🚨 Arkansas is officially the home of Streamer University 2026! Two days after fans leaked the Hendrix College campus in Conway via these custom "Streamer University Security" SUVs (branded "Protecting Our Community" and ready for campus police Fanum and Walton), the story is everywhere in local news. 👀🚔
The state's #1 ranking says far more about the Religious Right's agenda than it does about religious freedom
Friendly Atheist:
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.
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.)
[...]
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.
Arkansas is #1 in a very dubious honor: the state with the most “religious freedom”, per Christian right organization First Liberty Institute’s Religious Liberty in the States index.
