New frontiers of religious freedom? LGBTQ rights versus religious conscience

ABSTRACT One frontier of public deliberation on religious freedom involves the clash of religious conscience with government rules against discrimination. As American courts consider issues pitting religious believers against other groups, especially LGBTQ citizens, the public is deeply divided. A paradigmatic case has been the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation, testing whether a Christian baker could refuse to produce a wedding cake for a same-sex couple given his religious objections. As that case continues and similar confrontations proliferate, the First Amendment’s ‘free exercise’ clause produces new dilemmas. Although public attitudes seldom influence judicial decisions directly, in the long run American courts may well ‘follow the election returns’. This contribution considers public assessments of the importance of religious liberty and then examines attitudes on the Masterpiece controversy, using data from the Democracy Fund’s Voter Survey and the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES). We find that religious factors play a major role in determining citizen opinion, as the public reacts very much along ‘culture wars’ lines. But personal attitudes toward LGBTQ citizens also have a major direct impact on views about ‘conscience exemptions’.