U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Religious freedom statutes and lawsuits have been chipping away at civil rights advancements at an accelerated rate for the last handful of years. But now that Jeff Sessions is supposedly in charge of protecting those civil rights, so-called "religious liberty" is about to be prioritized, writes Sadie Gurman.

As a Republican senator from Alabama, Sessions, a devout Methodist, argued that the separation of church and state is unconstitutional, and that the First Amendment's bar on an establishment of religion has been interpreted too strictly, while its right to free exercise of religion has been diminished. Asked at his confirmation hearing whether a "secular person" has "just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious," Sessions replied, "Well. I'm not sure." That backdrop suggests Sessions' Justice Department could more eagerly insert itself into religion-oriented cases such as that of the bakery fined for refusing to make a gay wedding cake, or the high-school football coach fired for praying on the field after games, who Trump repeatedly mentioned during his campaign.

The Justice Department has already ended its defense of the right of transgender students to use the bathroom consistent with their gender in public schools. The shift is likely to be one of many coming from within the Civil Rights Division, which tends to be heavily influenced by the priorities of the attorney general. Think about things like organizations denying access to contraception and bakers being able to deny services to same-sex weddings.