Freedom of religion

He'll be great.

In the second block of the show, He has been a champion of religious freedom all around the world, a former ambassador, former Kansas governor, former Kansas senator.

Sam Brownback will join us for an extended conversation.

He just had an event this week highlighting all of the horrific cases of religious intolerance, religious persecution.

All right, folks, welcome back for the commercial break.

I have known our next guest in action for a long time, going all the way back to the 1990s when I was a young AP reporter.

He is a former governor and United States Senator for the great state of Kansas, and also in his more recent role, former ambassador at large for international religious freedom, a topic that is becoming increasingly more important all across the world, whether it's the incredible efforts to attack Christians in Nigeria or all the things that China does to crush anyone who holds faith in that communist agnostic atheist state.

He is none other than Sam Brombeck.

I am Mr.

Religious Freedom.

You can, as George Carlin once said, you can have a church that teaches that God is in a garage in Buffalo.

Whatever you want to do, that is your religious freedom, and we can accept it, reject it, and believe whatever we wish.

That's the definition of religious freedom.

But this is a little snake of a man who is walking around, and there are plenty of insufficiently attentive people who can be found saying, oh, what a nice young man.

He speaks about his faith.

I had a guy, and anytime there's a call where I got 60 seconds and it's somebody who needs to be dispatched into lunar orbit, I need to bolster it a little bit.

I mean, what we've seen is this problem.

And the problem is the First Amendment gives us this individual right, right, as you mentioned, religious freedom, expression, association of life, and protection from the government's infringing on the content of what we think and say, right? We also have the 14th Amendment and our civil rights movement is built upon the idea of equal protection, that the government shouldn't be discriminated against groups and it has an obligation to prevent people from being denied equal access.

to a bathroom in the days of segregation, right? To their educations.

We haven't had a strong enough, honest enough conversation, I think, as a society about what to do.

a religion.

This has been the

main attack on religious freedom, is that this is how Jesus ended up being killed.

This is how Jews ended up being killed in the concentration camp, because government agencies decided what was Christianity, who was God, or many gods, or what have you.

This case blew my mind when I read the description of it.

It's a religious freedom case.

An Orthodox Jewish man has been prevented by University Heights, Ohio from a gathering of a small group of fellow Orthodox Jews at his house for the purpose of prayer time.

After a neighbor complained to Mayor Michael Dillon Brennan, the mayor intervened and the city threatened Daniel Grand with jail time and enlisted the local police force to monitor his home and encouraged neighbors to watch the family and report any, quote, "unauthorized prayer activity." Neighbors told Daniel Grand, and I quote from the judicial record, "We don't want your kind here." And they expressed their concern that the neighborhood would be labeled, quote, "Jewish." My friends, we are in the 21st century in the United States of America, and University Heights, Ohio sent the police to monitor a man's home for unauthorized prayer activity and encouraged the neighbors to report the man and his family for unauthorized prayer activity.

Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So listen, today we're talking about religious freedom and to do that, we're gonna start by talking about drugs.

Like, is peyote, for instance, a sacred substance or an illegal drug? Peyote is an edible type of cactus a few centimeters in size that's been used for thousands of years in Native American religious ceremonies.

Many tribes think of it as an incarnation of the peyote spirit and when you ingest it, you can speak directly to God.

But in 1990, two men in Oregon were prosecuted and fired from their jobs for participating in this ceremony, which raises big questions about religious freedom.

Like, do we have it? And what are the limits? [upbeat music] So okay, I believe in religious freedom, and that's something I'm comfortable saying because it's, it's not a particularly controversial position, right? But it's when we start to try and define religious freedom and its limits that we find ourselves in tricky territory.

Territory that forces us to ask hard questions like, are there any cases when a person's religious beliefs should exempt them from the law? And what happens when one person's religious freedom makes it harder for another person to exercise theirs, or makes it harder to access government services? These questions are both older than my country, the United States, and in some ways, more topical now than they've ever been.

Religious freedom is something the United States has prided itself on since almost the beginning.

And you can take that time to chew things over and to ponder.

And so reading through and ruminating on the Psalms and also reading alongside of them, Don Hutchison's book, Under Siege, Religious Freedom and the Church in Canada, written back at the 150th anniversary in 2017 and reading them alongside one another.

And the question of Psalm 11, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? Follow along in Psalm 11, in the Lord...

How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain? For behold, the wicked bend the bow.