Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is a Chicago-based freelance writer.

What do a craft store, a Muslim inmate in Arkansas and two Newark police officers have in common?

Answer: A Supreme Court justice and a small, relatively unknown but highly influential law firm that has already prompted seismic changes in the country’s cultural and legal landscape.


The craft store, of course, is Hobby Lobby, the company whose case triggered Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion in June that allowed the for-profit business to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate on religious grounds.

And on Oct. 7, less than four months after that landmark decision, the Supreme Court is poised to hear Hobbs v. Holt, another religious freedom case, albeit one that bears little resemblance to Hobby Lobby. This one involves Gregory Holt—an Arkansas inmate who also goes by the name Abdul Maalik Muhammad—and asks the justices to decide whether he should be allowed to grow a half-inch beard while in prison.

Unlike in Hobby Lobby—one of the most politically polarizing cases in recent memory—the list of organizations that support Holt in his struggle against the Arkansas correctional system ranges from left-leaning groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm founded by James Dobson to defend the “body of Christ in America.” The scope in the upcoming case is also less sweeping; where Hobby Lobby promised to give religious business owners unprecedented power over their employees’ health care plans, the decision in Holt’s case will reverberate only within the narrow confines of the state prison system.

But Holt, like Hobby Lobby, owes a debt of gratitude to Alito and to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—the same nonprofit law firm that represented the Greens, the multigenerational family of evangelical Christians who own the Hobby Lobby craft store chain. Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, also stepped in to represent Holt after Justice Alito scooped up Holt’s handwritten plea out of the thousands of petitions last fall from the federal appeals court that hears cases out of Arkansas. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed to take the case.

To shepherd two cases to the Supreme Court in the span of six months is no small feat for even for the largest of law firms, let alone for a nonprofit firm with 11 lawyers and an annual budget of just $4 million. That the cases come from disparate corners of religious liberty law only underscores the Becket Fund’s powerful and far-reaching vision, which can simultaneously encompass Holt, who converted to Islam while serving a life sentence for slitting a former girlfriend’s throat, and the Greens, a wealthy family best known before the Hobby Lobby case for their extensive Bible collection.

“The Becket Fund is an extraordinarily ecumenical organization,” says Michael McConnell, a prominent religious liberty legal scholar at Stanford Law School. “It’s happenstance, of course, that a case is coming right on the heels of Hobby Lobby that will remind everyone that religious freedom is important and not—in most contexts—a culture war issue. But that’s been the Becket Fund’s position all along.”

Holt’s case, as disturbing as the underlying crime may be, is relatively straightforward. Arkansas is one of only six state prison systems that won’t allow prisoners to grow beards for religious reasons—a fact that undermines the state’s claim that there is no safe alternative to a complete ban on facial hair. Moreover, the prison officials’ argument that Holt’s half-inch beard would pose a security threat is threadbare, according to Robert Tuttle, a professor of law at the George Washington University. “You have to think about harms to third parties, and in this case, the arguments about security just don’t seem to be justified,” Tuttle says. Allowing religious corporations like Hobby Lobby, on the other hand, to refuse to provide their female employees with birth control arguably threatens more tangible damages.

The Becket Fund doesn’t accept that distinction. Luke Goodrich, the group’s deputy general counsel, says that groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU are selective about their commitment to religious freedom in a way that the Becket Fund is not. “It seems like groups like Americans United and the ACLU are willing to support religious freedom as long as it doesn’t conflict with other values that they hold dear,” he says. “In cases involving the contraception mandate, the Affordable Care Act appears to be a more important value than religious freedom.”

But when it comes to religious accommodations, Tuttle says, being choosy is a good thing. “You have to look at who’s claiming an exemption, what the circumstances are, and who might be harmed—it’s a balance,” he says. “Sometimes the exemptions are justified and sometimes they’re not. With groups like Becket, there isn’t that calculus. Their prevailing assumption is that religion deserves special treatment everywhere.”

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The Becket Fund emerged in 1994 as a rare breed of religious liberty advocate—one with no allegiance to a political party or religious tradition, dedicated to defending the rights of all faiths. Kevin J. “Seamus” Hasson, a Catholic lawyer and the firm’s founder, frequently joked that the Becket Fund defended the “religious rights of people from ‘A to Z,’ from Anglicans to Zoroastrians.” Educated for nearly a decade at the University of Notre Dame (where he earned an undergraduate degree, an M.A. in theology and a J.D.) Hasson spent a brief period in the Reagan administration, working on the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when Samuel Alito was one of the leaders of the office. He then worked for Williams & Connolly—one of Washington’s premier law firms—where he represented affiliates of the Catholic Church. Although its early funders skewed Catholic and conservative—the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic lay organization, provided some seed money—the Becket Fund advocated for a wide range of religious minorities.

The firm—named after Thomas à Becket, a medieval English archbishop murdered by royal knights for refusing to allow the king to meddle in church business and later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church—was tailor-made for the times. In 1993, a coalition of secular and religious organizations banded together to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The law was designed to overrule a controversial Supreme Court decision handed down three years earlier that was widely perceived to give the government permission to trample religious minorities’ rights. In a remarkable showing of bipartisan support, only three senators voted against it. Under the statute, which passed Congress in 1993 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, before the government could burden a person’s religious liberty rights, it had to simultaneously show that the burden served a “compelling” interest and prove that it was the “least restrictive means” of doing so.

In 1999, Becket took on a case that, according to University of Virginia law professor Micah Schwartzman, was a precursor of sorts to Holt’s. The context for Fraternal Order of Police v. Newark was different—instead of a prisoner, the plaintiffs were police officers—but the cases’ facts and cast of characters are similar. Two Sunni Muslim police officers were seeking a religious exemption from the Newark police force’s no-beard policy. As in the Arkansas prison system, the Newark force allowed officers to grow beards for medical, but not religious, reasons, strengthening the plaintiffs’ argument. The Becket Fund’s Hasson argued the case on behalf of a group of organizations that included the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League before the Philadelphia-based federal appeals court. At the time, the court counted among its judges a former federal prosecutor named Samuel Alito. The future Supreme Court justice was one of three judges to hear the case and he wrote the majority opinion holding that the Newark police force was violating its officers’ religious liberty rights. “Because the Department makes exemptions from its policy for secular reasons and has not offered any substantial justification for refusing to provide similar treatment for officers who are required to wear beards for religious reasons, we conclude that the Department’s policy violates the First Amendment,” Alito wrote.

As the Becket Fund outgrew its one-room office in Washington, D.C., and gradually acquired a larger staff, the issue of religious liberty was becoming more politically polarized. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the religious freedom statute as it applied to the states, and the bipartisan coalition struggled to pass a second piece of legislation that would expand the law beyond its federal authority. Some civil liberties groups raised the prescient fear that religious landlords or employers might be able to use the law to discriminate against gays. The law that eventually passed in 1999—the cumbersomely named Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act—had a much narrower scope, applying only to zoning claims and complaints from state prisoners.

Over the following decade, the Becket Fund litigated a dozen relatively mundane cases that fell under the religious land use statute, defending a prisoner who wanted to keep an Odinist crystal in his cell and a megachurch in Orange County, Calif., that was fighting to buy a piece of land that the county hoped to sell to Costco.

But Becket’s lawyers also began to weigh in on issues with a more distinct culture war flavor. In 2005, the Becket Fund convened a conference that hinged on the impending clash between religious liberty rights and same-sex marriage. In 2007, a Becket Fund attorney predicted in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy that legalizing gay marriage would result in “widespread legal confusion resulting in pervasive church-state conflict and a substantial chilling of religious expression.” In other words, religious believers would lose rights if gay couples gained them.

In the fall of 2011, several months before the debate over the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate became headline news, the Becket Fund filed the first lawsuit against the provision on behalf of Benedictine Abbey College, a liberal arts school founded by monks. Today, it is coordinating a half-dozen other lawsuits on behalf of religiously affiliated nonprofits, cases that are similar in spirit to Hobby Lobby. The Becket Fund’s operating budget has expanded substantially since taking a leading role in the fight over the contraception mandate. In 2012, it received almost a quarter-million dollars in funding from DonorsTrust, a group used to funnel money to right-wing groups from patrons like Charles and David Koch. The firm is pushing ahead on behalf of these nonprofits despite the Obama administration’s attempts to compromise. From Becket’s standpoint, even requiring religiously affiliated employers to sign a form stating their opposition to providing birth control—at which point the insurance company would pick up the tab—would violate their conscience.

To the extent that issues such as government-mandated birth control and same-sex marriage have come to stand in for a rising secular orthodoxy, Becket’s stance makes sense. Christians with traditionalist views on sex, who might oppose abortion as well as gay marriage, increasingly see themselves as a besieged minority—one worthy of defense by a law firm founded on the notion that “religious impulse is natural to human beings [and] religious expression is natural to human culture.” In a speech at the Heritage Foundation in 2012, Hasson, who had stepped down as president of the Becket Fund the year before due to advancing Parkinson’s disease, declared that secular “nihilism” is threatening to throw off the country’s moral center of gravity by uprooting religion from American culture. It’s a provocative stance, especially for left-leaning groups and advocates who believe that religion’s role in the public square should be restricted.

But these same groups may soon be cheering if, as many experts predict, the Becket Fund finds itself with another high court victory. “I don’t generally like to call Supreme Court cases, but this seems like an easy one,” Schwartzman says. “There’s a broad consensus that the state shouldn’t burden religious exercise without good reason, and the prison system hasn’t offered much of a defense beyond ‘Trust us, we’re right.’”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a piece of legislation as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Prisoners Act. The correct name is Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.