The fact is that religion is on the march, and it can only be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s ruling last June in the Hobby Lobby case. That decision, the legal consequences of which are still playing out, permitted an employer running an ordinary for-profit retail business to claim a religious exemption from compliance with the federal requirement to include contraception coverage in its employee insurance plan. (And on Tuesday of this week, the court abandoned its age-old stance of deference toward prison administrators and ruled that a Muslim prison inmate had the right under federal law to keep a beard despite the Arkansas prison’s ban on facial hair. While Islam does not require men to wear beards, the inmate’s belief that he should have one was sufficiently “sincere” to invoke the statute’s protections, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the unanimous court.)

However the justices proceed to resolve the increasingly audacious claims of religious conscience in a post-Hobby Lobby, post-marriage equality world, it’s safe to predict that politicians will be confronting these issues under the glare of a public spotlight. Republicans who expect the Supreme Court to give them a pass from having to take a stand are in for a rude surprise.

The same might be said of the consequences for Republicans of prevailing in their latest attack on the Affordable Care Act. This spring, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in King v. Burwell, the cynical effort manufactured by right-wing think tanks to unravel the law (I’ve written about this case previously.) At stake is whether the insurance exchanges the federal government set up when 36 Republican-led states refused to set up their own will be dismantled, and whether the millions people who bought subsidized policies on the federal exchanges will have to look elsewhere or go without.

Leading Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, now the Senate majority leader, cheered when the court agreed to hear the case. But now some conservatives are getting cold feet at the prospect of actually winning. They are contemplating the morning-after question: now what? Suppose constituents who have paid no attention to the seemingly arcane issue in the case turn to their Republican governors and say something like: The Supreme Court says the law will work only with state exchanges, so why can’t we have a state exchange? In other words: Save our insurance.

It’s been grimly amusing to watch the scramble that’s now taking place as some of the Affordable Care Act’s most prominent detractors realize they might actually need something with which to placate not only consumers but also the insurance and health care industries. Randy E. Barnett, an architect of the original constitutional attack on the law, published an op-ed last month in USA Today under the title “How to Finally Kill Obamacare.” Republicans “need to start right away,” he wrote, in order to have a “well-vetted replacement in the pipeline” that would serve the additional purpose of assuring the justices that they would not simply be tossing millions of people into a void. Among his proposals is to “restore the private insurance market” by pricing insurance “according to risk” — in other words, to do away with a centerpiece of the current law, which relies on the principles of “guaranteed issue” and “community rating” to bar insurers from penalizing people who have ever actually needed medical care.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yuval Levin and James C. Capretta, two associates of conservative policy organizations, took a different, tax credit-based approach but with a similar goal: “Show the public that the G.O.P. has a concrete alternative to offer.”

Is that a still, small voice that I hear: quick, somebody please take me off the hook? It’s a little late for that. The case will be argued March 4.