The Republican Party’s supermajority on the Supreme Court was barely a month old when the justices handed down one of the most consequential religion decisions of the last several decades. It was Amy Coney Barrett’s first significant vote as a justice.

The issue in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) was whether churches and other houses of worship were exempt from Covid-era restrictions on attendance. At the height of the pandemic, New York imposed strict limits on how many people could attend worship services at the same time — a rule that steered straight into the emerging partisan divide over whether pandemic restrictions had gone too far — although these restrictions were actually less stringent than the rules imposed on similar secular venues like theaters and lecture halls. 

Just months earlier, a 5-4 Court had upheld similar restrictions in California, with Republican Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Court’s Democrats. Although Roberts typically votes with his fellow Republicans in religion cases, he worried that the judiciary “lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health” and decide life or death matters like how to halt the spread of Covid. The Court’s other four Republicans dissented, but this was before Barrett joined the Court, so they were still in the minority.

But the new majority’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese rejected this restrained approach, and the decision fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. Before Republicans gained their supermajority on the Court, the justices gave states a fair amount of leeway to navigate the fraught political questions that arise when someone exercises their faith in a way that can harm other people, or limit their legal rights. 

But now the justices typically make these calls themselves, and they usually do so in favor of religious conservatives. As a result, under the current Supreme Court, one of the Constitution’s most difficult balancing acts — the task of weighing when one person’s religious beliefs should overcome another person’s freedoms — has toppled over on the side of religious individuals and groups, often allowing them to violate the freedoms of others. This is especially true when lawsuits pit religious conservatives against people exercising sexual freedoms such as the right to use birth control or to marry a person of the same sex.

Prior to Roman Catholic Diocese, the rule was that religious institutions must comply with state law, so long as the state does not single people of faith out for inferior treatment. If a state closed all venues where people gather in auditorium-like settings, that was considered constitutional, even though some of those venues are churches. The courts would only get involved if a state tried to, say, close mosques but not movie theaters.

But Roman Catholic Diocese effectively ended that regime. The new majority held that churches may only be subject to the least restrictive rules that apply to any secular business, even if that business bears little resemblance to a house of worship. Indeed, Roman Catholic Diocese indicated that churches must be treated the same as outdoor facilities like “camp grounds” or “garages” where the risk of transmission, compared to a church, was minimal.

It was a clear sign of where the Court’s new majority wanted to take its religion cases. Under this majority, lawsuits brought by plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions from the law have largely been used to resolve cultural disputes between Democratic and Republican constituencies in favor of the latter. 

This Court’s religion cases, in other words, fit a pattern that is also found in its decisions on topics as diverse as voting rights, abortion, race, and the question of whether President Donald Trump is subject to US law. The Republican justices seek to advance policy goals that are popular within their political party and unpopular among Democrats, and they aren’t afraid to overrule a wide range of foundational Supreme Court precedents in order to do so.

More broadly, the Court’s new approach to religion threatens to disrupt public schools’ ability to operate, undercut many anti-discrimination laws, and potentially turn every future conflict between cultural liberals and the religious right into a constitutional case that must be resolved by the Supreme Court.

Conflicts between religious and secular visions of America are inevitable under the Constitution

Many of the Supreme Court’s religion cases are driven by two separate clauses in the Constitution that often pull in opposing directions. The First Amendment contains two provisions governing religion, the clause protecting “free exercise” of faith, and a clause prohibiting the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The first provision guarantees everyone the right to practice their faith, while the latter was historically understood to prohibit the government from trying to advance a particular religious belief.

As the Supreme Court said in 1971, there is an “internal tension” between these two provisions — in part because it is inevitable that the government will make decisions that conflict with many people’s sincere religious beliefs. Taxes fund wars that many Americans believe are sinful. Public schools teach values that may be at odds with what their students hear in their temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Not long after Congress prohibited racial discrimination by restaurants in 1964, the owner of a South Carolina barbecue joint claimed that he could not comply because serving Black people violated his white supremacist religion (he lost in the Supreme Court).

Before Roberts was crowned as leader of America’s judiciary, the Court often resolved this tension by deferring to democratically elected officials. The Court permitted states to subsidize religious schools, but did not require it. It gave people who object to laws on religious grounds some exemptions from those laws, but did not allow these exemptions to give religious business owners an unfair advantage against their competitors. As the Court said in Locke v. Davey (2004), there must be some “play in the joints” between the competing values espoused by the Constitution’s two religion clauses.

But the current Court, which often seeks to centralize power within itself, has pushed hard to take away states’ ability to resolve some of these tensions, and instead resolves them itself. Under the old regime, blue states would sometimes operate their schools, or otherwise conduct their affairs, in ways that upset religious conservatives. And that was okay because that’s how things work in a multistate democracy.

This Court’s religion policies are both anti-federalist and anti-democratic. They restrict Colorado’s ability to bar anti-LGBTQ discrimination by religious business owners, and they force Maine to fund religious schools that label gay people “deviants” and “perverted.” These policies seek to impose a red-state vision on all 50 states, and, in some cases, they may go even further than that — requiring the government to subsidize religion in ways that even very conservative states reject. 

The Republican justices, in other words, have taken two vague constitutional provisions that espouse sometimes-conflicting values, and that reasonably can be read in many ways, and used them to impose their own values on the entire nation. The primary effects of these decisions are twofold: This Court often elevates religious freedom over other kinds of freedom, and it is rapidly tearing down the wall between church and state.

Religious freedom vs. others’ rights: The tug-of-war over the free exercise clause

The 20th-century Court cases that laid the groundwork for many modern debates over the Constitution’s free exercise clause are a bit of a muddle. 

In the 1960s, the Court used expansive language to describe the scope of this clause, and how easy it should be for religious plaintiffs to seek exemptions from complying with the law. Sherbert v. Verner (1963) held that laws that burden someone’s faith must “be justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’” As any law student who has passed their first semester of constitutional law will recognize, this “compelling state interest” language is associated with a legal test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding standard that courts apply in constitutional cases. Thus, Sherbert seemed to hold that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption from a state or federal law should receive one.

