Abstract
When religious claimants sue to protect their ability to practice their faith, they often invoke legal guarantees that specifically protect religious exercise. Yet historically—and still today—they also rely on secular guarantees like freedom of speech or equal protection. And their victories on these grounds set precedents not just for believers but for everyone. As a result, many rights we now take for granted stem from religious minorities pressing for the ability to preach, proselytize, and publish their religious views. No account of free speech law would be complete, for instance, without considering the pathbreaking decisions won by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Although scholars have recognized the role of Witnesses and other religious actors to First Amendment law, little scholarship has examined the broader phenomenon of religious actors advancing secular rights or traced how their struggles have affected secular individuals in secular contexts. To begin to fill that gap, this Article offers a historical account of how religious minorities inspired much of the Bill of Rights’ secular freedoms and how Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular secured many of those rights in court. The Article also shows how those victories laid the foundation for secular social movements—most notably how Witness cases in the 1930s and ‘40s provided crucial protections for the Black civil rights movement.
Better understanding religious minorities’ role in shaping our basic secular freedoms has important implications for how religious-claimant cases—both old and new—should be thought of today. In disputes ranging from a high school coach praying after games to companies like Facebook and YouTube challenging state regulation of their content-feed decisions, litigants and courts must decide both when to resolve religious claimants’ cases on secular grounds and, conversely, whether to resolve secular claimants’ cases by analogizing to protections afforded to religiously-motivated actors.
Recommended Citation
Joshua C. McDaniel, Religious Minorities and Secular Rights, 83 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 111 (2026).Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol83/iss1/5
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Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Law and Society Commons, Religion Law Commons