Just sitting here thinking a couple of things about the notion of religious liberty and real and perceived threats to it in this country. (Full disclosure: I'm Lutheran.)
Years ago, I taught at a Southern Baptist-affiliated uni. in Alabama . . . (anecdote alert)
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. . . where regular attendance at chapel was a graduation requirement. This was during the days (the '90s) when fundamentalists had gained control of the denomination and were doing what they could to purge seminaries and colleges of faculty who didn't toe their line.
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So chapel speakers by and large spoke in accordance with the fundies' position on things. We weren't required to attend, but for some reason one day I happened to be there toward the tail end of a speaker's talk. I don't remember his name or topic, but I do remember this:
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At the Q&A at the end, a student asked him what he thought of the future of the Church in a non-Christian world. He said that he didn't worry about it too much because, after all, Christianity itself emerged out of a non-Christian world.
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And . . .I will have to come back to this later on.
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(Later on . . . )
I don't have any deep take on this; I just finding myself thinking about that statement a lot in conjunction with Evangelicals' allying themselves with the GOP since the Reagan years. Somewhere in that span of time, they lost ability to speak truth to power,
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to the point that the most prominent among them cannot speak out against Trump's obvious ethical and moral failures. Their very desire to remain allied with power has caused them to lose their real power:the moral authority to ask people to search their hearts/consciences.
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I *still,* 4 years later, can't get over Trump's telling an interviewer for CBN that he's never felt the need to ask God for forgiveness. And when Evangelicals didn't have a little "Come to Jesus" talk with him, I said, "Really? *This* is the horse they want to ride?"
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[Insert a bunch of stuff here about how Trump's statement signals something truly broken about him and that one doesn't have to be religious to understand that, the ability to admit being wrong and pledging to do better being kinda important in human relationships and all.]
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While sure, the Church does better when government isn't hostile toward it, it doesn't need to have a compliant government in order to flourish. Indeed, it can better retain its integrity if it's not too chummy with secular power.

End.

Something of a coda to this thread. https://twitter.com/FredTJoseph/status/1314156225572024320