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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head-on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Doug:
[0:22] Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I'm your host, Doug Stewart, and I have a guest with me today, Paul Mueller. He's a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University. He's author of a new report, Religious Liberty in the United States, for 2026. We'll get into some of the details there. And that's what we're going to be here to talk about. Paul, thank you so much for being here.
Paul:
[0:50] Thanks for having me.
Doug:
[0:51] So give us a little bit about your background before we jump into this religious, what is it called here? Religious Liberty in the States. I want to say United States, although that is what it means. That's the title of it. The Religious Liberty in the States. Tell us about your work, what you do. You host a podcast, which I was recently made aware of. So that's great. I started listening to that. Tell us about yourself.
Paul:
[1:08] Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Colorado. I'm back in Colorado now, but went to Hillsdale College for undergrad, did political science and economics there, and then worked in D.C. For a few years. and went to George Mason where I did my master's and PhD in economics. So I'm an economist, but I'm interested in a lot of non-economic questions or broader economic questions. So my dissertation was on the moral and political thought of Adam Smith as it relates to economics today. But I've written on financial markets. I have a little book on the 2008 financial crisis. I mentioned financial markets, monetary institutions. And I went and taught at a place called the King's College in Manhattan for about eight years. It was a small Christian liberal arts college, downtown Manhattan, and then moved out to Colorado. I own a bed and breakfast out here. It was an old convent that we bought and renovated. So little entrepreneurial stuff on the side. I always believe not just in ideas, but in practicing the ideas that I talk and write about.
Paul:
[2:11] So I live out here, bed and breakfast, six children up in the mountains here. And then my day job is with the American Institute for Economic Research, as you mentioned, an AIER, a senior research fellow there. And so I do a lot of policy analysis and commentary, speak to a lot of different groups, conferences around the country, student groups, and do media appearances. And then the project that we're talking about today is kind of a side gig in some ways. So I was invited to participate and contribute as a social scientist for this study called Religious Liberty in the States. It's done by the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, which is this think tank out of Texas affiliated with a religious liberty law firm called First Liberty, the First Liberty Institute. And my co-author and the director of the project, Dr. Mark Hall, is a friend of mine and invited me to come help him with the project when he took over leading it. So we just finished our fifth year here. So he and I came on, I guess, year two. Sarah Estelle at Hope College had done the first year. And yeah, we've been working on it ever since. And we release it annually. And it's a pretty cool project that's building over time, trying to talk about or identify the landscape across the states for religious liberty and what it looks like from a.
Paul:
[3:36] Legal legislation standpoint. When it comes to religious liberty protections.
Doug:
[3:41] Yeah. So I have a question. It's like probably really in the weeds in one sense, but just more of like a process question. What does the research for this and the sort of, what does the legwork look like for kind of doing this work, right? Like you have to have a bunch of research assistants that kind of are assigned certain things. And I'm going to ask an inevitable question here. In the past report or two, has AI enhanced your ability to get that done even better?
Paul:
[4:08] Right. So our methodology, we spent, you know, and Sarah Estelle, again, economist at Hope, did Yeoman's work on this. So she spent a lot of time kind of thinking through and working out the methodology, the categorization. But the methodology for what we do is we look for religious liberty protections that are on the books. So we're not trying to say, oh, we could imagine protecting religious liberty in this way or that way. Do the states do it? We actually are doing almost kind of an inductive approach where we're going out and looking at what state legislatures have done to protect religious liberty. And then we incorporate into the study. And so we actually add new items each year as state legislatures defend or create new legislation to protect religious liberty in new ways. So for example.
Paul:
[5:03] Post-COVID, a number of state legislatures decided to pass laws saying, hey, you can't close, the state can't close churches and not.
Paul:
[5:12] Or they can't close them while not closing other public spaces, right? You can't discriminate against churches and shutting them down. So that was a new protection that had not been on the books anywhere pre-COVID because they never really shut them down before.
Paul:
[5:26] So that's kind of what we're looking for, things that are on the books. In terms of process we do, so my colleague, Dr. Mark Hall, teaches at Regent and has some law student assistants who go through and, you know, search LexisNexis and other places to see what laws are on the books. And then there's an interpretation element. And I'm not as involved in that. Mark heads more of that up of, okay, as we read this law, does it protect religious liberty? How does it protect it? Is it robust? Is it partial? Usually we score things one or zero but there's a few where there's some gradations where we might either have a couple categories or things that it might protect in the index and then we weight the index in a particular way so we have 50 different.
Paul:
[6:13] What we call items or protections, specific protections. But some of those protections are very closely related. And so, for example, medical providers being able to opt out of performing abortions, if they object to that, you can have an individual medical provider, you can have a private hospital, you can have a public hospital. There's actually four or five, six different protections that are all related to not performing abortions if it's against your conscience. And so we grouped that under one, what we call safeguard category.
Doug:
[6:46] Okay. I was going to ask about the whole safeguard thing. The question though I ask is like, if you're not looking at this, like I understand the approach, I think that you don't think, oh, well, what would religious liberty look like ideally and judge it against that? Then how do you end up with a baseline in judgment score? Like how does it, it seems, maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but it seems like then all you're doing is comparing the states to each other.
Paul:
[7:09] That's right. So...
Doug:
[7:12] I'm not saying that's bad. That's not a judgment. I'm just asking.
Paul:
[7:14] You're right. So it's when we score the states, so all the states get an index, like an overall index score. And what that index score means is of all the religious liberty protections that exist or that we're aware of in the states. We have, like I said, this universe of protections that we take as given that's already on the books. What percentage of those do you have?
Doug:
[7:38] Okay.
Paul:
[7:38] Alabama, Arkansas, Utah. And some of them have very few, you know, less than a third of the protections. And a couple have quite a few. So this year we actually had two with more than 80% of the protections or safeguards that we look at. And so there is this relative sense when we rate the states relative to each other, they can't all be number one. So there is that challenge, but we also have broken it down into, you know, do you have more than 80%? Are you between 60 and 80, between 40 and 60, between 20 and 40? And so in an ideal world, like what we would like to see is more states having more of the same kinds of protections so that lots of the states are in the 60, 70, 80, 90% range, as opposed to the 20, 30, 40% range.
Doug:
[8:29] Okay. I see. So if so there's if there's a state out there who has, you know, an aggressive legislature that is going to just say, all right, well, we have one hundred. I'm just going to make up a big number, right? We have one hundred and fifty laws that we want to put on our books. Let's say it's the state of Utah and they go out and put all those laws on the books of the next year or so. Your next report is now going to have an additional. Let's just assume that they all pass an additional hundred and fifty measures of some kind. And you're going to say, well, did West Virginia do that? Did Arkansas do that? Did Florida do those things?
Paul:
[9:03] So that's right. Although we would have to, we do exercise judgment, like we said with the other one, of are all of those 150 new things distinct? Like are they overlapping? Are they distinct? And what we might do is, you know, it might be, you know, if it was some kind of like nitpicky thing, it might be, okay, 120 of these things are actually all related. And so it's one safeguard. And so, yes, we're adding a new safeguard. But if a state doesn't have these 120 things, they're dinged 5% because we have 20 safeguards, not, you know, 80% because we've tripled the or quadrupled the number.
Paul:
[9:46] So but but you're right. And this is actually, I think, one of the values of the study is that states can see their scores decline over time.
Paul:
[9:56] Even when they do nothing. And so one of the interesting elements is that Illinois, was actually had the highest score for three years in a row. It had the most, the highest index score of religious liberty protections, which is a little bit surprising because if you know much, you know, there's no about Illinois. It's not particularly Christian, evangelical. You don't think like, oh yeah, there's a lot of religious liberty in Illinois. That's where I want to go to protect my religious liberty. So why is it number one? Well, it's number one, because back in the 80s and the early 90s, it was less blue. It was less, let's say, non-Christian. And they passed a lot of religious protection. So a lot of medical conscience stuff, a lot of clergy, being able to offer wine in the service, for example, is something we look at. So they passed these kinds of protections back when it was maybe less hostile to religious liberty. And so they've had a high score and they still have a high score. However, they haven't done anything in the past since we've been doing the study the past five or six years. There have been no new protections they've passed. So as we've added elements of nondiscrimination around transgender and adoption or counseling around transgender issues or not closing churches, they haven't added those things. And so their score has fallen because the universe of items has been growing slowly and they haven't been adding to it.
Doug:
[11:19] Well, to me, the approach you're taking is what's on the books, which is a very concrete answer. It's not how many thousands of headlines look like Illinois is terrible for Christians or something like that. I mean, maybe those headlines do exist. And there's, I guess, a study to be made out of that. But.
Doug:
[11:37] The value there of the on the books, you know, thing, I have a specific question. I hope I can ask it right because it's kind of off the cuff here. Are there things that come up for... Consideration as this is a law that is protective of religious liberty, where you guys have said, well, that's kind of what it's trying to do, but we don't deem that that's actually doing that one way or another. Like, are there laws that show up, you know, as there have been new laws that show up for you to be like, well, that's not really a religious liberty law. One, the reason I think about this, I just recently interviewed Jonathan Rauch, and he was talking about the Latter-day Saints Church in Utah in after 2000, I think it's 2008 with Proposition 8 was passed in California, they had a lot of backlash for their support of it. And so they worked sort of behind the scenes to get more religious protections for Christians while also pushing for non-religious freedom of conscience with like gay marriage. So for example, I don't have details off the top of head because again we're, doing this off the cuff a little bit they protected themselves but they were also supporting legislation that i guess allowed gay marriage in their state, that would be one of those like gray areas of like well is that a religious liberty protection or it is or isn't it.
Paul:
[12:55] Yeah, it's a good question. So a couple of thoughts on it. One thing that I'll mention is we very much, look for and include protections for non-Christian religious practices and also for conscience. So Mark Hall, my co-author, has written a lot about the conscience and the importance of conscientious objections, both from the American founding through the period. So again, most of that is religious, but not exclusively so. And so, you know, the index is a religious liberty focus, but conscience matters as well. And so we would want and value protections that are on conscience, even if it's not grounded in, say, a specific religion or religious context. Yeah. So we do care about that. Now, what I will say is that the lines get kind of murky. So one of the things that we cover that I'm conflicted about in my own mind is, states who pass laws that protect people from discrimination on the basis of their religion by banks and insurance companies.
Paul:
[14:15] And so it's basically the debanking problem, right, where you have large banks, that literally close down accounts of religious organizations because they object to their religion. And so there are states that are saying, look, you can't do that. That's a kind of discrimination that's based on people's religious conviction, and you're not allowed to do that. The challenge from a libertarian perspective is, well, are we violating free association here, right? Are we compelling a kind of association by saying you can't do it? And it's tricky because from the standpoint of, property and private ownership, right, we would say, well, if you have a cake shop or flower shop, you should have the right to refuse service to participate in things that you disagree with, right? And the Supreme Court has ruled this, right? That you, you know, Phillips doesn't, Jack Phillips doesn't have to custom make a cake for a religious ceremony that he objects to. But he says, I disagree with this. You can't compel him to do that. And so the question is, well, with these laws, are we compelling banks to do business with religious groups, even though they object, say, to the religion? And the reason I'm conflicted on this as a libertarian is that Jack Phillips is an individual proprietor who owns his company. Who owns J.P. Morgan?
Paul:
[15:37] Right. Who owns Citibank? Right. You have shareholders. You have diffuse ownership. You have a board of directors who are accountable to some extent to the shareholders for directing that entity but what you see going on and the reason why i've made peace with including these things is that what you see happen and what these laws are targeting are random mid-tier bureaucrats in these banks basically saying, i as the you know manager whatever don't like this religious group And so I'm going to flag a high risk, whatever, and shut them down.
Doug:
[16:10] Yeah.
Paul:
[16:11] It's not like I'm being forced to associate with them against my convictions or my property is being taken, like in the Jack Phillips, for example. This is some mid-tier hired bureaucrat making these decisions in a discriminatory way. But again, if we back out, there are some concerns here from a very high level free association perspective.
Doug:
[16:32] Well, that was literally the next question I have, because I can imagine already we're 15 or so minutes into this conversation and my libertarians are saying religious liberty is just a cover for special protections, special legal protections. Why can't we just go with I don't want to bake your cake? I don't have to give you my religious reasons sort of thing. Now, that doesn't negate the value of such a report. So we're not like I'm not putting that down. But it's like if we had a country where everybody had that mindset of free association applies to all and religion isn't really part of the reasons why, except for I mean, except for the fact that there might be underpinnings to why you believe in freedom of conscience and association. Yeah. I mean, what do you have to say about that from a from a like maybe moral perspective, not from a, you know, the study is valuable perspective. We're getting a little off script on the like purpose of the report, but I'm just kind of curious your thoughts there.
Paul:
[17:23] No, no, it's a good question. I mean, again, I lean that direction myself. I think the argument is that the problem that you run into in many, many cases is that laws, I mean, as a libertarian, I shouldn't have these laws, but the problem is that.
Paul:
[17:48] People can just say, I won't follow any law because I don't like it, because I object to it. And so, like, the religious liberty category is the idea of, like, no, actually, I have a very clear reason why this particular law goes against my conscience or my beliefs. And so, for example, you can't just say, well, officer, I was speeding because I don't believe in I have a religious objection to the speed limit. Right. Or I have my conscientious objection to the speed limit. Right. It's sort of like, well, no, that that's not really going to fly. And so you can't say, oh, I have a religious objection to this or I just disagree with it versus like, you know, vaccinations are kind of an interesting one. Right. Again, where, you know, I think people should be lopped out, as you say, for any reason. You shouldn't have to take it whether it's a religious reason or not. But religious kind of gives you a trump card, if you will, or gives you like another layer of that goes back into both jurisprudence and American history and even beyond U.S. History of like, this is a really important part of, the social fabric and how people make decisions and what matters in life and has long been recognized that politics should not be interfering with this particular kind of practice and belief.
Doug:
[19:15] Yeah. I think the people who probably are objecting to this are also saying, well, why not? Or sorry, I would have this pushback about like, well, just free association is more on the level of instead of why, why call it religious exemptions or religious safeguards instead of just conscience, right? Like, I don't know if anybody's going to say it's against my conscience to not drive the speed or to drive, to be forced to drive the speed limit. I mean, I guess I'm sure you will have a crazy libertarian saying that, but because there's all stripes, right? But the, the idea of association isn't quite about a law, is it? Or does it make sense?
Paul:
[19:47] Yeah. You know, it is a good question. I mean, I think, Well, so there's a couple reasons why it's religious liberty in particular. Again, you have a whole body of law here. And there are divergences where religious liberty has, say, a more substantive, view of the good than just a pure libertarian free association. And gay marriage, which you brought up, is a great example of this, right, where it's not clear to me at all that Obergefell was a good decision. And so if you read someone like Robbie George or others, right, you can have the idea of people should be free to act in various ways, which is different from the state should sanction whatever they want to be marriage, right? So a pure libertarian might say, I should have the right to marry whomever I want, full stop, period, and the state should recognize it, which is always an inconsistency, I think, in a libertarian position. Like, why are you inviting the state into marriage?
Doug:
[20:50] Oh, that's how, I mean, we wrote a book that had a whole couple questions on this. Yeah, exactly.
Paul:
[20:55] But that's where, like, well, from a religious perspective, we would say, well, there's actually a substantive conception of marriage. And now the other thing is that religious liberty is not the ultimate trump card, right? Right. So we recognize that in certain extremes, the state has compelling interests. Right. So you can't say, well, my religion involves human sacrifice or it involves, you know, polygamy was a famous example with with Mormons and Latter-day Saints. So it's not that religious liberty always, always, always trumps the state interest. But it's the idea the state has to have a very strong, compelling interest to do something to overturn it. So there's probably more we could go into there, but there are some disagreements where, like, you know, this is kind of it's in some ways. I think this is the story of the ACLU, right? You look at the ACLU in the 60s and you're like, man, they're doing some good work. You look at the ACLU today and it's like, man, they're just like beaten up on non-atheistic, you know, progressives. And again, you don't have to go that direction, of course, but that seems to be the way that kind of the civil libertarian divorced from kind of an ethical, religious conception and grounding of rights and freedom, had gone, at least in a very public organization.
Doug:
[22:12] Yeah, no, I agree. Thankfully, we have places like fire picking up the mantle where where they ought to and that kind of thing.
Doug:
[22:19] So before we get into the report, I want to just like let's talk a little bit about like federalism and like why 50 states versus a federal approach to two things. I mean, part of that is probably just the incident of history. And part of it is just, you know, that's where you can get data from. But is there is there a reason it's important for Americans to know that you've done this work in all the 50 states? It almost feels like an obvious question, but it's worth talking about, I think.
Paul:
[22:43] No, it is a good one. And because it's because it is very important because you think about, well, the U.S. Constitution, you know, the First Amendment protects our speech. It protects assembly. You know, it says that the national government, the state governments can't establish religion or church. So you have you do have a lot of protections. And so the example I mentioned, the Jack Phillips cake master example went to the Supreme Court And the Supreme Court, defended his religious liberty to say, like, no, you can't, he can't be compelled to do this. So you do have protections at the federal level, but there's a number of reasons why state protections are still very important.
Paul:
[23:23] One is that there are many places or many areas where the federal law and constitution are silent or haven't been, you know, worked out. So there's lots more protections that you can see at the state level than there are at the federal level.
Paul:
[23:41] Two, and probably the most important one, is that state protections, especially legislative protections, prevent a lot of heartache and pain. And what I mean by that is, so Jack Phillips won, but it took him, you know, whatever, five, eight, ten years of litigation to win. Right. Versus if you'd had, you know, legal protection in the state saying people can't be compelled to participate in ceremonies they disagree with. That goes against the religious convictions, if that was on the books in Colorado, he would never have been taken to court in the first place. And so you see that even though the legal system, the federal legal system tends to, at least recently, has done a lot of defending of who has liberty, it's slow and it's extremely painful. And so if you can preempt that, that's important. The other reason it matters too from a state level is we sometimes get objections, well, hey, this is Texas. And, you know, in Texas, we are a very favorable climate towards religious liberty. We don't actually need laws on the books protecting people because our culture and our climate is just very favorable. It's sort of like, well, that's true for 85, 90 percent of Texas, but it's not true in Austin. Right. You go to Austin and you will find city council members. You will find local judges who will crack down or do all kinds of things that are oppressive or causing problems for people exercising their faith.
Paul:
[25:08] Even though it's in Texas, it's this blue sort of bubble. And so a state level protection basically says, hey, judge, you know, this is the state law. You can't go in and persecute people in these ways or, you know, take away or violate or living in these ways. So and the third thing I'll say, going back to the Illinois example.
Paul:
[25:30] Is that getting these things on the state books is really helpful because the political climate changes. The federal climate can change, but the local climate can change as well. So I'm here in Colorado. In the 90s, in the early 2000s, Colorado was very red and was, you know, nominally very Christian. You've got focus on the family. You've got sort of evangelicalism, a lot of parachurch organizations, the Colorado Springs, very favorable. When I was growing up, very favorable climate towards religion in Colorado. Now, it's not. Very, very unfavorable climate. But unlike Illinois, Colorado, the legislators in the 90s and 2000s didn't pass, didn't put very many protections, religious protections on the books. And so that's why the Jack Phillips case happened here in Colorado. And then recently, there's another Supreme Court case about counseling that, the person objected to giving, you know, pro-gender identity affirming care and was like going to refer them somewhere else. The person like, you have to give me that care. Again, went to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court said, no, you know, you can't force people to act against their religious convictions and their conscience to like do that, provide the service. That happened here in Colorado too. And it's because we don't have anything on the books to like, you know, preempt this before it spends your creation.
Doug:
[26:50] Well, that stands in contrast to what you were, sorry, Colorado stands in contrast to, was Illinois, who you said had it on the books a long time ago because of, you know, certain legislature, whereas Colorado back then, you know, 30 years ago, they didn't quite need it because, well, why do we need this?
Doug:
[27:05] Let's everybody's like this. So, yeah, well, I want to get into the report, Excuse me for a sec. I want to get into the report. I'm going to pull up one of the pages or a screenshot of one of the pages. And now you'll be familiar with this. This is going to be the map that has all the states, you know, different colors here. So for those listening, you're going to have to watch this on YouTube or I'll put in the show notes the link to download the whole report. You can see this here. So this is the ranking of each state. And I just have to ask you, Paul, when you look at this first, what's the like most the thing that stands out to you the most? I know that you're very familiar with all of these details and why the colors are the way they are and rankings and so forth. But just from a general, you know, from a kind of first glance perspective, what do you notice the most here? And talk a little bit about anything surprising.
Paul:
[27:50] Well, I think, you know, when we look at maps like this, it's often around electoral politics, right? You think about like presidential elections, you think about legislative stuff. And so when I look at this, I'm often sort of like, OK, red, blue, you know, and obviously that's oversimplistic. But I think, OK, red state.
Doug:
[28:06] That's how our minds think of these. Whenever you see a colored map, a map of colors, that's where you go. That's probably why you don't have red in this color scheme.
Paul:
[28:14] Exactly. And I think what's interesting and part of what we think is valuable about the index is that it's not we're not trying to be partisan. Like we recognize that there are more Christians in the red camp and the blue camp. Red camp tends to be more, at least on the surface, pro-Christian. But you look at this map and it's not a real stark divide. It's not like, OK, all the red states are the top 25 and all the blue states are the bottom 25. As we mentioned, Illinois is in the top 10. Washington is in the top 10. And there are a lot of red states that are near the bottom. West Virginia has been near the bottom for many years.
Paul:
[28:49] You've got Nebraska, Missouri are pretty low, South Dakota, Wyoming. And so what it kind of shows is that this is not just a partisan issue. Although what we expect over time, if the report is compelling and finds its way into the hands of legislators, we would expect, red states to kind of improve over time, again, because they tend to be more attuned or interested or care about liberty issues. And we see that. So if you look at the top three states this year, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, those have all been both very red states and very active states legislatively. And they've been very intentional in Arkansas and Tennessee, Florida. I mean, they have intentionally been passing religious liberty legislation over the last few years to increase the protections that they have. So we do see movement along that red-blue divide, but it's very, it's not quite that simple.
Doug:
[29:49] You'd think, though, that even those on the Democrats, so for example, let's say like California, it's pretty near the bottom, or maybe it'll take something a little bit less near the bottom, like even like Colorado, to look at that and say, okay, we don't want Christians to think of us as their enemies. So we're going to we're going to play well with the religious liberty protections that our Republican legislatures across the aisle in our state are going to to, you know, exhibit. And so we're going to you'd think they would try to keep up just for political sake.
Paul:
[30:19] Well, it depends on their objective. So yes, there could be an element to that as long as they don't lose too much of their existing constituency. And so in Colorado, for example, right, the LGBTQ stuff is a huge, huge issue. You know, like a current governor is in a same-sex partnership. And so he's not at all interested in, you know, making sure that fostering is – like, so to give you an example of the foster case, right? So the state, again, I would argue in a libertarian world, the state shouldn't be involved in this at all. But given that state governments are involved in the fostering system and licensing people and placing kids, many states basically say, hey, to be eligible to be a foster parent, you have to sign and agree that you will affirm whatever a child's gender identity, self-identified gender identity is. And you have to go along with that and affirm that or you can't be a part of the foster care system.
Doug:
[31:18] Wow.
Paul:
[31:19] And we would say, well, that's, you know, that's bad public policy. It also violates conscience. Like there's all plenty of problems with that. But in Colorado, they're not going to be putting that on the books, even if it got made some Republicans happy because it's so against this kind of agenda of, no, everybody should affirm gender identity all the way down. But what we do hope to see is, again, the minority religious groups. So in like an organ, for example, we would hope.
