This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to front-line conversations about cultural and

theological issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moly, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

My guest today is Professor Douglas Laidcock.

He is the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law and is also Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia.

A graduate of Michigan State University, he did his law degree at the University of Chicago Law School.

Thereafter, he taught on that law school at the University of Chicago, as well as at the University of

Texas and the University of Michigan, before going to the University of Virginia.

He is an unusual combination.

He is, by my estimation, the most published legal scholar in the scholarly work of religious liberty and is very much a professor of law, but beyond that he is also a litigator.

He has argued no less than six major religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court of the United States

and before other federal courts.

Professor Douglas Lekhock, welcome to thinking in public.

Happy to be here.

I have been following your writings for many years and to be honest that's kind of a challenge.

As a matter of fact, I set beside me the five volumes published by Erredmans of your collected writings on religious liberty.

And there's a huge story here.

I know you didn't put this together in narrative.

We have arrived at a moment in 2020 that seems far distant from when you first began writing about the US Constitution,

religious liberty, and competing interests. Can you kind of trace how we arrived at this moment?

Well, like all social changes, it's complicated of course, but I think the biggest piece of it is the emergence of deep disagreement about sexual morality with

traditional religious

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