But the Court soon grew uncomfortable with the implications of this broad language — should people who claim that God does not want them to pay taxes, for example, really be exempt from the obligation to do so? — and began to place limits on who could get exemptions. 

The Court has ruled at least three times in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The expansive and easily available religious exemptions that Sherbert seemed to call for never actually came about. A 1992 study by legal scholar James Ryan found that federal appeals courts heard 97 free exercise of religion cases that applied Sherbert’s compelling interest test between 1980 and 1990, and they rejected 85 of those cases. 

In United States v. Lee (1982), the Supreme Court rejected an employer’s demand for a religious exemption from paying Social Security taxes. And, in Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), it ruled against a religious cult whose members worked in commercial businesses for no pay — the cult claimed that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws.

Both decisions were animated by a concern that a too-expansive reading of Sherbert would allow businesses that claimed religious exemptions to gain unfair advantages over their competitors. As the Court held in Lee, “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

But then the Supreme Court went too far. 

In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the objectors were two Native American men who lost their jobs and were denied employment benefits by the state of Oregon, because they used the drug peyote during a religious ceremony. The Court said that no one was exempt from any law so long as it applied equally to religious and nonreligious people alike.

The decision triggered instant backlash, with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) warning that Smith could lead to the government controlling “the selection of priests and ministers” and barring “the use of wine in communion service.” It’s likely that Smith was so widely disliked because the justices picked the worst possible case to put their foot down against religious objectors. The two men’s participation in a religious ritual did not injure anyone else. And the Court’s suggestion that the government may ban Native American religious practices smacked of colonialism.

Congress attempted, semi-successfully, to overrule that case when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). 

RFRA sought to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert … and Wisconsin v. Yoder,” a 1972 case establishing that Amish communities may educate their own teenage children instead of sending them to public high schools. The law, in other words, was intended to be a reset button, returning to the pre-Smith status quo when plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions were more likely to prevail.

But achieving that goal required answering a difficult question: What did the Religious Freedom Restoration Act actually seek to restore? Was it the expansive reading of Sherbert that courts never actually implemented — ie., that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption should get one — or the actual practice that existed prior to Smith, which was far more restrained?

By the time Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) reached the justices, the two major political parties both had divergent answers to this question. That case asked whether employers who object to contraception on religious grounds could refuse to provide their employees with health plans that cover birth control — despite a federal regulation establishing that these workers had a right to contraceptive coverage. The central question in Hobby Lobby, in other words, was whether one person’s religion may be invoked to diminish another person’s rights.

Most of the justices, the ones appointed by Republican presidents, answered this question with a resounding “yes.” 

Dissenting in Hobby Lobby, Democratic Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out her political party’s concern that one person’s rights should not be used to diminish another’s. She rejected the view that “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.” 

But there were five Republicans and only four Democrats on the Court when Hobby Lobby was decided, so Ginsburg’s view did not prevail. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion says that RFRA imposes an “exceptionally demanding” burden on the government when it wishes to enforce a law against a religious objector, and it ruled that a federal regulation requiring employers to offer contraceptive care in their health plans does not overcome this burden.

Yet even Alito seemed to recoil at the most expansive reading of Sherbert. His opinion concedes that “allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious grounds would lead to chaos.” So at least some aspects of Lee, the decision holding that private businesses must follow the same laws as their competitors, remain good law. 

After Hobby Lobby, the Republican Party’s position appears to be that religious objections trump laws that embrace a more liberal view of sexuality, or that otherwise resolve cultural conflicts between Democratic and Republican constituencies, but people of faith may not claim an exemption from literally every single law. At the very least, everyone still has to pay taxes.

Since Hobby Lobby, this agenda has come to define the Court’s religious liberty cases, including a number of recent ones that limit state governments’ ability to navigate political conflicts between religious conservatives and gay or trans people. While these cases are technically distinct from Hobby Lobby because RFRA only benefits plaintiffs who object to federal (that is, not state) laws, they also track the result in Hobby Lobby. 

The Court has ruled at least three times, for example, in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The Roberts Court, in other words, inherited a muddled mess of precedents governing when religious objectors may seek exemptions from the law, and much of this area of the law remains fairly muddled. Thus far, for example, this Court has not revealed whether it wishes to overrule cases like Alamo Foundation, that protect the rights of workers — though when it took up a case in 2025 that could have called Alamo Foundation into question, the Court did not do so.

But one bit of clarity that the current Court has provided is that, when the interests of religious conservatives conflict with the interests of queer people, queer people lose.

The Roberts Court has used education cases to tear down the wall separating church and state

Many of the Court’s cases involving religion in public schools also empower religious conservatives in cultural fights against LGBTQ Americans. In Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), for example, the Republican majority held that religious parents who object to books with gay or trans characters must be allowed to opt their children out of lessons that use such books. And, in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), the Republican justices appeared to hold that the Constitution requires public school teachers to out trans students to their parents, even if those students ask the teachers to keep their gender identity a secret.

But this Court has also advanced another project concerning religion, particularly in its cases about religion and education — dismantling the very idea that church and state must be separated. 

The First Amendment’s establishment clause — which prohibits the government from making any law establishing a religion — was long understood to require a degree of separation between government and religion. The Roberts Court hasn’t simply abandoned this reading of the establishment clause; it’s indicated that the very idea of separation between church and state is unconstitutional.

For much of the 20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the wall separating church and state was quite high. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), for example, the Court declared that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” 

The Court abandoned this approach nearly a quarter century ago, in its 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). But Zelman merely held that states could offer vouchers that can pay for tuition at private religious schools if they want to, not that they were required to do so.

One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive. 

