Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Hostility Towards Religion Continues To Grow In America
Hostility Towards Religion Continues To Grow In America
Mar 16, 2026 7:14 PM

Liberty Institute, a legal organization in Plano, Texas, has released the report, “Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America, 2014 Edition,” featuring more than 1,300 cases of religious hostility, persecution and/or Constitutional violations of rights in the United States.

According to the report,

Hostility to religion in America is still growing. Because religion is so vital to a free and well-ordered society, our goal is to expose and document this growing hostility to help Americans confront and reverse it. The hostility is growing in the “Public Arena” of public places, government, and the workplace. it is growing in the “Schoolhouse” of education, from K-12 through higher academia. it is growing in the sector of “Churches and Ministries” where one might expect it to be safest. And it is growing in the areas of society that pass the “Military,” which includes our veterans. The growth of hostility is undeniable and it is dangerous.

The report covers incidents such as one where a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy wrote a Biblical quote on his personal whiteboard. He was asked to remove it when other cadets said its mere presence was offensive. The report also cites numerous legal cases where churches, synagogues and other religious organizations were denied the right to build or expand; several of them were consistently harassed by local officials.

Nate Madden at the National Catholic Reporter quotes George Yancey, professor of sociology at the University of North Texas and co-author of So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States, about the report.

My research suggests a certain willingness of Americans to dehumanize conservative Christians. Yet many of these individuals also espouse a desire for religious neutrality. So how do we reconcile these two concepts? I discovered in my research that these individuals, who tend to be white, male, wealthy, highly educated, politically ‘progressive’ and nonreligious, tend to use mechanisms that can be justified for nonreligious reasons but have a disparate impact upon Christians.

Read “Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America” at Liberty Institute.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Means of common grace
In this week’s Acton Commentary, we take a short excerpt from the latest volume in the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology, the second volume of the trilogy mon grace. In this section, excerpted from chapter 68, “Finding the Means,” Kuyper is exploring the question of how the fruit mon es to expression in the world. In the standard Reformed understanding, baptism munion are confessed to be the “means” of special grace. But what are the “means” mon grace?...
Potential results of a no-deal Brexit
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is currently scheduled to exit the European Union on 29 March 2019 at11 pm GMT, however, no formal deal has yet been struck between the EU and Britain, leaving issues such as trade, immigration policy and border control unresolved. Delays in drawing up a withdrawal treaty are due to a host of problems. “As in the lead-up to the referendum, gloom-and-doom is being voiced from across the political spectrum at Westminster,”...
Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: Fighting socialism in the US today
Taking inspiration from a recent CNN town hall which featured Bernie Sanders, Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, offers some pointers inForbes on how to argue against socialism. Such arguments can’t be reduced to slogans or simple black-and-white characterizations, and we should be wary of underestimating our opponents or demonizing their motives. Political campaigns, especially nowadays, are not conducive to intellectual arguments, but it is part of our task to elevate the level of public debate. I recently watched a...
Why doesn’t Bill Gates (and the rest of us) donate money to the government?
When asked in a Reddit forum how much he should personally pay in taxes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he’s paid about $10 billion in taxes but that he should have paid more on his capital gains. Gates also said, “As far as I know most billionaires (and other ply with tax laws.” This is certainly true in America. Most of our citizens seem to follow Jesus’s admonition to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17). But why...
Acton Line: Is entrepreneurship declining? All jobs are on the A team
On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts is joined by the founder and president of the Center for American Entrepreneurship, John Dearie, to discuss the state of entrepreneurship in America. Dearie explains why start up innovation and small businesses sustain the economy and alerts us to the danger of declining entrepreneurship in America. Afterwards, occasional host and award winning news anchor, Anne Marie Schieber, speaks with several people about their work ethic, proving that sometimes satisfaction in the workplace...
Charlie Menditéguy: Golf and virtue
Now that I am full-time at the Acton Institute (I had been associated since the beginning, but on the governing board) I am trying to read most of its output. Not an easy task giving the numerous books, articles, academic papers and blog posts it publishes each year. Acton has an outstanding Journal of Markets and Morality, which has already reached 21 volumes. I browsed the contents of the most recent edition and saw that it devoted 40 of its...
More churches, more flourishing: The secret to success in middle America
In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of new social crises across America’s middle and working classes, from the opioid epidemicto declines in marriage and family stability to the dilution of social capital. In response, many have been quick to point their fingers at the economic disruption caused by trade and technology. Yet according to Tim Carney, author of the new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, the data tell a different story about the transformative...
In the year 2100, we’re all renters
Predictions about the future have a checkered past. But Michael Munger’s recent book “Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy,” born out a few of his many appearances on the popular podcast EconTalk, at least makes its prognostications based on current trends and reasoned economic principles. Munger predicts what he dubs the Middleman/Sharing Revolution, in which software and digital tools increasingly lower transaction costs and make it more profitable to share or rent “stuff” than to own it. In...
Socialism contributes to a global baby deficit
Polarizing figures throughout history – from doomsday cults to political extremists – have advised their followers not to have children. mentators and a groundbreaking new study show that this, when mixed with government pressure, has led countless mothers to lifelong remorse and deprived nations of a better standard of living. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined this chorus over the weekend when she asked, given an impending climate apocalypse, “Is it OK to still have children?” The carbon footprint of children may...
The political futility of moral and economic arguments today
Few things are more abundant – and durable — than human stupidity. In the universe of the feelings that govern the behavior of men and women only fear has a greater rootedness in the collective psyche. Seeing so many engaged in the debate on confiscatory tax rates proposed by leftists to finance the latest liberal programs that they believe will save the world, what strikes me most are those on the right trying to refute this policy according to economic...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved