God, Law, and the Cult of Power: Marci Hamilton on what it will take to restore the rule of law in an era of authoritarian religion

The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire career defending.

Marci is a Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in constitutional law. Marci is an intellectual leader against extreme religious liberty. She is the founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation, which she ran for a decade.

The core argument of God vs. the Gavel is one that sounds obvious until you see how hard it is to actually enforce: religious organizations, like every other institution, must obey the law. No mandatory exemption. No special carve-out because a leader claims divine authority.

Marci put it plainly: the very first free exercise case in United States history established that belief is absolute, but conduct is not. Conduct can harm others, and a functioning democracy does not allow anyone to use religion as a shield against accountability for harm. The cases that matter, she told me, are always about harm. Psychological harm is real. You only need to sit with a child sex abuse survivor once to understand that. This is a most important conversation.

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