Similarly, before Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, the Court generally insisted that public schools must remain neutral on religion. When schools promote a religious view, according to Lee v. Weisman (1992), that places “subtle and indirect” pressure on students to conform to that view, and leaves the student with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”

Yet, while Lee was consistent with mid-20th-century precedents regarding religion in schools, the consensus favoring government neutrality on religion was already fading by the early 1990s. Lee was a 5-4 decision, and its author, the moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, often argued that his more liberal colleagues read the establishment clause too expansively. Three years before Lee, for example, Kennedy dissented from a decision barring a county from displaying a Nativity scene in its courthouse. This decision, Kennedy wrote, “reflects an unjustified hostility toward religion.”

This idea — that government neutrality toward religion is itself a form of hostility against people of faith — could often be found in conservative critiques of the Court’s establishment clause decisions from this era. In a 1989 essay that foreshadowed many of the Roberts Court’s later decisions, legal scholar (and future federal judge) Michael McConnell made the then-audacious argument that the Constitution requires the government to subsidize religious schools.

The idea is that states typically tax all of their residents to pay for public schooling, but only some children actually attend these schools. Other families choose to pay out of their own pockets for private religious education, while still other families would prefer to send their children to a religious school but cannot afford it. This familiar system, where public schools are available to everyone and private schools are only available to people who can pay the tuition, McConnell claimed, is a form of discrimination against religious people. 

“That some parents wish their children to receive education in a religious environment should not deprive them of their fair share of the public resources devoted to education,” McConnell wrote. They pay the same taxes as families who send their kids to public schools. And so, McConnell argued, these religious families should be allowed to use that tax revenue to pay for their child’s private religious education.

Something close to the vision McConnell laid out in this 1989 essay is now the law. The seminal case is Carson v. Makin (2022), which involved a Maine program that provides private school vouchers for students in sparsely populated areas where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school.

Maine law provides that these vouchers may only be used at “nonsectarian” schools, and not religious ones. But, according to Roberts’s majority opinion in the decision, a system that “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious” is “discrimination against religion.” Carson, in other words, turns the old rule from Everson on its head. What was once forbidden is now mandated.

More broadly, the Court’s Republicans have ground the establishment clause down to such a tiny nub that little of it remains. For many years, the Court read that clause to forbid the government from advancing a particular religious view, but the Court overruled the older cases prohibiting government endorsements of religion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), and they replaced them with something much narrower. Under this Court’s new test, the government can only violate the establishment clause by making “a religious observance compulsory” or otherwise coercing nonbelievers to engage in a “formal religious exercise.”

So the government cannot arrest you if you skip church services. Nor can a government official hold a gun to your head and force you to declare that Jesus is your personal lord and savior. But it is not clear that, under this Court’s approach to the establishment clause, anything else is forbidden. One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court — indeed, under cases like Carson, it is now required in many states — is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive. 

A plaintiff in Carson, according to Maine’s brief in that case, wanted the state to pay for tuition at a school that requires teachers to sign a statement agreeing that “God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.” Previous federal court cases involved schools that teach girls they have a religious obligation to be subservient to their future husbands, or that prohibited Black students from having romantic relationships with white students. Under the Roberts Court’s new rules, taxpayers who find these views abhorrent — or who may even object to them on religious grounds — must nonetheless pay for tuition at schools that teach these values.

McConnell criticized the old regime for taxing religious parents to pay for secular education they find objectionable, but the converse is also true about the current regime — it taxes secular parents to pay for religious education that many Americans also find objectionable.

One nationwide solution

The unfortunate reality is that, in a pluralistic society, it is impossible to come up with a legal regime that won’t impose obligations on anyone that they object to on religious grounds. If a nation taxes citizens, some of them will object to how that money is spent. If it provides public schools, some families will object to the values taught in those schools. And if it changes which values are taught, some other families will object to the new lessons. 

The Roberts Court’s solution to these inevitable conflicts has largely been to resolve them in ways that favor members of the Republican Party’s coalition, such as religious conservatives, that burden members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, such as LGBTQ people, and that advance longtime Republican Party goals such as making private school vouchers widely available. 

That’s certainly one way to do constitutional law. The GOP controls the Supreme Court, and to the victor go the spoils.

But it is far from clear why many of these decisions should be made by a handful of unelected lawyers in black robes, especially in a nation that purports to be a democracy — and that also purports to be a federation of many diverse states. There was a lot of wisdom in Zelman’s approach, which allowed Maine to devise an education policy that makes sense for Maine and Alabama to devise an education policy that makes sense for Alabama. 

At the very least, cases like Zelman did not claim that the Constitution, with its two vague and often-contradictory approaches to religion, calls for one nationwide solution to the question of how to run a country made up of people of many faiths.

The woman whose son brought terror to Berlin is sitting on a worn red leather couch in a three-room apartment in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. It is Thursday afternoon, and she is pointing to the several missed calls on her phone screen.

They are all from the evening of July 25. They are all from the same person: Abdul Ballout, her son.

“He was terribly afraid for me,” she says quietly, her voice trembling. “I didn’t know why.”

She scrolls through the call log — the last traces of her child from the day of the attack, the day the unknown 21-year-old became the most wanted man in Germany.

She wants the public to get to know him — the son, the brother, the young man that she knew. “I find the way people talk about him incredibly painful, to be honest,” she says. “He was a good person.”

These are the subjective recollections of a mother who cannot and will not accept what her son did — and whose account is difficult to reconcile with what authorities established about him both before and after the attack.

She asks that her name not be published, nor any photograph or recording of her voice.

“I have two other children I have to think about,” she says.

* * *

On the evening of July 25, Ballout drove a rented van into a crowd on the fringes of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade.

After coming to a stop, he got out of the car and, according to authorities, began attacking people with a machete before fleeing on foot. One person was killed, and at least 29 were injured.

Around 20 hours later, special forces tracked Ballout to a garden in suburban Spandau, where he allegedly attempted to attack officers with a knife when they tried to arrest him. Police opened fire, and Ballout was shot dead. Nine days later, he was buried at Gatow Cemetery in Berlin.

The person killed in Ballout’s attack was a 65-year-old woman from Poland who had traveled to Berlin with her daughter specifically for Christopher Street Day.

Not far away, a gay refugee from Iraq was celebrating at an electronic music event when panic spread through the streets. He had fled a country where being openly gay could put his life at risk. Germany was supposed to be different.

Granted anonymity to speak openly, he said: “For many people, freedom is something they never have to think about. For me, it means being able to love someone, to leave the house in the morning without wondering whether I could be attacked or killed for who I am.”

After the attack, he said, that feeling of safety cracked. “That old fear was suddenly back.”

Sitting across from me just weeks later, Ballout’s mother is dressed in all black, her headscarf framing a face that looks exhausted. There are deep shadows beneath her eyes. She speaks so quietly that at times I have to lean in to hear. The only other sound in the room is the monotonous hum of a fan.

On the coffee table lay empty coffee cups, an open packet of TUC crackers and a box of iron tablets. Propped between them is a framed photograph of Ballout, a faint grin on his face.

She doesn’t want to begin our conversation with the attack; she wants to start with her son. She reaches for her phone and starts showing me videos. In one, he is a little boy in swim trunks, running along a beach and laughing. In another, he is an adult, dancing exuberantly through the living room with his family. He jumps onto the couch and pulls his sisters along, making everyone laugh.

His mother talks of evenings spent together watching television or playing Monopoly, how he would sometimes cheat if he were about to lose. As she speaks, her smiles give way to tears, and her tears give way to smiles.

The contrast with the image of the terrorist could hardly be greater.

* * *

Four days before our interview, I visited the neighborhood where Ballout grew up. Children were crisscrossing a courtyard, neighbors leaning out of windows or standing outside doorways. I asked them about him.

All their answers were strikingly similar: “He always said hello;” “he was polite;” “he was helpful.”

No one disputed what Ballout did. No one tried to excuse it. And yet, no one could explain how the young man they knew was capable of such an act.

Sitting in his mother’s living room a few days later, her phone rings, and for a brief moment, Arabic singing fills the room. “That’s his voice,” she says. Her ringtone is a recording of her son reciting an Islamic prayer.

But is it just an innocuous recording?

Court records show Ballout repeatedly posted videos containing Islamic State propaganda dating back to 2024, before starting to circulate recordings of his own. In some of the audio files obtained by WELT, which is — like POLITICO — part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters network, he recited the Quran; in others, he appeared to preach. He had hundreds of followers on TikTok and Telegram, with comments praising his voice.

But Ballout’s online messages were radical, speaking of “unbelievers,” God’s “agonizing punishment,” and his rejection of democracy and the German legal system.

Online, he went by the name Abu Muawiyah — a reference to the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty who emerged victorious over the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his followers, from which Shiite Islam later emerged. It is also a signal of his shifting faith, as Ballout converted from Shiite to Sunni Islam in 2021.

Was this also a break with his family? His mother gives no indication it was.

She speaks calmly about religion, and without hesitation. She says she was born in Beirut and grew up in Germany. She can neither read nor write Arabic and has therefore never read the Quran in its original language.

“I’m not particularly strict about religion,” she says. But her son was different.

For the last several years, he had increasingly been trying to push her toward stricter observance, urging her to pray regularly, to take her religious obligations more seriously and to engage more deeply with Islam.

“He told me every single day how important it was to pray and that it was my duty.”

* * *

Speaking about the days leading up to the attack, one word keeps coming up in our conversation: fear.

Her son had changed, she says. He seemed more nervous, more tense, more restless. He had started changing his phone number constantly — at least five times in 10 days.

“Why are you changing your number again?” she had asked him. But his answer was always roughly the same. Some people kept calling him; he felt followed, harassed and no longer safe.

To this day, it makes no sense to his mother. But to investigators, this is the behavior of someone who had realized he was on their radar — and was planning something big.

In late May 2026, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office classified Ballout as a high-risk individual capable of committing a serious act of politically motivated violence. And the reasons for this are documented across dozens of pages of case files.

In 2021, Ballout took part in street dawah events organized by a Salafist group in Berlin, where Islamists seek new followers and often distribute copies of the Quran. This is where Berlin’s State Criminal Police Office first took an interest in him.

From 2023 onward, he increasingly frequented mosques influenced by Salafist ideology — which espouses an ultraconservative, fundamentalist view of Sunni Islam — while investigators noted he began openly expressing his rejection of Germany’s free democratic order.

In the summer of 2024, he repeatedly posted propaganda from the Islamic State organization, and in May 2025, attempted to join the terrorist group in Africa but was refused entry into Mauritania. Shortly after, he tried to travel to Syria via Lebanon to receive weapons training, communicating with IS members through Telegram.

Lebanese authorities arrested Ballout in July 2025, and a military court sentenced him to three months in prison for incitement to religious conflict. In court, he spoke of two cousins on his father’s side who had died fighting in Syria.

Returning to Germany in November 2025, Ballout was then arrested at Berlin airport and taken into custody on suspicion of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. According to the case files, he presented himself as a preacher in prison. His religious fervor intensified, and his appearance changed. Ballout’s father later told Der Spiegel that he had argued with his son over his long hair and beard, which he regarded as a sign of religious extremism.

Finally, in May of this year, Ballout was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison but was initially released under the supervision of a probation officer while the court deferred its verdict on whether to suspend the sentence. This judicial decision is now at the center of a heated debate in Germany over how the country handles high-risk Islamist offenders.

From then on, police kept him under surveillance.

Did his mother know any of this? She shakes her head.

* * *

There is only one incident Ballout’s mother is willing to discuss: July 2 this year, his birthday. That day, she says, showed just how closely her son was being monitored.

Ballout had been playing outside with his sister, spraying her with a water gun, she says. Shortly afterward, officers from the State Criminal Police Office appeared. They had assessed the situation as a possible threat.

But investigators describe the scene differently.

It was already dark, and Ballout had stepped outside for just a few seconds, holding what appeared to be a handgun but was difficult to identify, they said. He tucked it into his waistband and went back inside. When officers eventually searched the apartment, they found only a toy gun.

