conclude that the court is concerned about the rights of some religious objectors but not all religious objectors. Another is that the court was simply correcting an incorrect decision. In any case, most signs point to this being a court that will continue to be protective of the rights of religious objectors, even when those objectors are some of the most heinous actors in our society.

Whoa. Say what? What kind of “heinous actors”?

Here we have eight members of the court who believed that Ramirez demonstrated he had sincerely held religious beliefs that should likely lead to Texas providing him with an accommodation, despite some of the justices’ initial concerns about the consequences of ruling in favor of Ramirez.

If the court will give credence to the beliefs of a death row inmate, it is easy to imagine how protective it would be of a law-abiding baker who doesn’t want to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. 

Once again, there is good religion and then there is bad religion. Thus, there is religious liberty and there is bad “religious liberty.”

Just saying (for 33 years or so).

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