The case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has received extraordinary attention as a site of struggle between faith and law. The Supreme Court’s decision that businesses may refuse on principle to provide contraception coverage has not been a shining hour for religious freedom. Many observers fear that the ruling will do less to protect that freedom than to expand the power of corporations.
Hobby Lobby has overshadowed two other suits this term that offered more compelling instances of conscience in action. In United States v. Apel and McCullen v. Coakley, the justices reckoned not with corporations but with individual rebels determined to share their convictions regardless of the consequences. In these cases Christian activists fought to uphold a robust tradition of free expression against a public realm increasingly hemmed in by government constraints.
The antiwar protester John Dennis Apel and the pro-life activist Eleanor McCullen would appear to represent opposite poles of the political spectrum. Left-right distinctions, though, are less important than their shared struggle of individual witness against official regulation. For reasons of faith, Apel and McCullen each refused to conform to the behavior that the law stipulated in the public arena. For those refusals, they ended up in court.