Investigators believe the 21-year-old was testing whether he was under surveillance — and how much time he had before police would intervene.

And while his mother insists she noticed nothing that would suggest Ballout was preparing an attack, she does not rule out the possibility that others knew of her son’s plans. However, she gives no names.

He spent most of his time with family, she says. He had few friends, at least no one she knew particularly well.

* * *

The day of the attack began, in her memory, just like any other. Both mother and son slept in late, then ran errands. Ballout was unemployed and had no particular obligations, she says. In the late afternoon, he left the apartment before a family gathering that evening.

Then, suddenly, the calls started piling up.

At 5:10 p.m., Ballout called his mother. An hour later, he called again. Then again. Each time, she says, the conversation revolved around the same question: “Are you okay?” He had never done that before.

Then, after one of the calls, she received a short message: “Take care of yourself.”

The words still haunt her today.

At 7:05 p.m., Ballout called again. He asked that his mother inform her partner of over two years that he had a new phone number again. Ballout’s parents have been divorced for three years, but Ballout continued to see and speak with his father regularly, she says. And as the family prepared for the evening, the phone kept ringing. 

They were supposed to have dinner at his sister’s place. Schnitzel, his favorite meal, was on the menu. Ballout loved these family gatherings, his mother says. “They always made him happy.” That is precisely why so much of what happened next is incomprehensible to her.

“He wanted to live,” she says, her voice rough.

He had spoken of the future, about having a family of his own, about all the things that still lay ahead of him. Nothing had suggested this might be a farewell.

Shortly before 10 p.m., her partner received one more call. They were the last words Ballout deliberately addressed to his family: “Get my mother to safety.”

Minutes later, the van drove into the crowd.

* * *

By the time Ballout’s mother was driven home by her partner that night, the first reports of the attack had started to circulate. At that point, she still didn’t know exactly what had taken place. But when she entered the apartment, she says, something immediately caught her attention.

A key was still in the door.

And right beside it, on the hallway shoe cabinet, were documents that seemed to be deliberately placed where they could not be overlooked. It was the rental agreement for a small van. It listed Ballout as the renter.

“That was when I knew immediately that it couldn’t mean anything good,” she says.

That same night, she took the documents to the police. And as she was questioned, a picture slowly started to emerge — one she initially refused to accept.

At the same time, she kept trying to reach her son, sending message after message. But there was no reply. She only learned the truth the next day, when her daughters called and told her about the reports on the news.

Her son was dead.

Since then, she has spent hour after hour in her Berlin apartment searching for explanations, her thoughts circling endlessly around her son’s last words, his fear and whether there may have been something in those calls that she failed to recognize. She cannot let go of the distorted image she has of her son, of the good boy who wanted to start a family.

Asked what she would say to the victims of the terrorist attack, she thinks for a long time. She is sorry, she eventually says.

“I would also tell them that wasn’t my son.”

Additional reporting by Lennart Pfahler.

Julia Zabert is a trainee journalist with the Global Reporters Network at the Axel Springer Academy. The Academy trains the next generation of leading journalists through hands-on, innovative work with a clear focus on the future of journalism. More information at axelspringeracademy.com.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Monday asked state lawmakers to study ways to further infuse religion into public life as part of a new crop of interim charges unveiled by the Texas Senate leader.

One of the lieutenant governor’s directives tells senators to compare state and federal laws surrounding religious liberty, with specific instructions to look at whether state laws line up with the “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses of the First Amendment and determine if “additional protections are needed.” Another charge instructs lawmakers to examine ways to educate Texans about their right to practice their religion “in all settings, including, but not limited to: education, workplace, government, and healthcare.”

A third calls for a pulse check on a law passed by the Legislature in 2025 that lets public schools excuse student absences for off-campus religious instruction. All three charges are assigned to Patrick’s newly formed Religious Liberty Committee, chaired by state Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, that was announced in March.

The latest charges arrive as Texas’ Republican leaders continue to attack Muslims in the state. One of Patrick’s first charges, released earlier this year, called for “preventing Sharia law in Texas,” while party members at the Texas GOP convention last month tried to expel Muslims who arrived to participate in the event.

Patrick has long been a champion of Christian conservative values and has said he does not believe there is a separation between church and state. Last year, President Donald Trump tapped him to lead a new commission on religious liberty.

“There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution. For too long, the anti-God left has used this phrase to suppress people of religion in our country,” Patrick said in April after the commission held its final hearing.

Interim charges are lists of issues that the lieutenant governor and speaker give to their respective chamber’s committees to study during the period between legislative sessions. They typically include reviews of recently passed laws and instructions to recommend laws for the upcoming session. Patrick has already released multiple waves of interim charges ahead of the Legislature’s reconvening in January.

The lieutenant governor’s other charges Monday call for preventing unfair online ticket sales, studying gaming platforms that target children for inappropriate advertising, examining “inefficient or inconsistent” divorce and child custody proceedings, and assessing the Pecos River Basin’s water situation.

The Republican-controlled Legislature has already thinned the line separating church and state in recent years. A new law requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments and another lets schools set aside time for prayer, yet few school boards did so last school year. 

Lawmakers have also required classrooms to hang donated signs that say “In God We Trust”; allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools; and approved new curriculum materials that teach the Bible and other religious texts alongside grade-school lessons.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Dan Patrick directs Texas Senate to study ways to further ingrain religion into public life appeared first on Salon.com.

The most efficient campaign finance vehicle in American history is tax-exempt, requires no donor disclosure and is available in virtually every zip code in the country. For 70 years, it has operated under one rule: It cannot endorse a political candidate.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its report to President Donald Trump on June 26, would like to remove that rule. They’re calling it religious freedom.

As a Christian minister of an American Baptist congregation, I’ve spent more than 20 years in a pulpit — long enough to know the difference between protecting a church and conscripting one. A government that wants to free the church, to borrow Trump’s language, is usually trying to use it. 

