Last Friday, the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy announced release of its 2024 report (full text) on Religious Liberty in the States. According to the Report:
Now in its third annual edition, RLS 2024 considers thirty-nine distinct kinds of legal provisions that states may adopt to protect religious liberty. These legal provisions, which we refer to as “items,” are aggregated into sixteen “safeguards” that we then average to produce one index score per state. The index allows us to rank states and to track changes in religious liberty protections over time....
States are far more likely to pass some protections than others. States either do not have mandates that require health-insurance plans to cover contraception, abortion, and/or sterilization or, if they do, most include a religious accommodation so that organizations that have religious objections to covering such procedures are not compelled to do so. Every state in the union requires children to be vaccinated before attending public (and sometimes private) schools, but the vast majority provide exemptions for families that have religious objections to vaccinations. And most states either provide absentee ballots for any reason or permit individuals who have religious commitments that prevent them from voting in person to receive them.
The least widely adopted protections include guaranteeing that medical professionals and organizations with religious objections to providing contraception will not be compelled to do so. Very few states permit public officials who may be asked to participate in a wedding ceremony to decline to do so for religious reasons. Finally, only one state permits for-profit businesses to decline to participate in wedding ceremonies to which their owners/employees have sincere religious objections.
This year's report ranks Illinois first and West Virginia 50th in protections for religious liberty.
