Religious Liberty Ft. Ian Huyett

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My name is Belushi Prevalon, coming to you from the Boston area. And right now, you are listening to Trueology, the study of the truth as it is in Jesus.

Welcome to Trueology. My name is Belushi Prevalon, and I appreciate you all for tuning in. And today's conversation is going to be quite a big one.

We really need to have this discussion because it's important to all our lives. Because in an age where free speech is increasingly being contested and Christian convictions are often treated as threats, believers are really being forced to ask hard questions about how and whether we're still allowed to live out our faith openly and in the public square.

From government pressure to cultural hostility, the challenges facing Christians today, they're not just abstract.

They're really legal, institutional even, and deeply personal, especially here in the

Northeast. And if you're from around here, you know exactly how that can be with the mass amount of liberals that conservatives are usually surrounded by.

So that's why tonight our conversation really matters. I'm joined today by Ian Hewitt, Associate Director and Head of Litigation at Cornerstone, an organization that is at the front line of really defending religious liberty and free speech for Christians across the country.

So together we're going to be talking about the current landscape of religious freedom, how

Christians should really think about public engagement, and the unique challenges believers face in regions like ours, all with an eye of being very faithful and courageous and taking action rather than retreating.

So with that being said, I want to allow my guest now to just briefly introduce himself, and we want to start to begin to really frame the conversation we're going to have tonight.

So Ian, if you would, can you just introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, Belushi, thank you so much for having me on, and thank you for creating more

Christian media in New England. We tremendously need it, and I think most Christians and other people who have kind of dissident opinions in New England would vastly underestimate the effect of starting new media outlets and ecosystems like what you're building here.

I am Head of Litigation and Associate Director at Cornerstone, which is a

New Hampshire Christian advocacy organization. We represent 100 -plus churches of assorted, small -o,

Orthodox Christian denominations around the state of New Hampshire, and we do both litigation and lobbying.

My work is about 50 -50 litigation and lobbying, and we litigate on a range of cases, but with a focus on constitutional issues, as you mentioned,

Belushi, so focus on religious liberty, religious free speech, and also statutory religious discrimination and related issues, but not all of our litigation is 100 % in that area.

We recently litigated a case related to New Hampshire's open enrollment statute, for example, which is an education law issue, and then on lobbying, on policy, we operate on a range of different issues, essentially encompassing anything that the churches in New Hampshire want to really proactively engage in.

We are organized to be a policy and legal voice for the entirety of New Hampshire's Christian community.

Awesome. Well, welcome, Ian. I really appreciate you for coming on. How would you, I guess, really condense the mission of Cornerstone in just a few words?

A pastor is really shaping believers for Christ. How would you really condense

Cornerstone's mission for the general public? We have a couple of different mottos that we use, but my favorite is probably advocating for New Hampshire's Christian community and Concord and the courts.

Those are our two areas of focus. Concord, if you're not in New Hampshire, by the way, Concord's the capital of New Hampshire, so that's where we do our lobbying.

And then, of course, we're active in litigation with, I should mention, we do a couple of federal cases here and there, but our focus is mostly on New Hampshire state courts and the

New Hampshire Constitution. And we think, and this is, I assume we'll get into this at some point,

Belushi, this is true in general in New England and in Massachusetts as well. That state constitutions are tremendously undervalued.

If you are a Christian or if you have a different sort of dissident perspective in New England, people really neglect at their own peril state courts and state constitutions.

This is a massively underutilized tool that we have to defend our religious liberty, our free speech, and our other constitutional rights.

Okay, I got you. And what do you think religious liberty and public engagement are really starting to become pressing issues?

I know we're in the new year now, 2026, but in 2025, what did you see, why was it so pressing in terms of your work so far?

Well, religious liberty can affect a range of different things. We, in the area of statutory religious discrimination, we worked on defending employees at private institutions who are being discriminated against or pressured to resign because of their faith.

In the free speech, we defended a Christian student who was being penalized for expressing a

Christian opinion at school. We, in a criminal case, defended someone who was being criminally prosecuted on the basis of his

Christian speech. So religious liberty is pertinent to a range of different things.

And I would say, if I were to give you one overarching answer about what's the significance in the early to mid -21st century of religious liberty,

I would say that we're in a battle for the soul of the church, and there are two obviously conflicting visions of Christian engagement with the courts, the legal world, and the public square within the soul of the

Christian. Christians in the contemporary West are very torn between, should

I take an approach to the public square and to the legal system of proactive engagement, of standing up for the least of these, of the church being engaged with law and with policy, or should

I take this more like withdrawn, a pietistic conception of my faith and treat faith as something that has no application to the public square or to the law, and it's really just sort of something that happens in my heart between me and Christ.

And definitely over the past, it's not unique to 2025, but over the past century, I would say the general big -picture trend amongst

Christians in the West has been to move towards an attitude of withdrawal and kind of inner pietism.

That has then created this opening for the state and for people who have totalitarian anti -Christian beliefs to step in and restrict and increasingly confine the church.

The more the church withdraws from the world, the more that the kingdoms of the world step into that space and fill it and do the opposite of what

Christians would like to see happen. And so I think that trend over time has sort of put blood in the water and put the church in a worse and worse position.

