Several things have changed in the last twenty-one years. First, the issue that helped give rise to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was the sacramental use of peyote by a Native American church. The Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law forbidding peyote, with conservative Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion and liberal Harry Blackmun of Roe v. Wade fame authoring the dissent.

Note that both the specific freedom in question and the plaintiff in the case were likely to arouse liberal sympathies. Not so traditionalist Catholics who don’t want to subsidize contraception or evangelicals who don’t want to photograph a same-sex wedding. (One could argue these different circumstances play a role in conservatives taking a different position too.)

White liberals have also become more secular in the last two decades. In 2012, Barack Obama carried 62 percent of voters who never attend church while Mitt Romney took just 34 percent. Liberal mainline Protestant churches have long been in decline. A press release from religious leaders defending the contraception mandate is signed mainly by members of these traditions.

Among a few liberals, this has resulted in an almost comical inability to comprehend what religious practice really entails beyond attendance at worship services or prayer. Others simply view religious people as conservative political opponents with misguided, perhaps even evil and bigoted, views.