Politics & Power Quote by Ron Lewis

Patriotism is doing a lot of quiet work here, and that is exactly the point. Ron Lewis stitches “freedom of religion” to the Declaration of Independence and then to “allegiance to America’s flag,” creating a rhetorical pipeline from private belief to public ritual. The maneuver isn’t subtle: if religious liberty is “central” to the nation’s founding, then legislation framed as religious protection can be marketed as simple fidelity to the American project itself. In that framing, critics don’t just oppose a bill; they appear to oppose the Declaration, the flag, and the “ideals” supposedly woven into both.

The subtext is a culture-war calculus: disputes over school prayer, “under God,” or faith-inflected speech aren’t presented as debates about pluralism and state neutrality. They’re re-described as a one-way street where the vulnerable party is the believer (or the believer-as-patriot), and the threat comes from government or secular institutions that are cast as censorious. “Positive step” does political branding too, pre-loading the policy as moral progress rather than a contested intervention.

Contextually, this kind of language tends to surface when Congress advances measures meant to protect public expressions that blur civic and religious identity - pledges, ceremonies, displays - especially when courts or local policies have imposed limits. Lewis’s phrasing offers reassurance to a base that feels its symbols are under siege, while quietly redefining religious freedom less as equal space for many faiths (and none) and more as permission for one dominant religious-tinged nationalism to speak in the loudest voice.