But in kind of a more short -term sense, I would say in New Hampshire right now in particular,

I see a lot of optimistic and encouraging developments. The churches that are growing tend to be very engaged and proactive and bold churches, entrepreneurial churches that are involved in their communities in a variety of different ways and are unafraid to engage with the legal system, engage with the world of public policy.

And I think that sort of comprehensive model of Christian engagement, there are a lot of signs that that's going to continue increasing within the church.

And if it continues to increase, then our religious liberty, our free speech, our other natural and constitutional rights are going to be in a stronger and stronger position in New Hampshire and New England.

Well, I like what you said there. It seems like what you were saying is this is really pressing because it impacts so much.

It's not just about your personal, just familial life, but this impacts. I mean,

I typically think of politics as not just what you see on CNN or what you see in the halls of Congress, but politics connects to a broad range of things.

And litigation also connects to a wide range of things. When you think of politics, it's not just about the things you see on TV, but it's also about trash day and what happens in your municipal regions.

And I believe Christians should be participating in that because if we step out of those arenas, then the only ones who are running the show are essentially depraved men who have what we can say is immoral or devilish standards of governing life.

And in the arena of law, well, you can't expect people to vote righteously or litigate righteously if they don't have a righteous standard or a worldview that really grounds morality and connects law to it in a reasonable fashion that actually promotes and protects life rather than oppresses it.

Would you agree with that? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's well said.

Those are both important points. I mean, on the first point, when it comes to even just narrowly defending religious liberty within New Hampshire, that can take the form of some of the obvious areas that I articulated a moment ago, like defending a

Christian student being censored at school or defending someone from being fired from their job because they're a Christian, but also a major area in both

New Hampshire and Massachusetts and presumably other New England states as well where religious liberty is under threat is in areas like zoning.

Anti -Christian discrimination is pretty prevalent on zoning boards, and zoning boards can quite easily, through different sorts of pretexts, use their authority to deny new construction to prevent any new churches from going up or to prevent churches from ever being expanded.

We have towns in New Hampshire where all new church construction has been denied for 50 years.

These zoning boards don't come right out and say, we don't want any churches in town, but they just so happen to always find some excuse or another to deny any new churches from being built.

And that's just a good example of if you don't engage with your local government, then ultimately the powers that be can suffocate any ability for the church to establish any kind of physical presence in your community.

You're going to just be confined to house churches, and then they're going to use zoning ordinances to go after house churches.

And you can say to yourself, oh, well, that's good for me as a Christian because by resisting these encroachments,

I'm going to sort of model Christian boldness, and there's something to that. But eventually when that's all any church can do, then you're really restricted in your ability to image

Christ in your community and be comprehensively engaged in a way that allows you to share the gospel, allows you to serve the least of these, and to carry out the

Christian mission. There's just no reason for Christians to, through withdrawal, put themselves in that position.

And not only are they doing themselves a disservice and doing their ministry a disservice, but they're doing other people a disservice because the church, when it is engaged, can protect people and protect and strengthen and bolster their community.

And on your second point, with respect to engagement with the judiciary, I did a

Law Review article not too long ago where I dug into the religious beliefs of U .S.

Supreme Court justices for the past century or so. And we can all think of probably a few pretty devoutly and outspokenly

Orthodox Catholic U .S. Supreme Court jurists, but there's this question that comes up sometimes of where are the

Orthodox Protestant jurists, justices on the U .S. Supreme Court? And there really is not any outspoken

Orthodox Protestant, by Orthodox Protestant in this case, I mean someone who's a mere

Christian and not just a formal member of a Christian domination. You can find justices here and there that'll say, oh,

I was baptized Presbyterian or something, but I mean a Protestant who not just as some sort of formal member in a loose sense of a

Christian denomination, but as a really outspoken believing Christian. Where are the Protestants like that?

There really haven't been any since a couple retired in 1910 and 1911.

Justice John Marshall Harlan I and Justice David Josiah Brewer were really the last

Orthodox Protestants on the U .S. Supreme Court. And we as Christians, we tend to think, well,

Christians became marginalized in the United States or the West over the past 20, 30, 40 years.

But you can see in the early 20th century that to a large extent, we did it to ourselves through just choosing not to enter these fields and through having a culture that didn't encourage us to enter these fields.

Because it's just not believable that there in the early 20th century when

Orthodox outspoken Catholics were still getting onto the Supreme Court, it's not believable at that point that Orthodox Protestants were being discriminated against and were being blocked from making it up to the highest court in the land.

They weren't being blocked. We just as believing, sorry, I'm a believing Protestant. I'd be interested to hear what your denominational identity is,

Belushi, but we weren't being blocked. We were choosing because we had a culture of withdrawal and pietism and not being engaged with the world, not to enter elite and influential areas like the

US Supreme Court and look where that took the nation. It didn't do us any favors. Yeah, wow, that's so fascinating, honestly.

And you see, I feel that pietism has really steered us the wrong way.

It's almost like a self -fulfilling prophecy. We tell ourselves that Christians aren't supposed to get involved in the public sphere and politics or in law.

And lo and behold, the devil is driving the bus. And how did we get here?

