Thanks to Stephanie Barclay, William Baude, Thomas Berg, Samuel Bray, Jud Campbell, Nathan Chapman, Nora Freeman Engstrom, Carl Esbeck, Richard Garnett, Stephanie Inks, Mark Kelman, Andrew Koppelman, Douglas Laycock, Christopher Lund, Ira Lupu, William Marshall, Michael McConnell, Chloe Moon, Douglas NeJaime, Jane Schacter, Geoffrey Sigalet, Lance Sorenson, Charles Tyler, Robin Fretwell Wilson, and participants in the Stanford Law School Fellows Workshop and the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable for helpful conversations and feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks are also due to Frederick Mark Gedicks, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe for their generosity and for helpful conversations about this topic and others. All errors, of course, are my own.
We occupy a unique moment in the story of American religious liberty. During the Founding period and for much of the twentieth century, it was widely accepted that religious accommodation—the practice of sometimes exempting religious individuals or groups from burdensome laws—was a desirable means of protecting free exercise. But as a matter of cultural consensus, that agreement seems to be quickly unraveling or at least entering a new period of uncertainty.
