On religious freedom, Kamala Harris faces doubts from conservatives

In 2018, Brian C. Beuscher, an agricultural attorney from Nebraska, was nominated to the federal judiciary. Buescher was a member of the Knights of Columbus, the largest Catholic fraternal service organization in the world. That affiliation became a central part of his nomination hearing: in a written questionnaire, then-Sen. Kamala Harris quizzed Buescher about the group’s conservative social views. Harris categorized the Knights of Columbus as “an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men.” Was Buescher aware, she asked, that the Knights of Columbus “opposed a woman’s right to choose” and “opposed marriage equality” when he joined?
Her line of questioning infuriated the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That Buescher should be part of an organization that upheld the Catholic Church’s stances on social issues like abortion and marriage, they said, should not be a litmus for a judicial appointment.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, criticized Harris for attempting to impose “religious tests” on federal judicial nominees. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., introduced a resolution in response, declaring that “disqualifying a nominee to federal office” because of their membership in the Knights of Columbus “violates the Constitution.” The resolution passed the Senate unanimously.
As Harris continues her candidacy for the U.S. presidency, that 2018 incident has garnered renewed interest among conservatives, who question whether Harris’ campaign promise — to respect people’s “faith or deeply held beliefs” — extends to all religious people.
“There’s kind of a social distance between Harris and the religious right,” said Matthew Continetti, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of domestic policy studies.
Since Harris accepted the Democratic nomination in late summer, her campaign has included a message of “freedom,” and her campaign surrogates have said she supports religious liberty. Harris’ new director of faith outreach, the Rev. Jen Butler, told Religious News Service that Latter-day Saint voters “are concerned about religious freedom, and I think we can engage them, because we are the party of freedom.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro repeated the message at the Democratic National Convention: we are the “party of real freedom,” he said, including the “freedom to worship how (one) wants.”
But on the campaign trail, Harris herself has spoken little about her personal faith or what she would do to protect people of faith in the U.S. That leaves people to scrutinize her record as senator and vice president on religious liberty — and many religious conservatives are not satisfied.
“I think you have to look at the record,” Continetti said. “The record is that Sen. Harris was hostile to religious liberty, and Vice President Harris has been part of an administration that has not necessarily been friendly to religious freedom either.”
Critics of Harris’ religious freedom record often point to the Do No Harm Act, a bill Harris co-sponsored as a senator in 2019. The bill came in response to several high-profile court cases in which the landmark 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s protections for religious individuals and groups collided with concerns about reproductive rights and gender orientation.
In one Supreme Court case, national retail chain Hobby Lobby claimed it did not need to include contraceptives in health insurance plans that go against the company owners’ religious beliefs; in another case, a funeral home argued it was justified in dismissing an employee after the employee underwent a gender transition.
The Do No Harm Act, Harris and her co-sponsors argued, would prevent RFRA from being used as a method for discrimination.
“That First Amendment guarantee should never be used to undermine other Americans’ civil rights or subject them to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity,” Harris said upon reintroducing the legislation in 2019.
But the Do No Harm Act would have been “a real step backwards,” for religious liberty, said Richard Garnett, the Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law and director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State & Society.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, when passed in the 1990s, enjoyed widespread, bipartisan support, and it “reflected kind of a shared view that, you know, religious accommodations are appropriate in a pluralistic society,” he said. The Do No Harm Act would prevent religious organizations from using RFRA to seek exemptions from civil rights law, fundamentally shifting how religious freedom protections are managed.
“The (Do No Harm) Act reflected a general, across-the-board view that if religious freedom bumps up against any anti-discrimination law, then religious freedom has to yield,” Garnett explained. “And I think for a lot of religious freedom advocates, that was sort of too heavy-handed an approach.”
Not all religious freedom advocates believe the protections in RFRA are always used correctly, and some believe that RFRA has caused harm — such as when the Trump administration used it to justify changes to federal regulations that opponents believed could have led to discrimination against LGTBQ individuals in hiring.
The Do No Harm Act, though, opens a Pandora’s box for religious institutions: it isn’t difficult to imagine, Garnett noted as an example, that a faith group wishing to hire individuals of their own religious practice — in line with its mission — would be committing invidious discrimination under the proposed legislation.
“Changing this standard would make it harder for many institutions to maintain their religious identity,” Michael Gerson, the conservative Washington Post columnist, wrote.
Harris has not explained how her potential administration would deviate from the Biden-Harris administration’s record on Title IX protections at home and religious liberty abroad. For many religious conservatives, the current administration receives poor marks on both.
In April, the Department of Education announced changes to Title IX that all institutions receiving federal aid must follow. The rule change was challenged in court by over a dozen states, and the Supreme Court paused the rule from taking effect.
The changes altered Title IX’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination to include “gender identity,” and it classifies any refusal to allow transgender individuals from using restrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identity as a violation of Title IX.
Some religious universities fear that the implementation of the new rule would no longer allow them to maintain single-sex living spaces.
“There are a lot of religious institutions that receive federal funding, and therefore are subject to the regulations that are used to implement Title IX and the current administration’s position,” Garnett said. “There’s every reason to think that President Harris would continue this.”
When approaching religious liberty abroad, the Biden administration has taken a markedly different approach than prior presidents, said Nina Shea, a former commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.
Biden deviated from the Trump’s previous executive order that made religious liberty a foreign policy priority, Shea noted, and subsequently took steps that appeared to deprioritize international religious freedom: a reference to protecting religious minorities abroad was dropped from the White House’s annual National Security Strategy, and the State Department delisted Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” — even as more Christians are killed there for their faith each year than the rest of the world combined, according to Open Doors.
The bright spot in the Biden-Harris administration’s leadership abroad, Shea said, was declaring China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims a genocide.
“Overall, Biden-Harris abandoned religious freedom as a fundamental foreign policy concern, in favor of partisan policies like climate change, gender issues and abortion on which there is no American consensus,” said Shea, who now directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.
Reproductive rights are a central part of Harris’ reelection effort, and she recently expressed support for ending the filibuster — a 60-vote threshold for most legislation in the Senate — in order to codify the abortion protections in Roe v. Wade.
She has pitched abortion as an issue that people of faith can agree on. In speeches and interviews, she repeats a petition to religious voters: “And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” she says. “If she chooses, she will consult with her pastor, her priest, her rabbi, her imam. But it should not be the government telling her what to do.”
Does that message work with conservative religious voters, many of whom view abortion to be wrong in most cases? “From the religious conservative point of view, these restrictions aren’t about the woman, they’re about the unborn child, and they’re restricting what can be done to the body of the unborn child,” said Continetti. “So it’s something of evasion or euphemism on Harris’s part. I don’t think it goes very far in satisfying (many conservative religious voters).”
Harris’ stance on abortion shows how the conversation on reproductive freedoms has shifted in recent decades, said Thomas Farr, president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute.
“Once upon a time, pro-choice men and women believed that abortion was a tragedy that should be safe, legal and rare. No longer,” Farr said. “Vice President Harris, Governor Walz and the Democratic party now firmly avow that the very act of abortion is good for women, good for men, and good for the nation. They demand that the right to abort be affirmed.”
Harris’ camp has made several direct plays toward voters of faith. She hired a faith outreach director and has organized faith-specific leadership groups, like a “Catholics for Harris-Walz” coalition and “Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz” advisory committees in Arizona and Nevada.
Her best tool for pitching voters of faith is talking about her own beliefs, wrote Jessica Grose, a columnist for The New York Times. “In a close election year, with an opponent who does not appear to have sincere religious convictions of his own, I see an opportunity for Harris to reclaim faith for Democrats,” Grose said.
Harris comes from a unique religious background: she was raised by a Hindu mother from south Asia; she is a member of a historically Black Baptist church; she is married to a Jew. Interfaith leaders — including those representing apolitical organizations, who will not endorse a candidate — agree she should talk more about that religious pedigree.
The Rev. Paul Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, said Harris has an “opportunity” to show the country what an interreligious American identity looks like.
“She does have a kind of religious diversity baked in within who she is, how she was raised, who she married,” Raushenbush said. “There’s an opportunity for her to come from an authentic self and say, ‘This is who America is.’”
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, agrees. He noted President Barack Obama’s frequent repetitions of Bible verses, like Micah 6:8. “If you’re talking about how your faith has inspired you to be a better person and a public servant, that’s a really positive thing,” Patel said. “That encourages people to reflect on how their faith inspires them to serve others. And I think that goes a long way.”
If Harris begins to discuss her personal faith more openly, some religious conservatives will still await a more clear message on what a Harris administration would do to protect the rights of all Americans — including those same religious conservatives. Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, recently called Harris “the biggest threat to religious liberty we’ve had in at least a generation.”
Harris has not yet made clear what she will do to ensure that is not true, said Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah.
“We have (religious freedom protections) in place, and it’s a matter of not eroding it,” Moore said. “That’s what I would want to understand more from the Harris campaign or the Harris team: if you’re really speaking up for religious protection, what are you going to do to keep efforts from within your party to erode those protections from coming to the floor?”