I think I know why. It's because we retreated away from these places where there were crucial levers of power and we neglected our responsibility to actually engage and be a witness for Christ.

What you said about no Protestants in high offices, I feel like it comes right off of that.

Christians have just retreated for so long. It's just created this vacuum. And it's not like the devil is going, oh, you guys are retreating?

Well, I guess I'm just going to leave this alone. No, he always wants to thwart the work of Christ in any place.

And in the public realm, if we retreat from there, it makes sense why we see the lack of faithful Protestants sticking up with a strong voice to litigate righteously or even in the realm of politics, actually guide and lead people in a proper manner.

In regards to my, I guess, denominational identity, I'm a Reformed Baptist.

What are you? I attend an Anglican church, but I don't have a strong denominational identity.

When I ask myself who I am, the word Anglican doesn't really leap to the fore as a central part of who

I am. I mean, I've tended to attend Anglican churches for several years now, more often than not.

But if I moved to a place where there was a great, really engaged, active

PCA church down the street, for example, I was baptized in the PCA, then

I wouldn't hesitate to attend that as well. I mean,

I care a lot about theology. I do have some definite theological beliefs that might set me apart from other

Orthodox Christians in some respects, but I tend not to think about my denominational identity really in terms of those theological differences.

Okay, I hear you there. 39 articles? Are you a 39 article guy? No, not particularly.

I claim no expertise in the 39 articles. Okay, I got you.

I would say I identify with Anglicanism in the sense that I value a sense of historical continuity.

I think that's common among Anglicans. I think that the church is one body extended through time.

You know, so Daniel chapter 2, for example, and foretelling the establishment of the church said that God will establish a kingdom that shall never be destroyed.

So, you know, theologically, I tend to look askance at kind of restorationist theologies of church history.

I don't think we should ever say that there was a time in Christian history where there just was no church.

I think that even though the institutional church has gone astray in various ways at different times, I think we should see

Christ's body extended through all of history, and many Anglicans share that belief. And then I also just share kind of the sort of Anglican aesthetic preference for liturgy.

I think this is a one body with many parts thing, and this is part of why

I wouldn't say Anglican identity is a core part of who I am. I don't think that we all need to be in high liturgical churches or anything, but at least for me personally,

I feel sort of the most uplifted and in contact with the Spirit when

I'm in a denominational, excuse me, a liturgical environment. Yeah.

Our church is very high liturgy, low church aesthetic.

We would love to have you sometime. I do appreciate you sharing that. I didn't know that about you. It sounds kind of like the

PCA, I guess. You said reformed, right? So that makes sense. Yeah.

You know, some of the things that you've been saying so far, I'm like, I think this guy's post -millennial.

I'm not going to ask him. We could go on the rabbit trail with that. Yeah. Let's do a whole eschatology podcast.

For sure. I'd love to do that. I'll resist the temptation. Unless you want to go there, I'll resist the temptation to start.

I got just the guy for you, my pastor. He's an expert on that. I'll send it to you later.

But yeah, I really do appreciate you sharing that. That's really fascinating. Kendall Lankford.

I thought that's what you're going to say. I've been on his podcast before. It was years ago. Really? Wow.

Okay. So you know all of us. Great guy. Come visit us, man. Yeah. Come visit us.

Our fees are great. Great guy. Yeah. We had a lot of views in common.

So we would probably, you and I would probably agree on more than we disagree, I would expect. Awesome.

That's great. Well, Ian, thank you for really sharing that. This is going really well. I love it.

In regards to just kind of still setting the stage for the rest of our conversation today,

I want the audience to know we're just going to talk about religious liberty and free speech, Christian engagement in public life, maybe even give some practical applications and really kind of focus on the unique challenges

Christians face in New England, because that's where we are. Ian's in New Hampshire. I'm in Massachusetts.

My entire life kind of revolves around Boston Harbor and the border of New Hampshire. That's where home and church are.

So that's pretty much my experience. And so for the rest of you that are in New England, I do hope that this is going to be extremely helpful to you and the insight that Ian will bring to our conversation tonight.

So, Ian, if you will help us understand, you know, religious liberty and free speech, like how would you define like religious liberty?

Like what is that? How does it kind of differ from privilege? Because some people would object that it's religious liberty.

It just means you're a privilege. Like how would you kind of give shape to definition? Yeah, that's a great question.

So free speech, you know, obviously is a protecting your ability to express your opinions.

Think of kind of any controversy that might result in a dinner table debate.

If it's politics or religion, for example, it's probably going to be free speech. So there's some overlap.

There's a sense in which your free speech rights are your religious liberty rights. But religious liberty is much, much broader than free speech.

And there's a reason that in our federal constitution and in state constitutions, religious liberty tends to be defined in terms of exercise or practice.

So religious liberty also protects all kinds of physical actions.

We use at Cornerstone, when we educate churches about New Hampshire constitutional and other rights that churches should be aware of, we use this acronym testament to describe the special powers that churches have under New Hampshire constitutional law.

And one of those letters is M for manifest your faith. Because one way you can conceptualize your right to religious liberty or free exercise is a right to do things that manifest your faith.

What are all the physical actions involved in your practice of Christianity?

