Americans strongly support preservation of religious freedoms, although fewer believe their rights will be protected by the government, a survey says.
Moreover, not all Americans are enthusiastic about giving Islam full religious liberty protections.
Eight in 10 Americans say it is very important or extremely important for people like themselves to be allowed to practice their religion freely, said the survey of some 1,000 people released Wednesday by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
However, the survey showed that people’s confidence that the U.S. government would protect their religious freedoms has fallen steeply: An AP-NORC poll in 2011 found that 75 percent of Americans thought the government was doing a good job defending religious liberty.
Only 55 percent said the same in the poll taken Dec. 10-13.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said Wednesday that religious liberty issues will loom large in 2016, with “new alliances” — such as atheist groups and Satanist groups — already forming to attack Christians.
SEE ALSO: Judge: Maryland cross memorial doesn’t violate Constitution
Liberal civil liberties groups are already suing Catholic hospitals for not offering abortion or sterilization services, while gay rights groups are stirring up public sentiment against Catholic schools and atheist groups are opposing religious expressions in the public square, Mr. Donohue said.
This week, for instance, the American Humanist Association filed a notice of appeal with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The group represents three citizens who want the removal or modification of a 40-foot Latin cross that has long stood in Bladensburg, Maryland, in honor of fallen World War I veterans.
“The Bladensburg Cross is an enormous Christian symbol on government property and has the clear effect of endorsing religion,” Monica Miller, senior counsel for the AHA’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center, said this week.
The group says the cross stands on a major public road, and government war memorials should recognize and honor all veterans, including those of minority religions or people who have no religion.
In November, a federal judge upheld the constitutionality of the cross, which the American Legion erected 90 years ago in honor of 49 Maryland men who died in World War I.
Noel Francisco, lead counsel for the American Legion, and Kelly Shackelford, president and chief executive of the Liberty Institute, said this week that the federal ruling should be upheld so that the war memorial can stand for another 100 years.
The AP-NORC poll also found that Americans were not equally enthusiastic about religious freedoms for all faiths.
Eighty-two percent said religious freedom protections were important for Christians. About seven in 10 said the same for Jewish religious freedoms, and 67 percent said the same for Mormons. But only about 61 percent supported religious protection for Muslims or for people identified with no religion.
AP noted that the poll was taken in the days after the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, California, and amid political disputes over Muslim refugees and immigration.
Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, told AP that the poll’s findings reflect deep divisions among Americans about the very definition of religious liberty, which has taken on newly politicized meanings in a time of debate over same-sex marriage and the threat from Islamism.
“Religious freedom is now in the eye of the beholder,” Mr. Haynes said. “People in different traditions, with different ideological commitments, define religious freedom differently.”
Eric Rassbach, a counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm that takes clients of all religions, told AP that “people may not realize you cannot have a system where there’s one rule for one group and another rule for a different group you don’t like.”
“No religion is an island,” Mr. Rassbach said. “If somebody else’s religion is being limited by the government, yours is liable to be limited in the same way. Even if you only care about your own particular group, you should care about other groups, too, because that’s the way the law works.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,042 adults was conducted online and by phone using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is 3.9 percentage points.
⦁ This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Cheryl Wetzstein can be reached at cwetzstein@washingtontimes.com.
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