In April, Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill that cut a hole in Connecticut’s own Religious Freedom Restoration Act. House Bill 5044, sold as a vaccine-standards measure, declares that the state’s RFRA does not reach school immunization requirements, and lawmakers passed it while that very question sat before the Connecticut Supreme Court. In Spillane v. Lamont, the court had let a RFRA challenge to the 2021 repeal of religious vaccine exemptions go forward. Rather than risk the ruling, the legislature rewrote the statute under the court’s feet. By its own sponsors’ admission, this is the first time Connecticut has carved an exception into its religious-liberty law. It will not be the last, and the people who should be most alarmed are the believers RFRA was built to shield.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that the friends of religious liberty keep declining to say out loud. The statute is susceptible to being abused. Not by the Amish dairyman or the Sikh who needs to wear his turban, but by the operator who discovers a deeply held conviction the same week a regulation arrives, and who would like the law to bind everyone except himself. Every such claim teaches legislatures that RFRA is a loophole rather than a shelter, and legislatures respond the way Connecticut just did. The cynic does not merely abuse the exemption. He poisons the well for the sincere.
Which is why it is worth returning to the document conservatives treat as scripture and liberals treat as scandal: Judge Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence in Hobby Lobby Stores v. Sebelius (10th Cir. 2013). Most people remember the holding, that closely held corporations could invoke RFRA against the contraceptive mandate. Fewer remember how Gorsuch opened his concurrence. “All of us face the problem of complicity,” he wrote. “All of us must answer for ourselves whether and to what degree we are willing to be involved in the wrongdoing of others.”
That sentence is the whole argument, and it is a moral one, not a corporate one. Gorsuch went further than the majority. He would have let the Green family themselves, not only their company, raise the claim, because the burden fell on actual people with actual souls. The question was never whether a corporation can pray. It was whether the government may conscript a person into what he believes to be sin and then call it a neutral business regulation.
Notice what that framing demands. Complicity is a cost you refuse to pay. It assumes the believer has something to lose. Because of their beliefs, the Greens already closed their stores every Sunday and forfeited the revenue. When it came to the contraceptive mandate, they paid their lawyers and absorbed years of litigation. Whatever one thinks of their theology, they bore a price for it. That is the signature of conscience. It accepts the loss.
The freeloader inverts the test. He wants the exemption without the cross. He has located a religious objection precisely where it saves him money or spares him a rule he finds tiresome, and he produces it on demand, like a coupon at the register. The kosher butcher who keeps the Sabbath at real expense and the entrepreneur who suddenly cannot abide a safety code are not necessarily doing the same thing.
Critics on the left draw the line in the wrong place. They say any for-profit claim is a racket, that commerce and conscience cannot mix. But that rule would void the Muslim-owned shop that will not stock alcohol and the Jewish caterer who closes for Yom Kippur. Profit is not the tell. Sincerity is, and so is sacrifice. The courts already hold the instruments to find them. The sincerity inquiry is no rubber stamp, and judges are permitted to notice when a conviction materializes on a litigation schedule. The substantial-burden test was meant to separate genuine hardship from the manufactured kind. Used with nerve, both do real work.
So the answer to abuse is not Connecticut’s answer. Gutting the statute to stop a few opportunists is like burning the barn to kill the rats. It leaves the faithful exposed and the cynics merely inconvenienced, since they will find another dodge by Friday. The better course is to police sincerity and honor it generously, and to stop treating every invocation of God as either sacred or fraudulent on its face. But checking into sincerity is a problematic bridge as well because it opens under a cloud of suspicion.
Gorsuch asked the right question in 2013. To what degree are we willing to be made instruments of wrongdoing. The believer who answers honestly will sometimes pay dearly for his answer. The person who treats that question as a tax shelter never answers it at all. They just wants out. The law should be able to tell the difference. So should we. But the question that remains is “how”?