So that can involve gathering with other people, forming an organization, running the organization according to Christian principles.

Religious liberty includes something called the ministerial exception, which means that the government or the state cannot intervene in the hiring and firing decisions of your church.

Your right not to be compelled to participate in a ceremony that you disagree with.

That's an example of religious liberty. Or your right to engage in certain charitable activities.

That can be religious liberty as well. We could go on and on. There's a broad test. It depends on what state you're in, what statutory and constitutional protections you're operating under.

But in New Hampshire, especially, and in Massachusetts, by the way, so this is pertinent to both of us.

In New Hampshire and in Massachusetts, we have state constitutional rights that contain, theoretically, robust protections for religious liberty.

And it's a broad category. It's a catch -all bucket religious liberty for all kinds of things.

If you feel like this thing is infringing on my religious liberty, this is something

I need to be doing as a Christian, and the government is infringing on my ability to do it by in some way coming after me for doing it.

They're discriminating against me, they're disadvantaging me in some way, or they're trying to fine me, anything along those lines.

We can go through a certain common law test, a test that judges have constructed in the case law over the decades, to ask ourselves, is your

New Hampshire or your Massachusetts constitutional right to religious liberty being violated? Now, I mentioned the federal constitution and the state constitution.

So the federal constitution is a compact among the states. It was created by the states.

The states, through the federal constitution, created the federal government. But in our case, in the case of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the state had its own constitution before it entered into that federal compact.

And the federal compact is, for both of us in some ways, less protective than the set of state constitutional rights that we enjoy.

So some state constitutions in a variety of areas go above and beyond what the federal constitution protects.

New Hampshire and Massachusetts both have broader and more robust religious liberty protections than the federal constitution.

Now, that wasn't always the case. There was a time when the federal constitutional right to free exercise was held to be very robust.

But in 1990, and it's gone back and forth, I should say. But in particular, in 1990, there was a major case that effectively nullified the federal free exercise clause and held this isn't really a real right that you enjoy in the way that you enjoy your right to free speech or trial by jury or other enumerated constitutional rights.

It's more of a nice sentiment the framers put in here. The framers were kind of telling us their policy preference is to protect religious liberty.

But it's really up to Congress to do that. It's not an enforceable right. The courts are not going to step in if your religious practices are being infringed upon or you're being compelled to do something that violates your religious practices.

And to a certain extent, we've kind of retreated from that, fortunately. The court under Chief Justice John Roberts has in many ways kind of built back up religious protections in our federal constitutional system since that big setback in 1990.

But federal constitutional religious liberty is still not remotely to the level of state religious liberty protections in New Hampshire or Massachusetts.

So there are a couple of reasons why if you're in either of these states and you think you have a religious liberty case, you pretty much across the board want to bring it in state court under your state constitution.

And in general, you don't even want to include a federal constitutional case because you want to avoid removal to federal court.

And one of those reasons is that our state constitutional protections for religious liberty in New Hampshire and Massachusetts are broader than the federal constitutional protections.

So maybe you'd like to talk about some specific examples or common scenarios when it comes to religious liberty, and I'd be happy to go through those.

But that's kind of a general outline of the concept. Yeah, actually, I would love that.

And if you could, how does the idea of free exercise compare to just a mere freedom of worship?

Because when I think about just like freedom of worship, I think you're allowed to believe whatever religion you want as long as it stays in your head.

But once you leave your house and you go through the front door, well, there's other people here.

You can't just be a Christian in public. How would you kind of like help us think through that?

Yeah, well, obviously the framers, and this is true of the federal constitution and the state constitutions, the framers were not trying to codify this modern belief that, yeah, you have religious liberty, but we're just talking about your kind of right to a private sentimentality in your heart.

The framers sought to protect the right of religions to engage with every area of society.

And you can see this in things like James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, which sort of laid out the reasons that we have a federal free exercise clause.

The framers thought religion is the most important area of inquiry in human life that there is.

So it's critical that we have special black and white protections just for religion.

And you'll see this sometimes because often as Christians, when we engage in policy or law, we're part of this broader coalition of people who maybe have some overlapping concerns with us and aren't necessarily

Christians. And sometimes, you know, when I'm working on a bill or I'm bringing a case, someone will say to me, why are you so focused on like religious protections?

I want general conscience protections, you know. You saw this a lot during like COVID, for example.

You know, I worked on some religious exemption to vaccination cases, and some people would say to me, you know, why is it always religious exemptions?

I want a conscience exemption. But in our constitutional system in the U .S., at the heart of our constitutional system is this idea codified by the framers that because of the cosmic eternal importance of religion, this is the most critical area of human thought and life that there is.

We can't just leave it up to our general right to free speech to ensure that we've got adequate protections.

We've got to codify this special protection for religion. And that protection encompasses not just private thought, not even just speech, because remember, it's distinct from the right to free speech.

It encompasses the right to practice or exercise or manifest your religion.

So one example I gave earlier that everyone should know about is the ministerial exception, meaning the government can in no way intervene in the hiring and firing practices of your church.

So in general, the government can manage hiring and firing decisions through things like nondiscrimination law of all kinds of different organizations.

But because of our constitutional history, and this is true also at the federal level, by the way, thanks to the

Roberts Court. This isn't just true at the state level. The government is blocked from intervening in the hiring and firing decisions of your church.

So that is not just about worship. That's also about running the organization.

The famous cases that we've all heard about, like Elaine Photography, Masterpiece Cake Shop, where there were attempts to compel a

Christian photographer or baker to participate in a ceremony they disagreed with, that is a religious liberty case.

That's a free exercise case. In New Hampshire, almost certainly, either of those cases would have turned out differently.

The state, insofar as the state wanted to try to compel a Christian to participate in a ceremony they disagreed with, the state would have lost at a very early stage of the case.

At least on paper, that is how things should go in Massachusetts, if something like this happens in Massachusetts.

And some of your listeners may look askance at that or assume that that doesn't quite add up because of the cultural environment of Massachusetts.

But the state courts in Massachusetts are OK sometime. They're kind of middle of the road.

Bear in mind, Charlie Baker made a lot of judicial appointments. So the courts in Massachusetts are,

I'm not saying they're conservative by any means, but they're significantly to the right of the federal courts in New England, like your federal district court or the

First Circuit Court of Appeals or the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In particular, by the way, the First Circuit Court of Appeals is the most liberal and partisan federal court of appeals in America.

So you really want to stay out of the First Circuit if you can choose instead to bring your case in state court under the

New Hampshire Constitution or the Massachusetts Constitution. Thank you for that.

You know, a cornerstone is often challenged. It offers challenges to governmental entities that are always,

I guess, putting forth policies that are conflicting with religious conscience. Sometimes you,

I'm sure you've seen this a lot, where policies are framed as neutral or inclusive just to kind of ram in something that will really blockade the exercise of Christian conscience.

Any examples other than the ministerial stuff that you've experienced that really are disguised as neutral policies that are really intended to really stop us from living on our faith legally?

Sorry, we cut out there for a second. Can you hear me? I can. Oh, good.

I can hear you. I was saying it sounds like you've been reading the case law. I'm sorry, say again?

I said it sounds like you've been reading the case law. I think we've got a bit of a lag now. Should I try resetting or should we just power through it?

Oh, go ahead. Power through it. OK, all right, we'll try. I'm sorry, could you remind me what the question was?

Oh, you know, what are, you know, policies are sometimes framed as like neutral or inclusive. Any examples of those disguised policies to really foment

Christian free exercise? Yeah, sure. So there's multiple ways in which a policy can be neutral.

That is, the policy doesn't single out a particular, you know, religious denomination or it doesn't even necessarily single out religion.

It may just be framed as if we're legislating without respect to religion, but it nonetheless is an infringement on your free exercise rights.

So a famous case, for example, that illustrates this principle is the case of Likumi Babalu -I, which

I think is partly a famous case because it's got a very funny sounding name. And this was a case in,

I think it was in the mid -90s in Florida where there was a Santeria church and the city government of this town in Florida wanted to single out and prohibit the

Santeria church from engaging in animal sacrifice. And the law itself didn't mention religion at all.

It basically said you can't kill an animal except under these, you know, very suspiciously defined circumstances.

And they really wanted to prohibit this particular church from engaging in this activity.

You know, they call themselves a church, this religious organization, from engaging in this activity, but they didn't want to, on the face of the law, kind of single out the

Santeria community and kind of identify that that's what they were doing. And the court nonetheless said, we don't have to stop at the neutral sounding text of the law.

We can look below that text and look, when we look at the city council and its deliberations that it engaged in before it passed this ordinance, at the city council meeting, people were saying things like Santeria is our barbaric religion and we need to kind of single it out and ban them and kick them out.

So a court can look at the history of the governmental decision or the governmental regulation.

And this same reasoning was used in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. So in Masterpiece Cakeshop, which was decided on pretty narrow grounds,

Jack Phillips, who was this Christian baker who'd been ordered in Colorado to participate in a same -sex wedding, that, theoretically, that rule saying you cannot decline to participate in a same -sex wedding is in some sense religion neutral.

I mean, it doesn't say in the rule religious people in particular are going to be compelled to do this.

But the reason that Phillips won that case at the U .S. Supreme Court on narrow grounds, although he did not really win decisively, he continues to be like dogged to this day by people trying to just maliciously force this guy to come participate in their weddings.

The reason he won at the U .S. Supreme Court is because in the procedural history that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had gone through to sanction him, there were all kinds of statements bashing this guy,

Jack Phillips, as bigoted because of his Christian faith. So the proceedings or the kind of basis of the policy or decision can be tainted by this invidious attitude towards a religion or towards religion in general.

So that's one way in which a policy can be seemingly neutral, but can in fact infringe on your religious exercise rights.

But also there can genuinely be no intent to engage in under the state constitution by asking yourself, does this burden your religious exercise?

And if it does burden your religious exercise, the government must achieve a compelling government interest.

This is called strict scrutiny, is the name of the standard. And even if there was no intent necessarily to single out religion or your religion for discrimination, if the policy or decision fails that test, it can be unconstitutional.

So for example, famous case in New Hampshire, state against MAC, a guy was a member of an animistic

American Indian religious denomination that used psilocybin, used a hallucinogenic drug as part of its religious rituals.

