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Few things are more dangerous to liberty than politicians who claim they’re doing what is best for us—especially when they wrap that control in the language of religion. It’s as if they’ve forgotten the Establishment Clause and the line in the Declaration of Independence that grants us the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
In Alabama, this fusion of faith and governance has become a defining feature of legislative power. Lawmakers are not solving problems—they’re sermonizing from the floor of the State House, turning personal belief into public policy. Law after law is passed not to uplift lives, but to enforce a rigid moral code. And the consequences are stacking up like hymnals in a pew.
This isn’t about protecting children or preserving values. It’s about deciding what speech is permissible, who controls their own body, and which ideas are allowed in the public square. It reeks of false piety.
True faith lifts up—it does not bind people in chains. Yet what we’re witnessing in Montgomery is not a ministry of grace, but a ministry of control. It runs counter to the founding principles of this nation.
Take a look at what’s being pushed: HB244 bans classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation, effectively silencing students and educators alike. HB246 shields anyone who refuses to use a student’s chosen name or pronouns, granting legal cover to disregard a person’s identity. HB318 and SB186 impose sweeping, undefined content filters on internet-connected devices, empowering the state to monitor and restrict what students can access or learn.
Together, they chill speech, codify cruelty and turn schools into battlegrounds for ideological purity. Meanwhile, other bills mandate the Ten Commandments in classrooms, ban pride flags and legally define “man” and “woman”—all while leaving wages stagnant, maternal mortality high and healthcare access low.
Then there’s HB284, which offers tax breaks to donors supporting “pregnancy resource centers”—many of which offer misinformation and shame instead of medical care. Medicaid expansion? Still too controversial for this Legislature.
What ties these bills together isn’t good policy—it’s bad theology. Or rather, theology used badly. These are not laws rooted in data, science or lived experience. They’re edicts passed down from pulpits and playbooks that treat freedom as a threat and diversity as decay.
And this isn’t new. It’s just louder.
Since the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1980s, religion has been wielded by the American right as a political weapon. What started as backlash to Roe v. Wade, the civil rights movement, and changing cultural norms has become a crusade to remake the country in a single image. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and their followers claimed to “take back America for God,” as if faith had been stolen by those seeking dignity and equal rights.
Now, their legacy is written into the laws of states like Alabama.
In Montgomery, it looks like lawmakers more interested in banning books than feeding children. It looks like tax breaks for propaganda centers while hospitals in rural counties shut their doors. It looks like grandstanding on virtue while the state’s most vulnerable fall further behind.
If history teaches us anything, it’s that legislating morality through fear and coercion never ends well.
Look to the Bonfire of the Vanities in 15th-century Florence, where Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola led citizens in burning paintings, poetry, cosmetics and books—all in the name of cleansing the soul. But it wasn’t about virtue. It was about control.
Or look to Puritan New England, where religious conformity was enforced by law and dissenters were exiled—or worse. The Salem witch trials weren’t just a case of hysteria. They were what happens when difference becomes heresy and heresy becomes a crime.
In more recent memory, theocratic regimes from Iran to Afghanistan have shown the cost of governing through religious absolutism. No one is suggesting Alabama is headed for full theocracy—but when government begins to define sin, freedom becomes its first casualty.
Even the Founders knew this.
Thomas Jefferson, in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, warned of the need for a “wall of separation between church and state.”
James Madison wrote, “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson used the word “unalienable” to mark a bright line between just government and tyranny. The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were not optional. They were not to be negotiated—or legislated away by those who confuse righteousness with rule.
Yet here we are—in a state where lawmakers govern as if freedom were a threat and happiness a sin.
They pass “values bills” that quietly erase liberty, dismantle joy and criminalize difference. They don’t just want to control behavior—they want to remove the pursuit of happiness from the American promise entirely.
There was a time when Christians asked, “What would Jesus do?” Today, it’s more like, “What would the Pharisees demand?”
None of this is to say we don’t need moral foundations. A free society depends on shared principles—ethics rooted in compassion, justice and reason. But there’s a difference between moral guidance and moral absolutism. One builds community. The other builds cages.
The real problems in Alabama—poverty, inadequate schools, rural healthcare deserts, a mental health system on life support—aren’t being addressed. Because it’s easier to police flags than to fund solutions. It’s easier to ban a conversation than to fix a broken system.
And that’s the tragedy: we are being governed by suppression while real lives hang in the balance.
If Alabama is ever to move forward, we need lawmakers who serve all people—not just those who sit in their church pew. We need policies grounded in facts—not fear.
History offers a clear warning: Liberty, once traded for the comfort of conformity, is rarely regained.
