Over the past decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has significantly expanded religious liberty, restoring religion’s rightful place in the public square. In response, irreligious groups have moved to exploit this advance by turning religious freedom protections into a weapon against authentic religion. Their sacrilegious strategy is slowly succeeding. This raises a fundamental, largely unanswered question: What exactly counts as “religion”?

[complaining about Satanists etc. taking advantage of religious “liberty” laws]

Why are irreligious groups succeeding in inverting the First Amendment and perverting religious liberty?

As legal analyst Frank DeVito documented in “The Original Meaning of Religion,” the U.S. Supreme Court has had a decades-long doctrinal drift in its definition of religion. […]

In United States v. Ballard (1944), the Court began subjectivizing religion by prioritizing the “sincerity” of belief over its truth or traditional content. […] Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) tried to draw a line between philosophical and religious convictions, but the dam had already broken.

[…] most modern court decisions address only whether a belief system resembles a religion, not whether it actually is one. […] Even if theistic Satanism may function like a religion, it is not one substantively, in any correct sense of the term.

[…]

Conservative religious advocates are starting to push back against the secular paradigm by articulating an objective definition of religion. In McCutchan v. Nicholson, a Texas district court ruled in July 2025 that a secular humanist group seeking to officiate marriages “is not a religious organization or a religion under the First Amendment.” That decision is now on appeal before the Fifth Circuit, where the Becket Fund, a religious liberty law firm, filed an amicus brief urging the court to return to the original, Founding era meaning of religion as articulated by James Madison: “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.”