And there was no allegation that the criminal prohibition on psilocybin in New Hampshire was passed to single out animistic people with pre -Christian

American Indian religious beliefs. But nonetheless, the government in order to be able to criminally penalize this guy just for using psilocybin in his own home, it would need to be able to pass that test, which is very difficult of strict scrutiny.

Is our penalizing this guy for doing this thing narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest?

And so you can see how, given that kind of broad set of examples that I just gave, in all kinds of different cases where your church is being in some way put upon by local authorities, you could have a religious liberty claim even if what the state or the government entity is doing is not kind of obviously invidious and even if it doesn't obviously fall into one of the very sort of well -known buckets of they're directly interfering in the hiring and firing of my church or they're compelling me to engage in certain speech or other things like that.

Wow, that's really fascinating. So how would you say, when you see a case that doesn't overtly seem like it's targeting

Christians, what is your, you're in your office in this case, I guess,

I don't know how it goes being a lawyer, but I guess this case lands on your desk. What is your approach in like, how do you meticulously go through this to actually find out whether this is infringing upon religious liberty?

What's this kind of look like for you when you have a case brought up? Yeah, that's a great question.

I spend a lot of time when we have something that sounds like it could potentially be a promising case just going through the fact pattern with the client.

I have them start at the beginning of the story and then I try to sort of tease out things in the story that I think might be legally relevant and I see if I can construct a case just because, as a matter of sort of background principle,

I know what legal tests we're going to need to be able to satisfy to potentially bring the case.

I would say maybe half the time people reach out to us and think they have a religious liberty case, it's obvious just on the face of their email or their voicemail that there's going to be no case.

Most often what happens is people will reach out to us because let's say their town government or their school is doing something that they don't like or is engaging in speech that they, the voter, the potential plaintiff does not like.

Like your local school is teaching a very politically biased version of history or it's putting up rainbow flags or other sorts of political propaganda in the classroom or in the town hall and people will come often and say

I want you to try to bring a lawsuit to stop this from happening and I have to explain to people that that claim fails at the outset because of something called a government speech.

It's just open and shut law that you have a right to protect all of your rights, your church has rights, but you have no right to a neutral government.

If communists take over your school system, if the superintendent is a communist and your town council are all communists, the town council can declare this is a communist town now.

The school can declare we're a communist school and we teach rainbow flag communism.

That's the official ideology of our school. This is relevant to the discussion we started with where people expect

I'm going to be able to disengage from the political realm and just adopt this sort of pietistic conception of the

Christian life where I don't have to be engaged with my town council or my school board and then they still nonetheless expect everything to work out somehow.

God is in charge and so everything's going to work out for the best even as I withdraw from the public square and get all my

Christian friends to withdraw from the public square. And lo and behold then things in the public square don't go so well.

And then people will come to lawyers and say, without myself engaging in this public space,

I expect you to go in and be able to fix things. But to fix something, you need to have a plaintiff.

You need to have someone whose rights were infringed to fix something in the legal system. I need to show that not just the government is doing something you disapprove of,

I need to show that your rights as an individual or your children's rights, or your church's rights are being infringed.

And so when we get a case that seems like it might satisfy that test, then

I talk to the potential client for a long time and I go through, tell me the history and I try to identify is there a potential claim

I want to explore and then I ask follow -up questions to take the conversation in that direction. And then sometimes

I'll ask for additional written evidence and that sort of thing. Wow, fascinating. You said that a government can actually proclaim itself to be

LGBTQ or communist. Does that mean that we can likewise say that this is a

Christian city, this is a Christian nation if our legislature say so?

Great question. Does it work that way? Great question. So glad you asked that.

There's the Establishment Clause, which we actually didn't really get into. So the Establishment Clause under just well -established, the case law interpreting the

Establishment Clause. We can dig a little bit into the history if you want and talk about whether things were sort of meant to be this way.

But in terms of just the very well -established for many, many decades now Establishment Clause, case law, not even a local government can say we're a

Christian local government because that is an establishment of religion. And you could not for the same reason say we're going to, as your school board, we're only going to employ

Christian teachers or something like that. Now, it does work in reverse. So if we can show that your school board or your school district is teaching atheistic or anti -Christian beliefs, we may actually have an

Establishment Clause case. The problem is it's got to be pretty direct. They can't, if they're teaching that French Jacobinism was so wonderful and they're teaching all of history through an extremely left -wing progressive lens and they've got all kinds of progressive political slogans up around the classroom.

I mean, you and I may know that's going to sort of cash out in some anti -Christian ways and have anti -Christian implications and probably the people teaching this aren't real fans of historic and orthodox

Christianity, but it's not direct enough. If the school has a sign up that specifically says

Christianity is oppressive or even if their textbook has a section saying

Christianity has been an evil oppressive force in history, we may actually have an

Establishment Clause case as Christians. So the Establishment Clause doesn't only cut one way.

It can cut both ways. Now, as to what can we do then if we were to take over the school boards and the town councils and so on?

Well, you know, personnel is policy and the left does not shy away from using all the political power that they acquire to select for personnel that will align with their beliefs.