Since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has restricted churches, religious organizations and other tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates or funneling tax-deductible donations into partisan campaigns. Pastors and faith leaders can preach on any moral or social issue, including justice, poverty, immigration, war. The only line is at the intersection of tax-exempt status and candidate endorsements. In other words, the amendment is the last structural barrier between the American church and full absorption into the machinery of partisan politics. 

The claim that this constitutes religious suppression is the oldest con in the game. Every American pastor has the same First Amendment rights as any other citizen. What the Johnson Amendment restricts is tax-exempt dollars in partisan politics. Churches pay no federal taxes. In exchange, they stay out of the candidate-endorsement business. Void it, and that deal ends — and every church in America becomes a PAC with better branding and transparency requirements and endorsed by a divine mandate.

Here is how the mechanism would work — and in some places, already does. A donor writes a check to their congregation. Takes the full federal tax deduction. The church endorses the candidate of their choice, bundles contributions, runs voter registration drives for one party — and does all of it without the disclosure requirements that apply to actual political action committees. This is tax-exempt political spending, passed through the offering plate and invisible to the public record.

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Since Trump promised at the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, churches that went all in on the MAGA model have provided a nine-year case study in what happens when a religious institution trades independence for political access. The flags of the nation and party beside the cross. The candidate’s name from the pulpit. The congregation sorted by loyalty to the pastor’s politics rather than anything resembling a common good. 

Church attendance has collapsed at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. According to a 2024 Pew Research study, the fastest-growing religious identity in America is “none.” The research on why people leave does not point to boredom or busyness. It points to disgust at what organized religion has become.

The Christian right has spent five decades getting closer to power and losing the one thing it cannot buy back: The credibility to speak to anyone outside its own coalition. 

The commission is not discouraged by any of this data. And their report does not even stop at the Johnson Amendment. It proposes replacing the principle of separation of church and state with what it calls “bridges between church and state.” In Trump’s Washington, “bridge” is apparently the new euphemism for “merger.”

The separation has existed because both institutions require protection from each other. When such safeguards are removed, the bridge comes with a toll booth, and the commission is waving one side through.  

This is state power reinforcing evangelical Christianity, and evangelical Christianity legitimizing state power. The commission calls it “partnership.” History calls it a state church. 

The stakes here are not merely theological. They are democratic. A fully politicized American church — operating tax-free, endorsing candidates, bundling political donations without disclosure — is not a more faithful institution. It is a more powerful one. Unchecked religious power fused to political authority, and with no structural wall left between them, is a problem for anyone who votes, pays taxes or prefers their government to represent the whole country rather than the congregation of whoever raised the most money last Sunday. Without the Johnson Amendment, every offering plate in America becomes a campaign contribution box.

Jesus was not being clever when he said in Matthew 22:21 “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” That verse has been cited in American political arguments for more than two centuries — usually by whoever needs it to mean something different. Christ was cornered — pay taxes to Rome, or be branded a traitor — and so he turned the trap into a statement about the limits of power. Caesar’s name is on the coin; give him the coin. 

But not everything belongs to Caesar. Jesus was not brokering a deal between two powers. He was drawing the line past which no empire’s authority can reach. Empires have always wanted everything, including the sacred — especially the sacred — because religion is the oldest instrument for making political power look like it came from God. The commission has proposed erasing that line, rebranding the erasure as religious liberty and consecrating it in the Oval Office.

The commission’s report had a lot of words for this: “bridges,” “liberty,” “partnership.” The legal word is laundering.

The post MAGA wants to launder political donations — through God appeared first on Salon.com.

I used to think I could change the world. 

More than that: because I could, I felt the responsibility to do it. 

I was 22 when I helped lead a delegation of young people to the United Nations. There, we pressured presidents and prime ministers to reduce carbon emissions, hoping to prevent the horrors of rising sea levels and catastrophic heat waves. Strangely, although I was immersed in the distressing climate science and the details of international policy negotiations, what I remember most from that time is my own sense of agency. If we organized, if we took action; I knew we could protect the beautiful world we loved. 

I don’t feel that so much anymore. Though I’m not yet 40, and still going through the motions of voting and donating to causes and candidates doing good, my heart has been crushed by the headlines lately. I feel defeated. Rather than believing my choices can shape the world around me, I oscillate between sadness and cynicism, numbing myself by eating a lot of chocolate cookies.

If you, too, suffer from weltschmerz, as the Germans call the despair at the state of the world — or if something else, like a death or divorce, has you feeling low — it might be time to pause on taking action and give into the grief.

Religious traditions have long centered grieving rituals amid the happier celebrations and festivals in their calendar. Entire sacred texts consist of lamentation — crying out to the divine in dismay.

Walter Brueggemann, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, explained in 2020 that lament is not just an expression of sadness. He said, “Lament is the breaking of numbness by the admission of pain and loss.” In a culture where grief is still seen as unseemly or inconvenient and people are encouraged to “be strong” and move on quickly, this ancient wisdom teaches us that we have to cry out if we want to retrieve a sense of hope and possibility. As Brueggemann writes, “Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life.”

But how do we do it? Where can we go to weep and mourn? And how do I get out of my own way? I’m pretty good at talking about the sadness and the anger and the pain; I can understand the therapeutic need to grieve. But actually doing it? Turns out, I suck at that! 

Then — just recently — a portal opened.

I’d gathered a group of friends for my monthly singing night: a chance to make music together for the joy of participation rather than performance. We sing simple rounds and folk songs, harmonizing where we can, and always close with a rousing rendition of an old shape note song in four-part harmony. After putting the foldable chairs away and clearing the wine glasses into the dishwasher, a few of us lingered behind.

Inspiration struck, and I shared my heartache about the latest horror from the White House. One by one, others started to share their pain, too. And then, Matthew, a particularly talented musical improviser, got behind the piano to sing his sadness. His voice jumped from one note to another and suddenly my eyes filled with tears and my heart filled with life. Something was shifting.

Ahlay Blakely is not surprised by this. Not at all. Blakely is a modern-day grief ritualist, songwriter, and facilitator. She sees herself as a professional mourner, hosting retreats and gatherings that help people touch their grief in tender and radical ways. 

