Anti-blasphemy laws in America?

America’s previous longtime consensus for universal religious freedom is fraying. Policies that targeted traditional Christian merchants who would not cater to same-sex nuptials or shuttered Catholic adoption agencies for similar reasons foreshadowed the end of the consensus.Those challenges came from the secular left. Now some religious conservatives are disputing America’s traditional commitment to religious freedom for all.In recent years, small numbers of often highly educated young men have embraced Catholic integralism or Protestant confessional statism, sometimes self-identifying as Christian nationalism. The former aspires to a society that, as in medieval times, makes the Catholic Church paramount, including in matters of civil law. The latter, often romanticizing John Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan New England, wants a government specifically committed to their version of Christianity. Both groups would restrict non-Christians and punish blasphemers and heretics in civil law. Both groups think “liberalism,” with its assumption of legal equality and freedom of speech for all, has failed. Both groups have gained outsized attention thanks to our current “postliberal” political moment.Postliberal Catholic integralists typically think American democracy, founded on Protestant and Enlightenment principles, was flawed from the start. Postliberal Protestant Christian nationalists try to claim the founders were fine with religious establishments and legal privilege for Christians.These arguments had seemed confined to the margins of religious conservatism. But recently, Al Mohler, president of America’s second-largest seminary, has aligned with their cause. In 2024, Mohler shared a platform at the annual National Conservatism Conference with Doug Wilson, the patriarch of Protestant confessional state Christian nationalism.Douglas Wilson, Senior Minister of Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho, speaks at the National Conservatism Conference, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.) “I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state,” Mohler said at the National Conservatism convo. “I call that ‘acknowledgment.’ I’m not claiming that every citizen will be a confessing Christian, but that does not mean they are not obligated to the acknowledgment of the Christian structure of this civilization.”More recently, Mohler contributed a chapter to a book published by Wilson called Five Views of Christian Nationalism, in which four contributors, including Mohler, plus, of course, Wilson, agree on religious establishment. Mohler said America’s Christian origins should be written into the Constitution, that office holders should be required to uphold this recognition, and blasphemy should be punished in civil law.“I believe they [U.S. laws] should be acknowledged as Christian and they should be legitimately Christian based upon the very ontological affirmations that were necessary for the American experiment to begin,” Mohler said in August as part of a panel of the book’s contributors at Wilson’s college in Moscow, Idaho. Denying God’s role in America is “blasphemy against the state,” he said, which, in the book, he said should be criminalized.This development stunned many, since Baptists are historically champions of religious freedom. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were motivated to overturn Virginia’s state church in favor of religious freedom for all by the imprisonment of unregistered Baptist preachers. The Southern Baptist Convention has a specific teaching against religious establishment and laws against blasphemy. For over 30 years Mohler has been president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is one of his denomination’s most prominent voices.The longtime former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, Richard Land, himself a prominent conservative religious leader, wrote that Mohler’s view contradicted the Southern Baptist Convention’s “Faith and Message.”It says: “The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind.” And Land noted that under a Christian religious test for public office, “Thomas Jefferson, a Unitarian, would be disqualified from holding office, much less being president.”Responding to the brouhaha, Mohler announced that he “blew it” in backing civil laws against blasphemy. He wrote, “As a Baptist, I would never want to coerce religious belief — period.” It’s unclear whether he still supports writing Christianity into the U.S. Constitution.Either way, the episode shows that touting legal privilege for Christians is now entering mainstream conversation. In 2023, Wilson’s Canon Press, published The Case for Christian Nationalism, which argued that state establishment is historic Protestant teaching. Its author, Stephen Wolfe, said civil punishment for blasphemy and heresy could include the death penalty.In 2025, James Baird, ordained in the mainstream conservative Presbyterian Church of America, published King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government, which also argues for state establishment and anti-blasphemy laws. Baird’s denomination in June released a preliminary report rejecting this form of Christian nationalism, saying: “The church is not called to direct the affairs of the state, nor the state the affairs of the Church.”Can careful denominational reports counter-bracing, more revolutionary influencers, who often have a wider reach? Clearly these arguments for legally privileging Christianity are not going away anytime soon.Last October, Wilson told Ross Douthat in The New York Times that he’s fine to wait 500 years for a Christian confessional state in America. In March, he told a Catholic podcaster that, ideally, Catholic Marian processions would be illegal since they are, according to Wilson’s brand of Calvinism, idolatrous. In February, Wilson preached at the Pentagon, hosted by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, who belongs to the denomination Wilson founded.TRUMP AND XI SIZE EACH OTHER UPThese arguments, once nearly unthinkable, are now commonplace in polarized, unsettled America. We can only hope that with time, George Washington’s famous reassurance to the Jews of Rhode Island that the U.S. government “gives to bigotry no sanction” will again prevail by consensus. Or as Thomas Jefferson similarly told Methodists in Connecticut: “No provision in our constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”Connecticut did not disestablish its state church, Congregationalism, until 1818, which must have pleased the Methodists and Jefferson. But today’s Christian nationalists celebrate Connecticut’s state church as a model for today. Sometimes old battles and old arguments over issues once thought settled must be refought.Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy.