Legal Docket: Freedom depends on your zip code
Date
08/10/2026
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Legal Docket: Freedom depends on your zip code
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WORLD Radio - Legal Docket: Freedom depends on your zip code
A new report ranks all 50 states on religious liberty protections, and the results defy assumptions — Illinois cracks the top ten while once-religious Colorado lands near the bottom. WORLD's Mary Reichard talked with report co-authors Mark David Hall and Paul Mueller about how where you live can affect how you live.
Melissa Klein ran a bakery in the state of Oregon. Photo courtesy of First Liberty Institute
Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 10th day of August, 2026. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.
LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Legal Docket, and today, something a little different: religious liberty at the state level.
Of course with 50 states it’d be impossible to cover each one in our time here. But you can learn a great deal of how to assess religious liberty in your particular state.
REICHARD: Right. Think of the First Amendment as the floor of your religious liberty rights. That’s at the level of the federal government, a Constitutional right.
The states can make a higher ceiling, they can make it easy to exercise religious freedom, or they can make citizens fight it out in court.
That’s because states can add protections beyond what federal law requires. They can protect for medical conscience objections, parental rights, even for matters involving finances.
Aaron and Melissa Klein learned the hard way what happens when states don’t strengthen those types of protections. They ran a bakery in the state of Oregon. Two women came in and asked for a custom designed wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony. The Kleins declined to do so for religious reasons.
HALL: Now, in a world of consenting adults, that should have been the end of it. I mean, this is Oregon! Pretty much any baker in the state would be happy to custom design that cake.
MAST: That’s Mark David Hall, co-researcher of a new report that looks at each state to examine how protected people are. He says the two women had ample access to the goods they wanted. But the Kleins still wound up in court.
HALL: But because this is Oregon…the state came down on them like a ton of bricks, civil suits were filed, and eventually they were driven out of business and they chose to leave the state…If they had lived in Arkansas or Mississippi, the law clearly would have protected their ability not to participate in a wedding ceremony to which they had religious or moral objections.
Hall worked with Paul Mueller, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. Both men are part of a project at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy called “Religious Liberty in the States 2026.”
MUELLER: And so this project was created about five years ago to begin cataloging, indexing, weighting, and measuring how states are doing in protecting religious liberty and what kinds of protections of religious liberty protections are out there.
REICHARD: The report evaluates fifty different legal protections.Each law earns one point with no subjective weighting as to which law is more important.
Here’s Hall again:
HALL: So we look at 50 distinct ways that states can choose to protect religious liberty, but they don't have to. When the report started five years ago, we looked at 29 distinct ways. So every year we add new protections.
Going at it this way produced a rather surprising result: the states you might assume are strongest on religious liberty, sometimes are not.
MUELLER: And so for several years, Illinois was actually at the top of our index in terms of having the most protections of religious liberty….and we had a law student who did some research into this and some digging. And basically, Illinois passed a number of…conscience protections back in the late 80s, early 90s, when there was more of a religious climate in Illinois. It was less maybe dark blue and hostile to religious liberty. So they put a bunch of protections on the books. And those are still there, even though the climate has changed a lot in Illinois.
MAST: Not so where Mueller himself lives.
MUELLER: And in contrast, my home state of Colorado was very red and religious in the nineties, but they never really passed any specific protections of religious liberty. Why bother? You know, we've got Focus on the Family, we've got Colorado Springs…And that has changed, you know, the politics and the religious climate has changed a lot in Colorado and we don't have a lot of protections on the books. And you can really feel it, because it gives…a lot more leeway to persecute people of faith…
REICHARD: As Hall told me, you don’t realize you need something —until it’s gone.
HALL: So if you go back to the late 20th century, it really is remarkable. Everyone supported religious liberty, Democrats and Republicans alike. You look at the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, passed in Congress by 97 to 3 in the U.S. Senate, unanimously by voice vote in the House, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. And I think that reflects the culture. And so that in the states, you had a lot more rationality, a lot more reasonableness. You didn't have prosecutors going after priests or bakers or this sort of thing. Things have really shifted in the 21st century. And again, this is not a partisan project, but just descriptively, it is the case that in the blue states there are active movements afoot to repeal religious liberty protections.
