Americas religious believers face a growing government push to censor expressions of faith and should prepare to respond rather than retreat, author and former Institute on Religion and Democracy president James Tonkowich told the Family Research Council in a Washington address.
Too often, Tonkowich argued, religious belief is treated as something to be contained rather than expressed in public life. He pointed to a run of real cases from the period: Houston city officials seeking subpoenas for pastors sermons to scrutinise their statements on sexuality, colleges restricting Christian ministries on campus, and courts compelling Christian business owners to participate in same-sex weddings against their conscience.
Tonkowich, author of The Liberty Threat: The Assault on Religious Freedom in America Today and a former colleague of the late Chuck Colson through BreakPoint Radio, told believers to expect friction rather than be surprised by it, urging a response built on holiness, virtue and what he called heroism rather than retreat or apology.
Whether religious liberty cases have grown more frequent since or simply more visible is a genuinely contested question, and reasonable people land on different sides of it depending on which specific cases they weigh most heavily. What has not changed is the underlying tension Tonkowich was describing: a pluralist, secular public square trying to work out how much room religious conviction gets when it collides with other rights claims. That argument was live in 2014 and remains live now.
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