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The Global Fight for Freedom

A bill moving through one Western-style democracy's parliament would hand the government the final say over whose beliefs are legitimate.

This week’s stories focus on religious freedom, demonstrating how a government doesn't need tanks to seize control of what its citizens believe. It just needs phrases worded vaguely enough to mean whatever it wants.

You don't have to be religious to feel it. As you read, try swapping "conscience" for "religion," and ask whether the story still feels distant.

We start at home, with a fresh debate over a seventy-year-old law, then cross the Pacific to watch a government try to win that argument outright.

Flashpoints

1. Madison's Timeless Principle - Tested Again
2. When Tyranny Seeps In Quietly

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

For seventy years, American clergy have lived under a quiet threat: say the wrong thing about a candidate from the pulpit, and the IRS can strip your church of its tax exemption. The 1954 Johnson Amendment bars any 501c3 — including churches — from endorsing candidates. It has been enforced exactly once.

In July 2025, the IRS — under Billy Long, the commissioner Trump had just installed — agreed in a court settlement that ordinary pulpit speech about candidates would not trigger enforcement. The liberal-leaning Campaign Legal Center calls that a “dark money” loophole: unlike a PAC, a church discloses no donors, so unlimited anonymous political money could flow through the collection plate. That is a fair concern.

On March 31, a federal judge threw out the settlement on technical grounds, leaving the ban formally intact heading into the midterms. The Treasury Department has promised new guidance but hasn’t yet delivered it.

Many skeptics see the 2025 IRS settlement as allowing religion to encroach on government. These pages take a different view — the one James Madison articulated in 1785: not that government should stay neutral toward religion, but that religion answers to no earthly authority at all.

"The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man, and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right."

In other words, the government’s job is to protect the expression of individual conscience, not to protect itself from it. Every inch the government claims back is a precedent for the next inch.

South Korea’s National Assembly is testing the opposite premise. As the debate continues here at home, it’s worth examining what happens when the state quietly accrues additional power to itself at the expense of individual conscience.

Primary Sources: Associated Press, Campaign Legal Center, National Law Review

Tyranny doesn’t always arrive by force, heralded by martial law decrees, the stomping of boots, or nights of broken glass.

More often, it slips in quietly — a noxious gas that seeps through windows left open in the parliaments of men.

A crack has been opened in the window South Korea’s National Assembly, and the vapor is rolling in.

From Strife to Harmony

The Korean peninsula has an exceptionally rich history of religious diversity and mutual tolerance, but it took time and a constitution to achieve.

Buddhism reached the peninsula in 372 A.D. from northern China and flourished for a thousand years, until the Joseon dynasty imported China’s Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and banished monks from the capital for 500 years.

Catholic missionaries landed in 1794; Joseon’s Confucian court beheaded or starved roughly 10,000 converts in purges over the following century. France’s navy shelled the coast in retaliation. Japan colonized and “Japanized” the peninsula in 1910 and ordered Koreans to bow at Shinto shrines. Pastors who refused were jailed, and many were executed as the occupation neared its end.

That pattern of strife finally broke around 1948, when Korea’s founding constitution promised for the first time that “all citizens shall enjoy freedom of religion” and that “religion and state shall be separated” — nearly the exact language Article 20 still carries today.

Since then, the faiths have mostly lived in harmony, with one glaring exception: more than 17,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses jailed since the Korean War for refusing, on religious grounds, to bear arms — a practice that didn’t end until a Constitutional Court ruling in 2018.

Today, roughly half of South Koreans claim no religion, while 20% remain Protestant, 16% Buddhist, and 11% Catholic. Buddha’s Birthday and Christmas are both national holidays.

The Scent of Tyranny

But three quarters of a century of harmony may be breaking. For five months earlier this year, Pastor Hyun-bo Son languished in a three-by-seven-foot cell, isolated from the rest of the inmates for speaking out against the government.

It was the first time in 78 years South Korea had arrested a pastor for dissent.

The Accused

Pastor Son’s offense was interviewing a school-board candidate who cited biblical principles.

And on a July night last year, more than 1,000 officers stormed the grounds of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in a fifteen-hour raid targeting the woman followers call “True Mother.” Hak Ja Han, 83, widow of church founder Sun Myung Moon, was accused of funneling a Graff diamond necklace and Chanel handbags to the wife of disgraced President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Yesterday, a Seoul court convicted her and handed down two years in prison. Prosecutors had sought thirteen.

Then there is Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a Christian offshoot founded in 1984 that mainstream churches deride as heretical and critics call a cult. Its 95-year-old founder, Lee Man-hee, already saw one case against his church — for allegedly breaching pandemic rules in 2020 — thrown out by the courts.

Prosecutors are now pursuing him for tax evasion and embezzlement, taking the unusual step of jailing him pretrial.