Doug:
[31:44] Which organ's ranked 39 for those listening. I'll give you a little bit more.
Paul:
[31:47] Rank 39. We would hope to maybe work with the legislatures there and say, hey, you know, when it comes to public school. Maybe you should think about creating more excused absences for religious holidays because the school year is actually based a lot around the Christian calendar, right? So we call it winter break, but it's over Christmas, right? Usually you have Easter off. So like the public school calendar has sort of developed out of a generally kind of Christian liturgical calendar, not perfectly. But if you're Jewish or you're Muslim, your holidays don't fall along the Christian calendar in the same way. And so we might say, hey, Oregon, maybe you should add these exemptions. And we might work with, you know, Muslim or Jewish or other groups and say, hey, maybe we can all agree on this, that we should have excused absences for religious observance by kids in the public school system that, you know, doesn't really benefit Christians that much because the school system is already kind of built. Around the Christian holiday calendar. But that might be something where you get some minority groups, some people across the aisle that's not a highly controversial thing, really, just to allow some more excused absences. So again, we'd say that is valuable, maybe not as important as, you know, being able to exercise your conscience in other ways, but it's still valuable and important. So there are ways in which we might find some possibilities to make progress.
Doug:
[33:16] Yeah. Okay. I want to ask you about Pennsylvania because that's where I live and my kids are in, well, two-thirds of my children are in the school system here. And, you know, we live in a particularly I wouldn't say like a heavy Christianized area or a Christian area, but it's definitely been Christianized, large Anabaptist area in this regard, a lot of conservative Christians. But Pennsylvania I feel like is a mixed bag when it comes to, liberty. But I'm just kind of curious, is there anything notable to say about Pennsylvania? This is kind of a personal detour here, but 13 is not bad out of 50.
Paul:
[33:56] Yeah, 13 is not bad. Let me just pull up Pennsylvania here and see. Okay. So...
Doug:
[34:10] During COVID, our governor was not too friendly toward churches opening and stuff. So maybe that's maybe that have a little bit of PTSD from that.
Paul:
[34:22] Yeah. So it looks like. Yeah, that Pennsylvania is is good on a lot of things and it's kind of mixed on on things as well. So they don't have protections around the fostering that I mentioned, the foster system. They don't have the idea that clergy or religious entities can opt out of ceremonies they object to, same-sex marriage and other kinds of thing. They don't have the houses of worship protected from closing. So a lot of it is the actually associational stuff, protections, whether it's business or the insurance, banking, or the not participating in ceremonies you object to. They have a lot of other things in terms of health insurance, not requiring health insurance companies or policies that have to provide abortion or sterilization services. They have some protections for abortion, contraception, a general conscience, medical conscience provision. So, yeah, so it's definitely it's a mixed bag. And, you know, their score overall is 55 percent. So over half of the safeguards that we look at, they have.
Paul:
[35:32] But 55 is, you know, certainly not 100 either.
Doug:
[35:35] No, that's still pretty low. Well, that brings us to the next slide I want to show up here, which is, I think, now maybe this is the distribution. Explain this chart here, distribution of states. What's the, it seems to me, if I'm reading this at first glance correctly, that the fact that this mountain is toward the left side of the scale is actually not very good.
Paul:
[35:55] Right. So... The idea here is it looks at, okay, states that could range from 0% to 100%, where do states fall? The majority of states fall between kind of 25%, 30%, and 45%. So that doesn't say most states have fewer than half the safeguard protections that we measure. And if you think about, though, the way we score these is, you know, top quintile, 80% to 100%, excellent. Second quintile, 60% to 80% of protections, we say good. And then, you know, 40 to 60% is sort of adequate. Many states are even below that, right? They're not even really kind of adequate in terms of like they're not even in the middle quintile. They're actually in this sort of like poor. Fortunately, there are no states that are under 20% or 25%. So all states have various religious liberty protections on their books from different parts in their history. But most states are not doing a particularly robust job of defending validity on their books.
Doug:
[37:00] So I was a little too happy that Pennsylvania was 13 because 13 out of this is a little, this is like a slightly depressing. Yeah.
Paul:
[37:09] No, that's right. And the goal is to see that mountain kind of shift to the right over time.
Doug:
[37:14] Yeah.
Paul:
[37:15] What I'm afraid we may see, I mean, if it was just a red state, blue state story is that you'd have like two mountains. You have like the mountain on the bottom end that doesn't have very many protections and then the mountain on the top end that has a lot. Maybe we'll move in that direction over time if, you know, if red states and legislators want to act on this more, we might move in that direction. I'm not sure. That'd be better than the big mountain, everybody being on the left. But we'd like to see every, all the states move to the right over time.
