The Stakes for Religious Rights in the Upcoming FISA Section 702 Vote on Capitol Hill

​Long before the founding of the United States, religious refugees flooded into America to escape the Star Chamber, the Inquisition, the persecutions, and wars over religious doctrine that made worship in the Old World a dangerous activity. Millions wanted relief from the incessant surveillance – exemplified by William Laud, Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury – that often relied on spies dispatched to listen to sermons with sharp ears for anything out of line with official orthodoxy.
 
The House of Representatives is preparing to decide whether to include surveillance reforms in the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This legislation will have serious implications for the free practice of religion in America.
 
House Speaker Mike Johnson in an interview late last year addressed the FBI’s surveillance of traditional Catholics as possible terrorists, and the targeting of pro-life activists like Mark Hauck, whose wife and seven children watched in terror as an FBI swat team broke down their front door and pointed five guns at his head over a supposed violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
 
“I’ve made it very clear that, in my view, the evidence shows that, the FBI, for example, in the last couple of years has been weaponized,” Speaker Johnson told The Daily Signal. “We have the evidence to show it. They have, in some cases, targeted people of faith. They’ve targeted conservative Catholics and concerned parents at school board meetings … that’s what happened.”
 
Alex Marthews of Restore the Fourth documents abuses of religious rights from church- organized civil rights protests in the 1960s to the surveillance of patriotic, law-abiding Muslims today. We recently reported on the creepy surveillance of Calvary Chapel in San Jose, California. Such government snooping into religious expression is enabled by two massive databanks that the government freely dips into without a warrant. One is Section 702, an authority that allows the surveillance of foreign targets located abroad, but incidentally collects the communications of millions of Americans. The FBI has dipped into this ocean of Americans’ communications millions of times in recent years without warrants.
 
The other database is the commercial purchase of our most sensitive and personal information scraped from apps and sold to the FBI, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, and many other agencies. This, too, is information the government holds and freely accesses, all without a warrant.
 
There are deep implications for the character of our nation in the growth of warrantless surveillance. Religious scholar David Lyon writes of the modern replacement of the idea of a God, who watches his creation with deep and loving concern, with the state’s Algorithm, replacing eternal joy with a perpetual living death. Or to put it in secular terms, this is the vision of George Orwell of a boot stamping on a human face forever.
 
Any House Member who values the freedom to worship as one wishes, or not to worship at all, should take a stand for religious freedom by requiring warrants before the FBI or any other governmental agency can freely inspect our beliefs, values, and activities. This is not a new or radical notion. The founders wrote the warrant requirement into the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to set us apart from Old World ways.
 
Let us not go back.