“Singing with people is often a gateway to deeper work with grief,” she explained to me. Because so many of us have a sense that our voices aren’t good enough, singing immediately makes us vulnerable, opening us to the deeper pain we might be avoiding in our everyday lives. Singing, Blakely said, is “not about what it sounds like at all, it’s what it feels like in your body.” Blakely’s insight into the power of communal singing led her to create an entire album of grief songs with some 200 amateur singers, and that listeners like us can join in with. Its purpose is nothing less than the re-enchantment of the human soul. 

A study from 2014 shows there might be a scientific explanation for this. Musicologist Gunter Kreutz conducted an experiment with amateur choral singers in which he measured oxytocin levels across two contexts: before and after a 30-minute choir rehearsal, and before and after an informal conversation with another choir member. Remarkably, oxytocin, which is sometimes described as the “love hormone,” increased only during group singing — not during ordinary social interaction. In other words, singing enhances our well-being and connects us to others more effectively than conversation alone.

But that magic doesn’t come by moving through the grief — processing it and moving on. No, insists Blakely, “People often are trying to get over their grief. And grief is just as powerful and potent…as happiness and laughter. Are we trying to get over our laughter? Are we trying to get over our happiness?” Blakely wants us to court grief as an ally. 

Carla Fernandez, author of Renegade Grief, agrees. For her, grief is not something to overcome, but to befriend. Whatever our assumptions about falling apart, grief, she told me, “is not messy — it’s wildly fertile. When we don’t go there, we miss out on such fecundity from which real relationships can grow, and solutions can form, and ideas can emerge.” In other words, grief isn’t a dangerous can of worms, but the soil from which new life can grow. 

That’s what I felt sitting on my living room carpet as my friends and I sang together. And if you don’t have a crew to do that with yet, start by singing along to music that helps you open up to grief. Laurel Premo’s Laments is another great grieving album — or you can just make up sounds to this digital chord-creating shruti box. Remember Blakely’s advice: this isn’t about how you sound. It’s about how it feels in your body. If it feels like something is moving in your heart, keep singing.

Maybe this practice of collective singing is what we need more of in our political spaces, too. The success of the Singing Resistance in Minneapolis earlier this year was a testament to what music can do to mobilize people for collective action and bear witness to injustice in a way that keeps us hopeful and aware of the power we have to do good. Who knows — maybe singing will find its way back to cross political divides, too. One candidate in Iowa is starting every town hall by having people sing “America the Beautiful” to remind them that whatever their differences, they can create beauty together. 

Heidi Wilson, the composer of “Hold On,” which has become somewhat of an anthem in the Singing Resistance movement, puts it best. “Grief is about feeling cut off from something, losing something, and singing is an experience of reconnecting.” I think that’s what we’re all looking for now. In fact, it might be the only way forward. 

Pope Leo XIV is dealing with his first schism. 

A small, conservative sect of Catholics were excommunicated from the church earlier this month after it ordained a group of bishops without the pope’s approval. The drastic move from the first American Pope is the latest way he’s cementing his tenure at the helm of the church, just months after his call to “disarm AI.”

But David Gibson thinks the Pope’s strategy of dealing with this radical group of followers tells us something bigger about how we deal with our stateside politics. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Gibson about the Catholic drama, what this schism represents, and why it might be a losing battle to go up against the pope. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Pope Leo XIV did something dramatic. Tell us what happened. 

Well, basically the pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalist, super right-wing, Latin mass, types. Actually he would say they excommunicated themselves. It’s this group called The Society of Saint Pius the X (SSPX). They ordained four bishops. 

The Catholic church is an apostolic church. It’s all about chain of custody. You can’t break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. The pope is the one who ordains bishops. He says you can ordain a bishop. You can’t go ordain a bishop on your own. That’s like starting your own church. That’s a total red line.

They said, “No, we need this,” July 1st in Écône, Switzerland. They gathered SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism.

It’s really a tiny, tiny group. They’re located in the West. It’s all about restoring christendom, restoring the glories of old European, white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve out, a special bubble where the Pope says, “It’s okay and I’ll give you your own bishops.” The Pope is saying, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t go off and have your own special little church.” So essentially they’re saying, “Okay, we are more Catholic than the pope.”

You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Peter the X that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been the first Asian Pope, the first African Pope. Is this group a little kind of white racist?

They’re certainly culturally chauvinistic to put it mildly. I’ve traveled around the world with popes. I’ve seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa. I’ve seen mass celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It’s beautiful. It’s the mass wherever you are. It’s diversity. These folks don’t like that. 

It’s very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism that our culture, our people, is the same dynamic in the church. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You’re baptized Catholic, you’re raised Catholic, you are Catholic. Anybody is Catholic, whether you’re in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don’t see it that way. That’s what they’re about.

They have influence and they have money. So that’s really why it’s a big story. They also have an amen corner.

An amen corner?

So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks. Because it’s kind of a “no enemies to the right” dynamic within the Catholic Church. Here are these folks who’ve been given everything and they still went and split. They would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing, but they’re giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.

So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why pick a fight with the pope?

Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not?

They want to revisit the Vatican II council where the Church modernized like 60 years ago?

Yes, exactly. In the 1960s, they did things like lifting the anathemas of Protestantism, engaging in endorsing religious freedom, accepting a division between church and state, and lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews. 

It also gets to what is really going on. It’s not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we’re seeing in the secular world, where it’s this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position mainly of white European folks who see America, “the glories of empire,” of the past, being “taken away what is rightfully ours.” That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That’s really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.

Is it a losing battle?

If you’re looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They’ve already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back? Or will they just persist here in the United States as kind of right-wing Catholicism? 

JD Vance, who wouldn’t know a Latin mass from anything, he’s the guy who tells the pope to stay in his lane on theology. It’s that kind of mentality that we’re really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.