Doug:
[37:43] So I have a question about this. It made me think about it when we were looking at the chart I just had up. Are there are we're talking about the on the books nature of this, right? Like these are things that you're looking at that are on the books. We all know that there are things that are on the books that are so old that, if challenged, they wouldn't survive. Now, I don't know. Maybe those maybe these religious exemptions are still within my lifetime. And so they're pretty recent. It's not like we're relying on an 1870s law or something like that. But I don't I don't know, like how far back does this go? And if those particular laws in that particular state were challenged, how likely are any of these to be sort of not upheld because they're too archaic
Doug:
[38:22] or too poorly written for their time or for our time?
Paul:
[38:25] It's a great question. So I'll say maybe three things about it. So first, we are looking at recent legislation. So, you know, the protections that states have, you know, I don't think we have any legislation that we link to or look at that's more than like 30 or 40 years old. So we're not looking at, like, statues from the 1800s to give credit here. So it's more recent stuff. However, the point you raise is a good one and something that we really try to think about, and it's hard to do, which is, okay, you have a RFRA, a Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Illinois and in Texas. So in our study, they both get points for that, the same points. However, the way that Illinois' court system interprets and applies the RFRA, might be pretty different from the way the Texas court system applies the RFRA because there are elements of judicial interpretation. We don't have a great way of sort of like measuring that. We're thinking about it. We're trying to figure out other ways we can actually say, how are these laws actually interpreted and applied?
Paul:
[39:31] Right now, that's beyond the scope of the study, but we're aware that that can be an issue. Again, the clearer the statute, the less there's an issue. So just say it very clearly. And so you don't have cases in Illinois, their religious conscience objection, like medical conscience stuff, they're not even challenged really because it's so clear. It's just like written very clearly. You can't compel someone to do X. And so, but there's others like the RFRA, the broader umbrella ones that have more interpretation. So that's an element. I forget what the third thing I was going to say about the way that these things are applied. Oh, yeah, here's the last thing that I'll say that we're still working through and part of how we're updating the study is...
Paul:
[40:13] And do we need, and this goes back to actually one of your earlier questions, do we need specific exemptions for religious purposes or can there be more general laws? And so we focus on religious exemptions. However, we've had some state legislators or different people in different states write back to us and say, hey, you know, we know we don't have an abortion exemption clause. So we don't have a law that says religious providers don't have to perform abortions if it goes against their medical conscience. But we have a law saying abortions are illegal in our state. So do we really need that extra law? Like, you know, can we get points for this? Because no, because legally, yeah, yeah, because legally, so it's not just that, well, it's not going to come up because we're like a favorable state. It's like, no, legally, this is not allowed. So they can't be compelled against their conscience or not to reform an abortion. And so we do give points for that. And those are ones we haven't looked at as closely. And so we're trying to update as people say, hey, we don't have these specific ones you look for, but actually, look, we have this broad, you know, kind of prohibition or law that actually subsumes that of that exemption. So we do give we do want to give points for that. And we are updating things as we go and correct.
Doug:
[41:29] You know, your remark there that about that one in particular just reminds me of like Like I have this like flash of a couple of headlines written by some pretty far left progressive Christian, you know, clergy or something about how abortion and, you know, abortion right is a Christian value or some craziness. And I'm just thinking, wow, it's it's I don't know if it ever happens, but you can imagine somebody in a state where abortion is illegal claiming that they have a right to abortion for religious reasons. It just seems really odd. But I can imagine there's some left leaning people out there who might.
Paul:
[42:00] Well, and this is where like this is the this is the religious substance of religious part, because you do get and I was listening to some some legal lawyers talking about this, like you do get, synagogue of Satan people who are who actually make explicitly that case where they're like part of our religion is having abortions. And, like, they go to court and the judges and the lawyers point out and say, like, well, what about this and like that? And you find out, no, it's actually not. You're just, like, making this up to, like, cause problems. It's not actually a deeply held conviction that it has to be applied in this way. But that's where if you just let people opt out with anything substantive behind it, you can have people making complete counterclaims to these parts of things and say, well, but you're really this is not grounded in anything. You know, again, the bar is not real high. Like, you know, you can, there's a lot of different religions out there and conscience, like there's stuff out there, but there is a bar. It's not simply, oh, I just object for conscientious or religious reasons. You have to do a little bit more than that.
Doug:
[43:00] Yeah, okay, gotcha. So let's talk a little bit about efficacy and like message here, right? Like, so we're talking about this on a show that is going to be like, you know, we're going to clap at all this, right? And say, hey, great work. You've given us an idea of where the states are and that's great. But I don't know how many legislators are listening. Actually, I think I do know one, but I don't know how many legislators are listening to this show and thinking, oh, wow, I need my hands on this because I need to get let's say they live in West Virginia and they're like, oh, I need to get West Virginia up and I'm going to start thinking about this more. How are you getting the message out? And are these distributed to legislators around the country?
