The First Amendment protects freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion.
For decades, activists on the left used lawsuits and cultural changes to distort America’s basic religious freedom and its history, twisting the Constitution into an enemy of the individual right to worship rather than protecting religious expression for people of all faiths.
Correcting this distortion and fighting anti-religious liberty government actions has been a primary goal of American Constitutional Rights Union.
In recent years, the left’s anti-religious rights playbook included an attack on faith symbols in the public square. One such assault was an atheist demand that a hundred-year-old memorial cross to World War I war dead in Maryland be removed. ACRU is proud that our Amicus Brief and partnership with other organizations and local citizens lead the Supreme Court to find in favor of protecting the Bladensburg Cross in 2019.
Through our Protect Our Monuments initiative, ACRU publicly and actively called for Constitutional protections for religious and secular American landmarks.
With the political ascendancy of the atheist and secular left, people of all faiths will be facing an unrelenting insurgency against religious freedoms. This has been apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic in many states with liberal governors where houses of worship were deliberately targeted for lockdowns, closures and penalties as other venues remained opened with social distancing and mask requirements.
In December 2020, ACRU assisted a Maryland pastor singled out by a county healthcare bureaucrat who fined the pastor for a mask violation while the pastor was in an empty church building behind a closed door.
ARCU will continue to defend religious liberty for people of every faith, counter the false liberal argument and deliberate misinterpretation of “separation of church and state” and defend communities’ right to honor their local religious monuments.