Arkansas won a fake "religious liberty" contest. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants praise for it.
The state's #1 ranking says far more about the Religious Right's agenda than it does about religious freedom
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Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants everyone to know her state is finally #1 in something.
Not crime. They’re 48th in that.
Not health care. They’re #47.
Infrastructure? Nope. They’re #41.
It sure as hell isn’t education, where they’re #36.
But they’re #1 when it comes to “Religious Liberty”… at least according to a right-wing Christian group looking for attention.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders today announced Arkansas ranks #1 in the nation for religious liberty according to the First Liberty Institute’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy’s (CRCD) Religious Liberty in the States (RLS) index. Arkansas earned a score of 89.2%, becoming one of only two states to receive the index’s first-ever “excellent” rating.
“Religious liberty is America’s First Freedom, and Arkansas is leading the nation in protecting it,” said Governor Sanders. “Our rights come from God, not government, and every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience. We’ll continue defending that freedom and ensuring the Natural State remains the best place in the country to live, work, and worship.”
It is downright comical that, even with the #1 ranking, Arkansas could still only pull off a B+. Also funny? New York was ranked last by the right-wing group, which Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ought to wear as a badge of honor, given where the ranking is coming from.
The conservative group says the rankings were calculated by evaluating “50 legal protections across 20 safeguards… to support religious freedom in daily life from education and healthcare to family law, economic activity, and religious practice.”
To put that another way, if your religion is allowed to override civil rights protections for groups of people you hate, you’re rewarded for it. Same rule applies if your religion is allowed to ignore all the things that generally benefit society
For example, First Liberty explains, Christian judges in Arkansas are allowed cite their faith in defense of discriminating against same-sex couples.
Arkansas’s rise to first place is due in large part to legislation adopted in 2025. The state enacted HB 1615, a law that protects individuals and institutions from being forced to participate in wedding ceremonies to which they have religious objections.
That bill, the ACLU noted, also allows taxpayer-funded faith-based adoption and foster agencies to discriminate against gay people and “undermine[s] nondiscrimination standards in education, licensing, and accreditation.” They added that the bill played on the unfounded fear that religious groups would be forced to violate their beliefs, “something that has never happened in the decade since marriage equality became law.”
HB 1615 also lets private business owners—bakers, florists, photographers, etc.— discriminate against LGBTQ customers. They can refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple even if they would sell the same cake to a straight one. First Liberty says these “protections” save businesses from “being forced to participate in wedding ceremonies” against their will… as if the caterer at a wedding holds the same importance as the maid of honor.
These are the things Arkansas is being rewarded for.
Among the other things First Liberty considered in their rankings?
Are clergy members allowed to keep pedophiles’ secrets a secret if they learn about them through the act of Confession? (Requiring them to be mandated reporters in those cases, which would help the victims, is considered a bad thing among conservatives.)
Are houses of worship are allowed to spread a disease during a pandemic? (Conservatives threw a hissy fit when churches were prohibited from opening their doors for large services during the pre-vaccine COVID days. This was done to prevent the spread of an airborne disease because churches, unlike, say, grocery stores, are spaces where people talk and sing and spread germs in close proximity.)
Do public schools let unvaccinated students enroll? (Herd immunity only works if enough people are vaccinated, which is why no one should be exempt from vaccines unless there’s a medical reason for it, but anti-science conservatives think vaccines should be optional.)
Can employees avoid joining a union if they have a religious objection to it? (Conservatives want to decrease the power of those unions, thereby allowing businesses to take advantage of their employees, so any excuse to avoid paying union dues is considered a win.)
It’s just a laundry list of right-wing grievances devoid of consideration of evidence, reality, or what’s it’s like to live in a pluralistic society. There’s no attempt to understand why certain rules that benefit all of society (like with vaccines) are more important than the religious whims of the most ignorant members of society.
But Sanders was so eager to treat this ranking as some kind of victory that she held a press conference to celebrate the Christian equivalent of a participation trophy:
“Religious liberty is America’s First Freedom, and Arkansas is leading the nation in protecting it,” Sanders said. “Our rights come from God, not government, and every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience. We’ll continue defending that freedom and ensuring the Natural State remains the best place in the country to live, work, and worship.”
Her God, she means. The Christian God. Because Arkansas is not a welcome place to be if you’re Muslim, atheist, or even a progressive Christian, and she’s made that explicitly clear over the years.
Just last year, she proclaimed that state employees would have Christmas Day and the day after that off—which would not be weird at all—while adding that they should use that time with their families “giving thanks for Christ’s birth.” It was a religious mandate so blunt that you didn’t have to do much work to realize how inappropriate it was.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation sent Sanders a letter urging her not to use sectarian language in official pronouncements—a perfectly sensible request! Sanders predictably reacted by cosplaying as a victim of religious persecution and insisting she would “do no such thing.”
That’s because she sees religious freedom as the freedom to shove her religion in everyone else’s face.