Paul:
[43:37] Yeah, no, it's a great question. There's a couple of things. One is in the legal circles that we run in, people rub shoulders with legislators. And so like the lawyers for First Liberty or Alliance of Indian Freedom, like they being aware of this when they interact with legislators can tell them about it. We do have a number of direct interactions with legislators. And so actually, a couple of things we've done recently that have been very exciting is last year, we did a press conference with Governor DeSantis talking about the Rules of Liberty in the States report. So First Liberty had some connections with someone in his office and they said, hey, Florida moved to number one this year. Would you guys like to do a press conference with us sort of talking about the index and Florida being number one? And then this year, Arkansas actually moved to number one because they passed several good pieces of legislation in the last year. And so we did a press conference with Sarah Huckabee Sanders about it. So that gets a lot of publicity in terms of, you know, governors of these states that become number one saying, hey, this liberty matters, here's what we've done. And that gets attention from other states, other governors and legislators. There's people in Utah, I think, who are interested in trying to get Utah number one. We'll see what happens. We also have in the past, we don't do this every year, but we've gone to a gathering of legislators. The American Legislative Exchange Council holds like an annual conference that a lot of state legislators go to. So we've been at that before and handed out material and met with legislators and say, hey, here's information about your state, about the study.
Paul:
[45:04] We also create a lot of resources in terms of with the study itself, it's online. So you can find the map you talked about. You can find individual state pages. What do they have? What do they not have? And most importantly, for every, you know, protection and safeguard, we have links to.
Paul:
[45:21] To model legislation, if you will, or states that have this legislation on the books that's really good, in our opinion, and say, hey, if you want to see what a good RFRA looks like, here's a link to Alabama's or whatever. So we do. But again, Mark and I, we're academics. We both, we've taught in academia for a long time. We're scholars. And so we love to see people use it, and we talk with people, but the marketing and the connections are more kind of around us, and we just participate and provide the information and the arguments as best we can.
Doug:
[45:53] All right. Anything I didn't ask you that you wish we could say that we could talk about? We've covered quite a bit of territory.
Paul:
[46:00] I think we covered it pretty comprehensively. I mean, it's, again, I'll just emphasize that the study is developing and growing over time. And we very much are, it is a research project, right? That we're doing that has a lot of political or legislative implications. And so our data is online, our information is online. We try to update things whenever we get corrected. We're hoping now that we have five years under our belt to maybe do like kind of an academic symposium, get some other scholars in to kind of, okay, analyze the data, the trends, compare it to demographic shifts, compare it to economic freedom, which is very important, but kind of just a different thing that we're not measuring in this index. Right. So we're hopeful that this project will keep growing and that people will use it in a lot of different ways over time.
Doug:
[46:49] Yeah. Well, I know we're talking about a study, but I'm going to pull this up here and just show everybody that this is not just like a literal white paper. This is like a beautifully designed and something that's like, I'm just going to get going through. There's visuals, there's wording, there's images, obviously there's text, of course. There's the discussion of safeguards. This is like, I don't know I would say like college level textbook design like this is all full color I'll just I'll just go with that.
Paul:
[47:17] And a lot of pictures it's meant for anybody can kind of pick up and and kind of read through it in 10 to 10 minutes to half an hour and see the visuals the graphics and stuff and kind of have a sense of what it is and of course we have this you know enormous spreadsheet which I manage you know 50 states across you know 50 different items each year so it just begins to multiply so there's a lot of data behind it but the report itself is is very accessible and and yeah yeah yeah.
Doug:
[47:46] All right, Paul, tell us a little bit about where people can find you online. Go ahead and plug your podcast because I know you have one. And it's a good way to sign off here.
Paul:
[47:54] Yeah, definitely. Well, you can find, you know, I've got a website, just pauldmuller.com. You can find me on AIR's website. And then the podcast you mentioned, which I really have been enjoying, which started this year, is called The Economist Next Door. And it's meant to be, you know, if your next door neighbor was an economist and you had conversations with them about different issues, what would they say? What would they talk about? So we focus a lot on economic issues. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I'm very interested in other things. So the podcast, the episode that came out last week was talking about the sociologist Robert Nisbet and the quest for community and how human beings desire and really need for communities and the deterioration of community, in modern societies, Western countries leads to either deaths of despair and isolation or people jumping into radicalization, radical communities. So if you think about like the rise of democratic socialists of America, it's not because they have good ideas. It's not because, you know, they're going to make the economy work. It's people are going there for identity out of frustration. And so anyway, so we have a whole podcast talking about that. This week's about affordability issues. So I encourage listeners to hop on that and give it a listen and see what they think.
Doug:
[49:08] Excellent. All right, Paul Mueller, thanks so much for being here with us. And hopefully we'll chat again sometime.
Paul:
[49:13] Doug, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.