Reasonable Doubt

None of this can be judged with certainty from the outside. Short of sitting on the jury and weighing the evidence firsthand, nobody can say for sure whether Han’s bribery charge, Son’s election-law conviction, or Lee Man-hee’s tax case is a legitimate prosecution or a pretext dressed up as one. They may all be exactly what prosecutors say they are.

What’s harder to dispute is the shift in aggressiveness — the volume, timing, and rhetoric of a state suddenly moving against nearly every prominent conservative religious figure in the country.

Further muddying the picture: the Washington Times reported claims of a Chinese-backed “Unholy Alliance” — Chinese state agents, coordinating with anti-religious activists and lawmakers in South Korea and Japan. Here’s the catch: the Washington Times is owned and operated by Han’s church, the Family Federation.

Are they using their own media outlet to exonerate themselves, or are they the only Western media outlet with an incentive to pay attention?

When the West Turned Away

The left-wing Democratic Party has earned its suspicion of the right; less than two years ago, the right tried to take over South Korea’s democracy by force.

On the night of December 3, 2024, conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, denouncing “anti-state forces” and “shameless North Korea sympathizers.” Helicopters dropped 230 troops onto the Assembly grounds; 50 more scaled the wall. Soldiers shattered office windows to reach party leadership while aides barricaded hallways with couches. Lawmakers climbed the compound fence to make the vote. All 190 who arrived struck the decree down six hours after it began.

Special prosecutors later found something worse on a general’s phone: orders to fly drones over Kim Jong Un’s own hometown and drop leaflets deep inside the North, with a note attached — “we need to create [an] unstable situation.” Yoon was impeached, convicted of insurrection, and sentenced in February to life in prison.

For most Western newsrooms, that’s the whole story: authoritarianism attempted, authoritarianism defeated, democracy restored. Roll credits.

The Window Cracked Open

But right-wing authoritarian decrees and the storming of parliaments make headlines. Creeping authoritarianism from the left does not.

Article 20 of South Korea’s constitution is unambiguous: “All citizens shall enjoy the freedom of religion,” and “religion and state shall be separated.”

Yet a 1994 statute, the Public Official Election Act, already makes it a crime for a religious leader to campaign from within his own pulpit — the very charge that jailed Son over a single interview. As outlined in above, even the U.S. has never gone that far. The 1954 Johnson Amendment threatens civil penalty against an institution, not a criminal one against a person.

What is a deeply held belief worth if the believer cannot apply it in the world in which he lives?

The Vapor Rolling In

Now Seoul wants more. A bill backed by members of President Lee Jae-myung’s own Democratic Party would let regulators, not judges, revoke permits, seize assets, and dissolve any religious group found to have “interfered in politics” — vague criteria, the World Evangelical Alliance warns, that hand the state final say over which faiths are legitimate and which are mere "cults."

This is what turns reasonable doubt into something else: a government writing itself the power to decide which beliefs get to keep existing. Vaguely worded dictates are precisely how the vapor gets through the cracks.

Lee has called the harm these groups inflict on society “severe.” His prime minister, Kim Min-seok, went further, branding them “pseudo-religious cults” and declaring they represent “a social evil that must be eradicated.”

Eradicated. Not investigated. Not monitored.

A delegation of European religious-freedom monitors who traveled to Seoul this year concluded that Korea’s restrictions on clergy are now “among the most restrictive in the world.”

It’s worth noting most of the religious leaders targeted are Evangelical Protestants, a group that draws little sympathy in the West, sometimes for good reason. This newsletter doesn’t share all of Son’s convictions either — his offense was favoring, in an interview, a candidate who opposed the government’s preferred LGBTQ school curriculum.

But we defend Son’s right to hold that conviction as sacred, agree with it or not — because a state that can silence one man’s conscience today can silence any person’s tomorrow.

According to Our Conscience

A Korean teenager, asked why church and state must stay separate, put it better than any editorial could: without that wall, he said, “we wouldn’t be free to worship God according to our conscience.”

He’s right, and the principle goes beyond any individual’s conception of God. Seoul isn’t deciding what its people believe about God. It’s deciding who holds final say over conscience itself — the believer, or the state. Cede that ground, and it won’t stop at pulpits.

The crack is widening. The vapor keeps rolling in.

What to Watch

Bill No. 15932 still sits in committee, with no floor vote scheduled. Lee’s Democratic Party holds the votes to pass it whenever it chooses. The World Evangelical Alliance warns enactment would make a constitutional challenge “inevitable” — meaning this fight’s next chapter is likely decided in Korea’s courts, not its Assembly.

Primary Sources: Washington Times, Bitter Winter, Christian Broadcasting Network, Hankyoreh (South Korea), Korea Herald (South Korea), Korea Times (South Korea)

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