It’s common for the religious right, people like my own representative in the House of Representatives, Mike Simpson (R-ID2) to make claims like:

I am deeply concerned about the recent trend toward judicial attacks on our religious freedoms. The freedom of religion that America’s early immigrants sought—and which the Constitution recognizes as an essential element of liberty–has become a misguided judicial imperative to ensure freedom from religion. The need for a separation of church and state meant something very different and specific when the Constitution was drafted, during an age of monarchs who asserted heavenly authority. Recent attempts to undermine our freedom of worship in the name of “political correctness” are a direct attack on the values and liberties for which our forefathers fought and died.

Freedom from religion is ensuring that the government stays completely out of the business of religion. This would include government officials not using their public office to push a religious agenda, public schools not pushing religion or religious practices (like prayer) on students, not allowing religious symbols on government property like courthouses, keeping laws based on purely secular motives, and keeping worship out of government proceedings like city counsels. Freedom from religion makes all citizens equal regardless of religious beliefs or the lack thereof.

Freedom of religion allows all people to practice their religion and hold their own private religious views free of government interference or coercion. As such Christians, Muslims, Wiccans, and everybody else are free to practice their own religion and the government can’t force Christianity on Muslims or vice versa.

The First Amendment is where the Constitutional protections of religious liberty can be found in the form of the establishment and free exercise clauses:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

The establishment clause protects the freedom from religion, while the free exercise clause protects the freedom of religion. Unfortunately the religious right ignores former while focusing in solely on the latter.

What would a world of freedom of religion (free exercise) with no freedom from religion (no establishment) look like, at least the way the religious right wants it?

• Mormons in Utah and Eastern Idaho would be free to put images of the angel Macaroni, uh I mean Maroni, in courthouses and schools since that could be the judge, principal, teacher, or school board’s free exercise.
• Public schools in highly Hispanic (also highly Catholic) areas of California would be free to give a priest an office and allow students who break the rules go to the priest for confession instead of the principal’s office, since that would be their free exercise.
• Dearborn, MI’s mayor could call on all citizens to fast during Ramadan and their school cafeteria could close during that month, since the staff would just be exercising their religion.
• City counsels in heavily protestant areas could invoke their lord and savior to guide them in the meetings, in heavily Catholic areas they could invoke their town’s patron saint, in heavily Muslim areas they could pass only resolutions which are in line with the teaching of the Qu’ran, and in heavily Jewish areas they could start with a reading of the Torah.

It would be a wonderful place for everybody who’s part of the local majority religion, but for everybody else, it would be nothing short of shitty. The non-Catholic students who would face suspension while their Catholic classmates get away with saying a few Hail Marys, the non-Muslim students who wouldn’t get lunch during Ramadan, and Baptist who have to sit through the invocation of a saint would all be justified in feeling excluded and unfairly treated because they’re being subjected to somebody else’s religion all in the name of “free exercise.”

For all to be free to practice their religion the state has to stay out of all matters of religion, which means that all public bodies and institutions must be barred from expressing any religious sentiment or preference even if it’s the “free exercise” of every official in that institution.

There can be no freedom of religion without the freedom from religion because any endorsement or preference of one religion over another or religion over non-religion infringes on the rights of who ever is on the losing side.

Simply put, the freedom from religion protects religious minorities from the tyranny of the majority’s freedom of religion.