Twenty-nine states have a Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the books. But others do not. Called RFRA, those laws require state governments to jump a much higher legal bar before burdening a person’s religious exercise.
HALL: And almost all the new additions we've seen have been in the red states. So states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida are passing real important protections and their score is rising dramatically. Arkansas just became number one of the nation.
RFRA is one measure; medical conscience protections another we mentioned earlier, and that’s a big one:
HALL: Basically it says any medical professional can refuse to participate in any medical procedure that he or she has religious or moral or moral objections to. And so that obviously covers abortion, but also covers contraception, it covers sterilization, it covers euthanasia, it covers genetic counseling. And so this one statute really can protect a lot of stuff.
MAST: This report considers other protections as well: Can clergy legally serve communion wine to minors? Can houses of worship remain open during emergencies? Can foster parents be rejected just because of their religious beliefs?
And more:
MUELLER: So whether you can be debanked, excluded from banking or from insurance based on….religious practice or conviction. We saw some of that arise in the last five years…..That's an area where not that many states have protections on the books, but they began adding them …
REICHARD: These researchers argue it’s about living out your religious convictions in everyday life.
HALL: But we are committed to the proposition that individuals must be free to take their faith…into the public school, to share the gospel in a public park, to run their business according to their religious convictions. And so we include a number of protections, maybe well over a majority of our protections actually don't involve belief and worship, but they involve everyday life, economic life, interactions with the government, interactions with public schools, and that sort of thing.
This all may raise a hard question: What’s the line between religious liberty and discrimination? Hall gives an example:
HALL: If someone comes to a baker and says, “Bake me a cake celebrating the glories of the Klu Kuklu Ku Klux Klan, the KKK,” I want that baker to say, “No, that's morally wrong. I can't do that.”
By the same token, if someone comes to a baker and says, “bake me a custom cake celebrating the same-sex wedding ceremony,” and if that person has a religious objection to doing so it seems to me that religious objection, that refusal should be honored.
He gives another example:
HALL: And I'm not even sure it is discrimination… I was at one of the trials of the Kleins. I went out to lunch with them afterwards and I …came up with a hypothetical example. I said, “look, what if Paul and I came up to you and said ‘will you custom design a cake to celebrate our marriage and we're both heterosexual males…and we want to get married just for the tax advantages. That's why we want to get married, but we still want a cake celebrating this wedding ceremony. Would you bake that? And they said, “no, of course not.”
You see what I'm saying? It's not about sexual orientation. It's about a form of a ceremony …to which they have religious or moral objections, and we think that sort of thing should be protected.
MAST: Mueller says the worst discrimination comes from government, not from private citizens.
MUELLER: The problems that we've had in the United States when it comes to discrimination historically have overwhelmingly been legal discrimination as opposed to private discrimination. …when you don't have legal discrimination, but you do have, say, racism, you do have prejudice which is usually what people are upset about if you think about, say, conflict in the South especially, you find that over time that discrimination, private discrimination, tends to go away when there's high economic costs, to say, paying white workers four times as much as you would pay a black worker. And so you see wages in the late 1800s actually moving towards more equilibrium. Where people might have certain kinds of personal prejudices that we may disagree with and find morally repugnant .and yet .when they bear the cost of their discrimination, they tend to not act upon it as much.
Imprecise definitions confuse the matter:
MUELLER: And so…there's a lot of misunderstanding…about the nature of discrimination, about Jim Crow, which was primarily legal discrimination. That perpetuated injustices for very long periods of time, versus private compulsion and private choice about how to run a business, how to interact with others, how others interact with you.
But the researchers point out the report doesn’t set out to settle philosophical debates. It’s practical: to identify which laws are already working in a state and then give legislators in other states the roadmap.
HALL: Every single protection we consider has been adopted by at least one state somewhere.
REICHARD: So which states are in the top ten for protecting religious freedom?
HALL: Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Montana, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio, Idaho, South Carolina, and Washington State.
And which are the worst?
MUELLER: Colorado, North Carolina, Alaska, Nebraska, Wyoming, California, West Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, and New York.
So that means most states — red or blue— have a lot of room for improvement.
It’s a short report, just 16 pages. And each recommendation links directly to the state laws behind the rankings.
You’ll finda linkto the report in today’s show notes.
And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!
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