She is the co-host of BJC’s “Respecting Religion” podcast and a board member of the Center for Faith, Justice, and Reconciliation. She is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), which has a long history of championing religious freedom as both a democratic and a Baptist value. To learn more about the shifting landscape of religious liberty, the Center for American Progress conducted an interview over email in February 2022 with religious liberty expert Amanda Tyler.

Supreme Court appears eager to hear more religious liberty cases advancing Christian nationalist arguments than in previous years. These issues will only draw more attention in the years ahead, since the 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Christian nationalism is also a contributing ideology in the religious right’s misuse of religious liberty as a rationale for circumventing laws and regulations aimed at protecting a pluralistic democracy, such as nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQI+ people, women, and religious minorities. It also leads to discrimination, and at times violence, against religious minorities and the nonreligious. At its core, this idea threatens the principle of the separation of church and state and undermines the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Today, conflicts most often arise from Christian nationalism, the anti-democratic notion that America is a nation by and for Christians alone. Constitution, yet the meaning of this core American value has been debated throughout the nation’s history. Religious liberty is enshrined in the U.S.

Freedom of religion and speech