During her press conference yesterday, Huckabee claimed atheists were mad because she closed government offices over Christmas… even though the closures themselves weren’t the problem. Sanders went on to say she was proud to defend her decision to include a “detailed theological narrative presenting core Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, his crucifixion for the sins of mankind, his resurrection, and his anticipated return in glory.” She confessed to the damn crime!
To put this another way, even while accepted a “religious freedom” award, Sanders used the opportunity to proselytize.
She didn’t stop there. She celebrated laws that protected “religious views on fundamental biological differences between men and women”—so making life more miserable for transgender people. And she boasted about a law “placing copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and state buildings despite liberal activists trying to stop us.” (A federal judge said that law was unconstitutional because there was “no educational purpose” for displaying the Ten Commandments and it was “coercive.” An appeal is pending.)
She closed her speech by saying, “In this administration, we don’t just believe that Jesus is our living hope, we will always stand up for the rights of Arkansans who believe the same.” Which, again, is an admission that only one religion ever matters to the “religious freedom” crowd.
By the way, not a single reporter asked a question after Sanders finished speaking, something she also celebrated: “Make sure that that headline reads just how we want it to: Arkansas ranked #1!”
The ACLU wasn’t buying the spin:
“It’s deeply ironic to celebrate Arkansas as the nation’s leader on religious liberty while state leaders continue to push policies that privilege certain religious beliefs, mandate religious displays in public schools, censor books, and target LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities,” Megan Bailey, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said in a statement. “The government does not protect religious liberty by elevating one set of religious beliefs over everyone else’s.”
It’s not the only time Sanders has used her position to advocate for Christianity. In 2023, she bragged about the stained-glass Christian cross “masterpiece” her children had created in front of the Governor’s Mansion, as if this was some kind of accomplishment worth celebrating.
And then there were all the political moves she’s made to directly benefit Christians, like okaying a voucher program to send millions of dollars to private religious schools (at the expense of public schools) and firing the State Library Board because they weren’t doing enough to ban books.
As I’ve written before, Sanders, much like her father, isn’t interested in merely blurring the line between church and state. She doesn’t believe such a line exists at all. She thinks her beliefs are state-sanctioned truths while everyone else’s beliefs are merely fiction. That violates the law she swore to uphold.
By the way, Arkansas remains one of a handful of states where, at least on paper, the state constitution literally prohibits atheists from holding office: Article 19, Section 1 says “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court.” It’s unenforceable thanks to the U.S. Constitution, but it’s still on the books in what we’re told is the greatest state for religious liberty. The legislature could begin the process to take that law off the books if they wanted to… but Republicans aren’t interested in doing anything to actually protect religious freedom for non-Christians.
The bottom line is that this ranking is a joke. It doesn’t measure “religious liberty” in any meaningful sense of the phrase. It measures how thoroughly a state has embraced the policy wishlist of the Christian Right. If lawmakers let conservative Christians discriminate against LGBTQ people, weaken public health protections, funnel taxpayer money to religious institutions, and inject Christianity into public schools, they rack up points.
If a state actually treats all religions—and those of us with no religion—equally under the law, it gets punished.
Muslims don’t get invited into this vision of religious liberty. Neither do atheists, Jews, Hindus, Catholics, or even Christians who reject her brand of conservative evangelical politics.
The real trick here is trying to convince people that defending conservative Christian privilege is the same as defending religious liberty for all. Sanders and her allies have to act as though the most politically powerful religious demographic in the country (and certainly Arkansas) is somehow an oppressed minority in desperate need of legal protection. It’s all political theater, which makes sense coming from a party whose leader constantly acts like he’s the victim of every conspiracy known to man.
So, congratulations to Arkansas on winning a contest where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
None of this validates what Arkansas is doing. It just exposes how superficial and pathetic the Religious Right’s definition of “religious freedom” has become.
[every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience.]
You don't really believe that.
Because my faith and my conscience are very different than yours. My faith and conscience says that we should welcome immigrants and refugees. My conscience says that I should respect the rights of others to make their own medical decisions. My faith and conscience demand that we should take care of the poor, eliminate injustices in our institutions that favor one person over another because of skin color, my faith and conscience says that I should love my LGBTQ neighbor as myself. My faith and conscience says that religion is not something to be forced upon others by the State's monopoly on violence. My faith and conscience say that it is profoundly and deeply immoral to allow a handful of men to horde and control the vast majority of the world's resources. My faith and conscience say it's immoral for a rich nation to allow people to sleep on the street. My faith and conscience say it's immoral to support genocide, that it's immoral to go to war unless it is actual self-defense, that it's wrong for the police to gun down unarmed people posing no threat.
My faith and conscience say that the government has no role in promoting religion.
So how would I be free to live accordingly when you use the State's monopoly on violence to ensure that my conscience is violated repeatedly in your state's borders?
"Our rights come from God..."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Have you even read your bible, Sanders? When was that ogre you worship (not Trump. The imaginary one) ever a champion of human rights and liberty? Show us book, chapter and verse.