So, you know, I sometimes give the example of in New Hampshire, which is a purple state, it's got a

Republican superfecta government. All branches of government in New Hampshire are controlled by Republicans.

There are, you know, every single, pretty much every single state agency, Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Safety, DHHS.

These people are all overwhelmingly progressives. The superintendents are exclusively progressives.

There's not a single superintendent anywhere in New Hampshire that has beliefs that are like to the right of Obama.

And that's because progressives prioritize selecting personnel that are aligned with their policy positions.

Now, while you can't have an overt policy, you can have any policy of preferring

Christians or having kind of a theological criteria for whether you hire and fire someone, there would be nothing illegal whatsoever about, for example, a

Republican state government saying, we want all our state agencies to be politically conservative.

We want to prioritize politically conservative superintendents.

We can even say we wanna prioritize personnel or superintendents that have certain cultural beliefs.

That's not necessarily a theological test, just in the same way that a court would hold that a teacher putting up a rainbow flag in their classroom is not per se anti -Christian or taking a theological position.

The reason that in Republican -led states like New Hampshire, the reason you don't really see

Republicans doing this and prioritizing personnel, unfortunately you could say is not a consequence of discriminatory case law in the courts.

It's really just that conservatives themselves don't have a culture of prioritizing personnel.

And so often when I say to people, why is it that what looks like in many ways an increasingly red state in a state where Republicans have all this power, why is there not a single remotely

Republican -aligned superintendent? Sometimes Republican politicians will say to me, oh, well, those jobs are for left -wingers.

It's not conservative to wanna be a school superintendent or a public school teacher, to wanna work at DHHS or Department of Safety.

That's the kind of thing Democrats do. And maybe a Republican will say, well, we don't wanna take over these agencies.

We just wanna dismantle the public school system and dismantle the agencies and have anarcho -capitalism or something.

But what's the result of that? The result of that is election after election after election, none of these personnel are conservative whatsoever.

All of these school districts, agencies, et cetera, the personnel are all selected entirely by progressives and not a fundamentally illegal problem.

That's a political problem. And there's a political problem because there's a cultural problem.

And the cultural problem is that conservatives don't culturally have an understanding of the idea that personnel is policy.

But if they did, to tie a bow on your question, they could 100 % just come right out and say, like, by the way, the left does every single day in every, not only blue state, but every purple and red state, we want to hire people that are aligned with our politics.

Now, quick disclaimer there, that does not necessarily mean you can engage in discrimination in hiring.

So there would be a case, if you told someone I am not hiring you because you're politically progressive, they would potentially have a free speech case.

That person would probably have a pretty good free speech case against you. But what does the left do?

The left sometimes gets hit with these free speech cases for not hiring the right people. And by the way, if you are a

Christian or you're just a conservative and you're denied in your attempt to become a government official of some kind, outside of the electoral process, of course, come to us if you're in New Hampshire.

We can point you to some of our allies if you're in another state. You may have a free speech case.

And if conservatives tried to do that, people on the left could have a free speech case under the current legal system.

But what does the left do to advance their recognition that personnel is policy that is successful for them?

Well, they do many things that are politically oriented, but are not per se discriminatory.

So they may go to job fairs where they think there will be tons of left -wing people and focus on those venues for trying to attract candidates.

They may go to trainings put on by left -leaning organizations and say, we wanna advertise here, we're looking for teachers.

They'll pull out every stop to use every tool along those lines to find aligned personnel that they can recruit to these agencies, or they'll just call up their friends that they know are politically aligned and encourage them to apply for these jobs.

Conservatives could do all those things and conservatives could, by the way, clearly use government speech to, for example, teach politically conservative beliefs in the school system, just like the left every single day teaches politically progressive beliefs in the school system and by the way, promotes them as official government policy in more or less every state government department.

There is no reason under established principles of government speech that conservatives could not do the same thing.

It just under the existing establishment clause law could not be an explicitly Christian thing.

That would be an open and shut loss for us. Wow, thank you for that.

That's very insightful actually. Do the conservatives know this?

What has been the reaction after you've made this known?

And I know we're pressing for time here, but I do wanna kinda get that answer out of you.

I'm sure you have been quite passionate about making that clear to them. Yeah, well, one thing I've been working on a lot is we do have some school boards where...

School boards are a big problem. You can get in New Hampshire, much more so in New Hampshire than Massachusetts, by the way.

And where you are in Massachusetts, actually, and I know because I've worked on school board issues in both states, in Massachusetts, if Republicans take over a school board, you can pretty much, you can pass conservative policies.

In New Hampshire, 100 % of the school board seats on your school board can be occupied by Republicans, and it makes no difference because the school board is boxed in by all these institutions.

They're boxed in by the ultra -progressive law firm, by the superintendent who's extremely progressive, by the advocacy group.

These people are very good at coordinating and containing and controlling the school board and kind of just cajoling and coercing it into enacting the policies they want.

I think in New Hampshire, just a lot more money is put into creating this progressive infrastructure because New Hampshire is a competitive purple state.

I think paradoxically, because Massachusetts is a deep, deep blue state, if you're a big left -wing donor, it's not an attractive value proposition to pour money into building up these control networks in Massachusetts.

