‘We have more religious freedom now than ever in our lifetime,’ says top conservative legal expert Kelly Shackelford

As Israelis continue to battle over the future of their disputed judiciary system, Americans who stand for personal liberty, religious freedom and the rule of law are lauding several monumental decisions that were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer.

ALL ISRAEL NEWS Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg highlighted some prominent cases on his weekly program ‘THE ROSENBERG REPORT’ which aired on TBN last Thursday and Saturday evening.

Along with one of America’s foremost conservative legal experts, Kelly Shackelford of First Liberty Institute, Rosenberg analyzed the dramatic victories for religious freedom and put them in perspective.

“Every American alive right now has more religious freedom than they've ever had in their lifetime,” Shackelford told Joel.

“They might not understand it right now because they might not have caught up with what's happening. But the legal victories, we're winning. We're shifting 54 precedents and God is literally opening whole swaths of religious freedom that nobody's ever seen in this country. And the question is really going to be, 'Are we going to walk in it and exercise it?'”

Shackelford is President and Chief Executive Officer of First Liberty Institute, the largest legal organization in the nation, dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.

The constitutional scholar and his team have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and won numerous landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases. The most important one, according to Shackelford, is known as the Coach Kennedy case.

“Without a doubt,” he said.

Coach Joe Kennedy, an 18-year Marine veteran, was suspended and fired from Bremerton High School (BHS) in the State of Washington because he prayed a brief, quiet prayer after football games. First Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit against the school district, arguing that banning coaches from quietly praying, just because they can be seen by the public, is wrong and violates the Constitution.

“If he had gone to a Kaepernick knee during the national anthem, he would have been fine,” Shackelford stressed. “But he was going to a knee to pray. And their big argument is that some student might see him, and if they saw him they might think maybe they should pray and we can't have that.”

“So we can have teachers and coaches being all kinds of bad examples… But the one thing we can't allow is any person who is a coach or a teacher – or really even works for the government – to ever do anything that anybody would know is religious,” he continued.

For seven years, Coach Kennedy lost several cases all the way up to the Supreme Court, which eventually sided with him in June 2022. With a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled the coach’s conduct was protected by the First Amendment.

As the case unfolded and became a controversy, there was an uplifting moment that Shackelford believes “will probably be in a movie” one day.  

After one of the games, when Coach Kennedy went to the side to take a knee, he suddenly felt his team had surrounded him. At the time, he was thinking that he did not want them to get into any kind of trouble.

“He opens his eyes. It's the other team, all their players and all their coaches, coming to surround him because they saw in the newspaper that an American was having his First Amendment rights taken away and they were saying, ‘We're not going to allow that to stand,'” Shackelford shared with Rosenberg.

Another recent focal win for liberty is the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. Here, too, in a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that the State of Colorado cannot compel a designer to create websites for same-sex weddings – a work that violates her values.

Kelly said the government was trying to force her to say something she didn’t want to say.

“And if she won't, they're going to punish her,” he explained. “It violates the free exercise of religion. It violates her conscience and faith to do this.”

The Supreme Court took only one claim of the two that First Liberty was making, the one of a free speech violation but not the other of religious freedom.

“We can't have the government telling citizens, 'If you don't say certain things, we're going to punish you,” stated Shackelford.

The top lawyer has been in plenty of debates on this topic. Whenever people get upset, he presents the following questions that usually confuse them: “Do you really think the government should have the power to punish a black baker because he won't bake a cake for the Klan rally?”

At that point, Shackelford said, people realize they wouldn’t force it either.

In another high-profile case, Shackelford’s group also represented an Evangelical mail worker from Pennsylvania named Gerald Groff, who brought a lawsuit against the United States Postal Service. He claimed the USPS had violated federal law by failing to reasonably accommodate his religious request to not work on Sundays.

In his 2019 resignation letter, Groff wrote that he had been unable to find an “accommodating employment atmosphere with the USPS that would honor his religious beliefs.”

While a lower court ruled against him, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Groff.

“There is now this level of protection for everybody in the workplace,” Shackelford told Rosenberg. “And it's not just government entities, it's this statute that applies to private employers or government employers.”

To watch the full interview with Kelly Shackelford of First Liberty with Joel Rosenberg, visit www.RosenbergReport.TV.