Chelsea Langston Bombino, January 19, 2017

Should we give up on the language of “religious freedom” and find new ways of talking about, and advocating for, this most foundational of human rights? Advocates of religious freedom unwilling to abandon a phrase that has become associated with bigotry, intolerance and even hatred have their work cut out for them. Yet for many advocates of religious freedom, wholesale abandonment of language that encapsulates an ideal is inseparable from what it means to be human is not an option.

This means, in both principle and practice, the concept “religious freedom” must be re-appropriated. A re-appropriated word is, by definition, “a word that was at one time pejorative but has been brought back into acceptable usage.” Contemporary examples of linguistic re-appropriation often refer to marginalized groups in their expressions of human sexuality or gender variance- reclaiming words that once were meant as derogatory slurs. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals recently took up a case involving a group trying to reclaim a racial slur. The U.S Patent and Trademark Office had denied a band’s efforts to trademark their name: “When the Portland-based Asian-American band chose to call themselves The Slants, they called it re-appropriation. The federal government called it a racial slur.” The court is now wrestling with the difference.

It must be noted at the outset that many of those advocating to re-appropriate religious freedom have not faced the systemic oppression of many other groups who have sought to reclaim once pejorative labels, including racial and sexual minorities and those with disabilities. Yet efforts to reclaim religious freedom from associations with bigotry are essential for the future of this Constitutional cornerstone.

What will it take for religious freedom to come full circle in the public perception of many from a placeholder for prejudice to a positive public good?

First, those advocating for religious freedom must take some responsibility for the state of affairs in which religious freedom finds itself today. This is a difficult task for people who more often than not have genuinely good intentions to advance freedom of faith and conscience for themselves and others. Yet to change public perceptions and re-appropriate religious freedom as a social good, religious freedom advocates must do the hard work of first taking the plank out of our own eyes.

Too often, religious freedom advocates who profess to advocate for religious freedom for all do not have the religious literacy or cultural competency to understand what advocating for religious freedom for everyone may actually entails. In a recent article in Vox, Alan Levinovitz argues: “True religious literacy requires engagement with the enormous variety of beliefs, practices, and motivations found in different religious traditions, and, for that matter, within a single tradition, or even a single church.” Religious literacy is a prerequisite for deep and substantive advocacy for religious freedom for the other, then.

It may be easy for a white evangelical Christian to understand the nuances of why evangelical nonprofits they are familiar with need the freedom to employ people who adhere to evangelical ethics and principles. It is easy to advocate for your own freedom to practice your faith and for others to practice your faith, because the faith is familiar to you. You understand, for example, how something that might appear to be unrelated to religion is, in fact, core to the embodiment of faithful practice. Yet for white evangelicals to fully advance religious freedom for individuals and groups unlike themselves, they must engage others seriously with this question: “What do you need to fully live out how your faith calls you to live?” The answers to this question will look starkly different for the Lakota Sioux, for the Sikh in the military, for the Muslim school teacher, and for the African American engaging in a protest.

There is some truth to the perception that the space of religious freedom advocacy in the United States is disproportionately filled with older, white, conservative, Christian men. It is also true that many of these advocates have done amazing work to advance religious freedom not just for their own narrow interests, but to advocate for the same for their very different neighbors. But because of the persisting perception that those who have traditionally occupied positions of power in the religious freedom advocacy world are not adequately diverse, extra efforts need to be made to build meaningful relationships with people and institutions of faith from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds.

These relationships, when developed authentically and not instrumentally, across theological, racial and generational differences, will equip new leaders to advocate for religious freedom in new ways. They will also equip established leaders to better understand the depth and breadth of religious freedom needed to protect the full spectrum of embodied religious diversity in our pluralist society.

So what steps should people and organizations who care about religious freedom should take, whether they currently feel empowered or currently feel left out? We must start conversations with our very different neighbors, not with some policy goal or photo-op in mind, but because we should be seeking out meaningful relationships with people of all faiths, or no faith, across difference. Loving our civic neighbor cannot just be done through mutual service and in private spaces, though.

Citizenship requires we think about the structures that advance or create barriers to the fulfillment of justice for all, of religious freedom for all. Relationships built on love of our civic neighbors across difference can birth partnerships built not on uniform religious or ideological agreement, but on the shared belief that religious freedom gives us all the right to disagree, and live out our dissenting beliefs through distinctive acts of faith, both in the privacy of our homes and in the public square. Religious freedom re-appropriated requires nothing less than the religious responsibility to love our very different neighbors as ourselves, through our individual and organizational practices, through public policy, and through our public witness.