But in New Hampshire, especially, where we do have some school boards that are controlled by Republicans, I've given some thought to, well, how do we punch a hole in this phalanx of institutions?

And one way potentially to do it would be to encourage conservative school boards to hire more conservative superintendents as opposed to exclusively progressive superintendents like they do now.

And I'll tell you, unfortunately, a big problem I have is just that, and one reason

I thought we would be able to do this much more easily than the difficulty we've actually encountered, is that there are so many

Christian educators. Many Christians are very passionate about being Christian educators. Christians start all kinds of great schools, including in New Hampshire.

Many Christian schools are booming around New Hampshire. So these schools are all full of Christian teachers,

Christian principals, Christian administrators, and these people could, by the way, make higher salaries as public school administrators who are very well paid in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire pays its teachers not as much as Massachusetts pays theirs, but it pays its administrators very, very well.

And by the way, New Hampshire spends more per pupil than Massachusetts, but it doesn't pay its teachers as well as Massachusetts pays them.

And the biggest bottleneck I heard, sadly, is just that even among Christian educators, there's just not a lot of interest in going forth and conquering and trying to be public school teachers or administrators.

I think it is fundamentally an internal cultural problem, especially in the church.

And you look at the history of the church, and for especially a millennia, the church was the most potent geopolitical force in the history of the

West. The church could completely contain, reorient, restrain extremely powerful states and shape their policies towards the good just by speaking or by withholding communion, for example, from unjust rulers.

And the church, as this tremendously effective geopolitical force through all of history, is a model for us for Christian political engagement today that we're just not utilizing.

It's like there's this broken lever on the ground. We know that throughout history, the lever was able to move this great stone of the state, but the lever's broken and we're not invested in fixing it.

The simplest way to affect political change, I think the most elegant, would be to focus on fixing the lever and then use the fixed lever to be able to move the stone.

We know that the lever worked before. If we would fix the culture of the church and create a church that supports active, comprehensive cultural and geopolitical engagement, then we know as just a historical matter, the church can be very effective, even when most of the culture is not necessarily favorable in its attitudes towards the church.

And so when it comes to something like, how do we get more Christian educators in the public school system?

I think there are many things that attorneys and policy advocates can do, but ultimately, first and foremost, it's down to the work that people like you and like Pastor Kendall Langford are doing to reshape the culture of the church in a way that's favorable towards political engagement so that we have the personnel and the resources we need to affect these changes.

Oh, sorry. You kind of froze there for a little bit, but I heard the ending of that perfectly fine.

So Ian, as we wrap up here, man, I really appreciate all that you had to say today. How can listeners support and learn more about Cornerstone's work?

And is there any material and any resources that we can actually get in our hands to really learn and be prepared for the political aspect and legal aspect of all of this?

Absolutely. Yeah, we have a page of resources under our resources tab at nhcornerstone .org, which is our link to all of our social media there.

Follow us on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter, at Ian Hewitt. You can sign up for our emails at nhcornerstone .org,

and we also have a donate page there. You can donate in pretty much any way that's conceivably convenient for you.

And our email updates, by the way, go out once a week, and we'll update you on legal and policy happenings throughout the state that are relevant to the churches we represent.

Awesome. If you could, please send me any links so I can actually leave them in the description of this episode so that I can share that with the audience today.

Folks, we are going to have to wrap it up here. Ian, I really appreciate all the insight you brought today.

So much to think about. I think it's a very important topic, one that really doesn't get talked about much.

But I'm glad you came on today to be at least able to give us a little bit to think on. So as we think about faithful public engagement, it's really not optional, and it shouldn't really be fear -driven or reactionary.

It's too bad it has to be that way. But it has to be grounded in truth and love for neighbor. And as we really wrap up here, my hope is that this conversation doesn't just inform you, but it serves you to really think more carefully and act more faithfully in the public square.

Because religious liberty and free speech aren't just abstract ideas. They're arenas where our convictions are really tested, and our witness is really refined.

I'm really grateful for Ian's work at Cornerstone and all that he's shared with us today. And I really hope that it has helped you and that it's really fueled you up to learn more so that you can really prepare yourself for what may be coming down the pipe.

We're just in the beginning of 2026. We have no idea what is going to come later down this timeline.

So I do really hope that, as listeners, that you would take this seriously, prepare yourselves, be faithful to not just Christ, but to the community you live in to really be a bold and wise disciple amongst your neighbors.

So with that being said, thank you for everyone for listening. Ian, really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for listening to Trueology today.

Thanks, Kalushi. Happy to come back on any time. Absolutely, man. Certainly have you for another discussion soon.

This has been Trueology, the study of the truth. I do thank you, and I hope you all have a good night.

God bless. Trueology is a podcast that seeks to equip, effect, and engage the world through Christ and his wonderful gospel of the kingdom, against which he has promised that the gates of hell shall never prevail but increase by his government, his law, and grace, till it be presented a glorious church without spot or wrinkle.

If there's any fear, threat, or worry, remember that the one that has called you according to his purpose and grace has also promised that all enemies will soon be placed under his feet.

Now, I want you to believe that not because I said it or because it sounds really nice and spiritual, but primarily and wholeheartedly and only and biblically, because it's the truth.