Blanche's memo points specifically to two decisions the high court handed down in June 2026. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices ruled 6-3 that Montgomery County, Maryland's public schools violated the First Amendment rights of parents by refusing to let them pull their children from classroom instruction using LGBTQ-themed storybooks. In Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, the same 6-3 majority, in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that Damon Landor, a Rastafarian inmate whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison guards after he showed them the federal law protecting his religious vow, could not collect damages from the officials who ordered it done.
The new guidance states plainly that "the free exercise of religion includes the right to act or abstain from action in accordance with one's religious beliefs." It directs agencies to test their programs against the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the First Amendment itself. Justice Department officials said the update reflects the most significant shift in federal religious liberty policy since the original 2017 guidelines were written, and that it is meant to protect Americans of every faith, not one denomination alone, in their dealings with the federal government.
A memorandum out of Washington cannot save a single soul. But it can decide whether a Christian nurse keeps her job when she declines to take part in a procedure her conscience forbids, whether a church keeps its doors open when a zoning board comes calling, whether a father gets a say in what his own child is taught about the body and the soul. That is no small thing. It is worth stopping on before turning to the deeper liberty no attorney general, however faithful to his charge, has the power to grant or to take away.
A Liberty No Memo Can Grant
Every earthly protection for conscience is a mercy, and this one is worth thanking God for and thanking the men who wrote it. But the liberty the Christian lives by did not begin in a courtroom and it will not end in one. Long before Rome ever wrote a law about religion, Peter and the other apostles stood before the council that could flog them or worse and told them to their faces, "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). No memo issued that liberty. No ruling can revoke it. It was purchased on a hill outside Jerusalem and it belongs to every soul who has been born again by the Spirit of God.
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Corinthians 3:17)
My friend, there are two kinds of freedom in this world, and it is easy to confuse them. There is the freedom a government grants and a government can take back - real, worth defending, worth being grateful for on a day like this one. And there is the freedom Christ gives, which no prison guard's razor and no hostile bureaucrat's pen can touch, because it does not live in the body at all. It lives in a heart set right with God. A man can walk out of a courtroom having lost every earthly case and still be free indeed, if the Son has made him free. And a man can win every ruling this world has to offer and still be shackled to sin, still bound for judgment, if he has never bowed his knee to the Lord Jesus Christ.
So take heart in this news, because it is good news for the church in this land. But do not mistake it for the gospel. The gospel is not that Washington will leave you alone to worship as you please, though that is a blessing worth having. The gospel is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That liberty was settled at Calvary, and it is offered to you today, whatever the courts decide tomorrow.