It does not take much these days to be labeled by evangelicals — or the nation’s highest court and legal figures — as being hostile to religion. In a U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy found government hostility towards religion based on a single commissioner’s statements that the refusal of a baker to bake any custom wedding cake for a gay couple simply because they were gay, was an improper or “despicable” form of religious discrimination used by others “throughout history.” Whatever your thoughts are on a finding of hostility in that case (I personally agree with the Court that government hostility existed, but based solely on its second finding of animus), it is just a simple fact that religion has indeed been used to justify every form of discrimination. James Madison, the Founder most credited with establishing free conscience liberty, knew this fact well and in his infamous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Madison spoke about the nature of religion’s past when it was supported by the state:

Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

The solution to this history of religious bigotry, according to Madison and other Founders, was to propose a restoration of religion’s “primitive state” where dependence on the state did not exist and funding was dependent on “the voluntary rewards of their flocks.” To Madison, however, returning religion to this primitive state would cause many to predict religion’s downfall. Which brings me to William Barr, our current attorney general.

Recently, Barr gave a speech where, among other claims, he asserted that secularism, or a separation of church and state, was targeting religion for destruction. Barr would also claim that non-religious Americans, or those who reject the religious teachings of Judaism and Christianity in particular, were directly responsible for every societal ill including “depression and mental illness,” “suicide,” “senseless violence,” and furthering “a deadly drug epidemic.” Although Barr’s claims that non-believers are responsible for all societal moral failings are provably false, the response to Barr’s speech by evangelicals was, to my knowledge, universally positive. Even the evangelicals who claim to dislike this president nevertheless proclaimed gratitude that “a man of William Barr’s convictions is heading up the Department of Justice,” and used Barr’s speech as justification for supporting the current president.

I ask my fellow citizens of all beliefs to think about this reality for one second: The Attorney General of the United States blamed citizens who do not subscribe to his religious beliefs/convictions as being directly responsible for the worst elements in society (including violence), and evangelicals universally cheered. Moreover, think about how if you were to replace the word “secularists” in Barr’s speech with say, “Catholics” or “Christianity in general,” how different the reaction would have been. In other words, if any AG had said the teachings of Catholics or Christianity was directly responsible for the country’s violence, drug abuse, and mental illness, can there be any doubt evangelicals would have no problem denouncing that person as a bigot?

Yet, evangelicals see no hypocrisy in celebrating Barr’s speech demonizing those who do not share their beliefs. In many ways, evangelical bigotry is nothing new, as evangelicals today regularly burn secular books, discriminate against secular Americans from giving invocations, force non-believers and those of other faiths to be taxed for the maintenance of Christian monuments, force states to fund property enhancements for churches, force all objecting non-religious people to use currency that conveys upon them a belief and trust in some God they do not have in order to participate in commerce, and force the ever growing non-religious population to subsidize church functions and religious clergy in the billions. Yet, evangelicals with no shame are resolute that they are the greatest victims of society and bias application of the law.

For any student of history, this tactic of the powerful playing the victim while demonizing and discriminating against those who do not share their beliefs is also nothing new. The cause of this latest version is due, in part, to religion’s (particularly Christianity) rapidly declining membership in American society. Like others, however, I expect this decline to stabilize so that in all likelihood by 2030, “[t]he size of most religious groups in America are predicted to be almost exactly the same as they are now.” But for evangelicals who are used to Christian dominance in American politics, law, and social society, this leveling process is a terror. I’ll let Maajid Nawaz, an individual who knows a bit about religious extremism, explain:

When the powerful are being leveled, they become scared. Petrified of losing the deference they believe they are entitled to, they cast themselves anew as the oppressed. Used to receiving preferential treatment, they suddenly feel discriminated against. And so it has come to pass that every time a powerful group is equalized during times of great social upheaval, they cast themselves as victims.

Combining this kind of fear and bigotry continues to be a central tenet of this administration. The attorney general prior to William Barr (Jeff Sessions), was an equally clear religious bigot who regularly described those who did not believe in his religion as a threat to the country that must be stopped. The current vice president demands that his view — that homosexuality belongs in the same immoral category of unacceptable sexual behavior as pedophilia — should be accepted without criticism, but that “criticism of Christian education in America should stop.” In other words, it is clear from this administration that the concern over religion has nothing to do with “liberty” for all Americans, but rather on maintaining Christian ideological dominance over non-believers.

The combination of fear and bigotry also explains why the same evangelicals who lamented for literal years that Amy Barrett was asked a question once about her religious views, say nothing about Barr’s and Sessions’s more overtly bigoted statements about non-believers. As long as evangelicals continue to install and celebrate religious bigotry in power out of fear, portraying all non-believers as threats coming to get them, things are going to get much, much, worse. However, the only and best recourse we have to such bigotry is an appeal to the Constitution and Madison’s principles of free conscience liberty for all.

Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.