On June 28, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, a Catholic nun from Nigeria, stepped out of her home to take the short, one-block stroll to her church in McAllen, Texas. It should have been uneventful: dressed in her white habit and bearing a rosary, Sister Letty was walking to Sunday morning mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.

She didn’t make it — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped, arrested, and handcuffed the 56-year-old. They took her to a detention facility an hour away, reportedly confiscated her rosary, and declined to bring her the medication she takes. She called her diocese for help — and as news spread, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress appealed directly to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for details. Hours later, she was released — without explanation.

Plenty of questions surrounding this incident remain. According to her diocese, Sister Letty had worked as a registered nurse in the area for about a decade and entered the country legally. 

But the incident is not a one-off — and instead is representative of a concerning trend in America over the last year. Though ICE and President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement activities have receded from national headlines, Sister Letty’s detention shows how two forces are clashing in the second Trump term: the drive for hardline immigration enforcement and the constitutional imperative of preserving religious liberty and free exercise in America. 

The tightening of federal immigration enforcement around religious spaces and believers

The last year of Trump’s mass deportation program has produced many cases like Sister Letty’s — even if they haven’t made national news. Federal immigration agents have detained and harassed Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim chaplains and priests, while sparking fear across denominations — particularly as religious leaders and communities organized and led responses to immigration crackdowns across the country.

Both the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sister Letty’s case, or other religious liberty concerns. They have also not responded to requests for comment to other local and national outlets in the case of Sister Letty.

In November, the Episcopal bishop of Texas reported that a Kenyan priest working for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had been detained by ICE while leaving his workplace and transferred to a detention facility. His diocesan leaders said he was working in the US legally, and had the proper documentation to be in the US. In July 2025, a Muslim hospital chaplain in Ohio was arrested and detained during an immigration check-in. An Egyptian immigrant, he was held in detention for weeks before finally being released. And earlier this year, Catholic Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago reported that priests in his archdiocese have been stopped by federal agents and ordered to prove their citizenship. That’s all on top of clergy who were shot at with pepper balls or sprayed with tear gas at anti-ICE protests in Illinois and California.

Yet this clash has shown up not just through harassment of clergy and those dedicated to religious life, but also in restrictions on how those in detention receive pastoral care, how those trying to provide that care are allowed to operate, and whether places of worship can be free of a federal presence. 

For years, federal immigration enforcement was limited by “sensitive location” rules designed to protect places like hospitals, schools, and churches from unnecessary intimidation. Those guidelines were first formalized during the Obama administration, kept in place by the first Trump administration, and reaffirmed during the Biden presidency. Nor were these restrictions entirely new: Some form of protection for houses of worship has existed for more than 30 years, according to the legal organization Democracy Forward. 

But DHS rescinded the “sensitive location” rules at the start of the second Trump presidency — to “empower” CBP and ICE  to go after “criminals” who “will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” according to a DHS statement at the time — triggering legal responses from immigrant rights and religious freedom groups.

“For decades, the federal government recognized a simple truth: targeting people at houses of worship violates religious freedom and harms communities,” Bradley Girard, the senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said earlier this year when announcing friend-of-the-court briefs in federal cases brought by a coalition of Quaker, Sikh, and Baptist groups. “These briefs make clear that the Trump-Vance administration’s policy is not only unlawful — it is dangerous. It chills religious exercise and undermines public safety by driving people into the shadows.”

Many of those suits ended up succeeding — at least in getting judges to protect various Baptist, Lutheran, Christian, and Sikh places of worship that could prove they were being affected by immigration raids. But broader federal protections for places of worship have not yet been formalized.

Instead, churches, religious organizations, and legal aid organizations have waged piecemeal legal fights to secure religious liberty protections, like in Minnesota and Illinois — particularly to exercise pastoral care, like providing counseling, sacraments, and religious rituals. In Minneapolis, for example, Groundwork Legal, a local nonprofit, public interest law firm, sued ICE over a ban on clergy access to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building.

“Under federal law — both the Constitution and statute — it’s clear that the government can only limit the ability of somebody to practice their religious faith, including the ability to provide [or receive] pastoral care, in the least restrictive means possible given the circumstances,” Irina Vaynerman, the co-founder and lead attorney of Groundwork Legal, told me. “And here, a categorical bar from even entering the building, to offering that care to anyone who wants to receive, it was obviously not the least restrictive means.”

Groundwork filed that suit in February on behalf of multi-denominational faith organizations and faith leaders under both the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment’s free exercise protections. They won a preliminary injunction in March, with a judge ordering the federal government to allow faith leaders to offer pastoral care to those held by ICE at the building.

Catholic clergy and religious leaders launched a similar suit last fall in Illinois after ICE and CBP officials denied clergy access to the Broadview federal center to minister to detained people — including offering Communion to them. They won a partial victory this year, when a judge ordered federal agents to allow clergy access for Ash Wednesday services — and in May, ICE and religious leaders reached an agreement to allow daily visits once again while litigation plays out. 

Vaynerman reiterated to me that the Illinois case is still playing out — these agreements and changes are temporary reprieves, in part because no national protections or guarantees have been formalized beyond piecemeal fights over religious liberty and free exercise in specific cities and around specific federal buildings or places of worship.

“Certainly this is something that we know folks are experiencing across the country…and we know that this is happening all over the country because there is not a standard protocol or policies related to this incredibly important constitutional and statutory right,” she said. “It is so important that the government recognizes [the importance of pastoral care] and then offers that level of access that is constitutionally required to support people going through one of the darkest times in their lives.”

This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.

At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.

In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.

Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”

One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.

Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.

Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:

Introduction by SherAli Tareen

LL Hodges, ‘Claustrophobic Archive‘

Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Black Internationalism, the Black Prince, and the Pressures of History‘

APS, ‘”What this means I do not know”: Loss and Rumours of Loss‘

Samaah Jaffer, ‘The Contention of Mourning‘

Marika Rose, ‘A Matter of Fantasy‘

Satbir Singh, ‘Dandy (de)livery‘

Basit Iqbal, ‘Non-redemptive Narration‘

Response by Rajbir