Methodology
Because religious liberty matters, so does careful measurement of its component parts and causal factors. Objectivity is critical for meaningful measurement and consistent with the highest standards of research integrity.
RLS is further committed to transparency, providing rationale for choices where they have been made. This website also provides free access to everything from the raw data of this project (safeguard pages link directly to relevant locations in state laws) to the scores that comprise the index. Our full dataset is available for download.
In keeping with our commitment to integrity and transparency, we also provide an errata page where we note and discuss any corrections to the RLS data, whether past or present.
RLS’s Notion of Liberty
RLS adopts the term “safeguard” to describe state laws that provide a general freedom from artificial barriers that would otherwise reduce one’s capacity for religious exercise. These laws often take the form of exemptions. Even those who think that liberty is a means not an end should recognize that this sort of liberty is an essential precondition for facilitating other goods, including personal, familial, cultural, and spiritual ends.
Appendix A of the Religious Liberty in the States 2022 report explains in much greater detail what we mean by “liberty” and how it informs this measurement project.
Advantages of Written Law
Taking together this project’s conception of liberty and its goal of objectivity, RLS constructs an index and state rankings that reflect the reality that states differ in their legal provisions for free exercise.
While it is also likely that states differ in other ways that provide more or less space to people of faith, measuring the legal safeguards has a number of advantages over alternative measures (e.g., the attitudes of one’s neighbors, accepted social norms, or religious stigma), providing greater accuracy and practical utility.
First, laws are written and publicly recorded and thus manifest two necessary conditions for the transparency and objectivity to which RLS is committed.
Second, an index derived from such laws can illuminate practical opportunities for improving the space for free exercise. For example, a low score from an index measuring legal safeguards of religious liberty will point directly to feasible means for improvement.
Updating
Our methodology also includes a step known to legal scholars as Shepardizing. Through a systematic process of reviewing relevant case law, we consider the influence of judicial decisions on all the statutes cited in RLS data to determine whether the statutory law is still “good” law, neither deemed unconstitutional nor otherwise superseded by a court decision. RLS is committed to this updating process because it enhances the credibility of both our source data for researchers and the aggregate scores and resultant rankings we report annually. It also better reflects whether state protections of religious liberty are substantive.
What States Reveal
Rather than predefine a topical scope for religious exercise, RLS considers as candidate items anything that arises in any state and that references religion in making an exclusion or exemption in its law. In this way we allow states to reveal which aspects of American life are religiously relevant rather than using a philosophical, theoretical, or value-oriented definition of what areas of the law might impinge upon free exercise.
The Codes and Scoring document explains how the dataset for RLS was constructed. The data appendices in RLS 2022 and 2023 explain in further detail how elements of state laws were verified, scored, and aggregated for the index.
Selecting Items for RLS 2025
Rather than predefine a topical scope for religious exercise, RLS considers as candidate items anything that arises in any state and that references religion in making an exclusion or exemption in its law. In this way we allow states to reveal which aspects of American life are religiously relevant rather than using a philosophical, theoretical, or value-oriented definition of what areas of the law might impinge upon free exercise.
The Codes and Scoring document explains how the dataset for RLS was constructed. The data appendices in RLS 2022 and 2023 explain in further detail how elements of state laws were verified, scored, and aggregated for the index.
From Laws to Data
State statutes (and in limited cases constitutional or administrative protections) comprise most of the data for this project.
For each piece of data (a law in a state), the RLS team assigns a lettered code that reflects the way in which a state engages (or does not) in that area. Those codes are converted to numerical scores based on whether the code constitutes a safeguard (score = 1) or not (score = 0).
The resulting index score—a percentage of all the possible individual safeguard scores that a state has in place—allows us to rank, compare, and evaluate religious liberty in every state.
The publicly available data file reports all codes, score, and statutory citations for each item of the data. The Coding and Scoring page provides detailed explanations of our coding and scoring system.
An Invitation
We invite interested scholars and data-informed advocates to make the case that religious liberty matters.
RLS index scores can be correlated with other state-level measures so that researchers can enhance the collective understanding of the factors that predict legal protection of religious liberty and its potential consequences (e.g., social stability, economic development, religious pluralism, charitable giving, and religiosity).
As an annual project, RLS also reflects changes in states’ laws so that researchers can consider time trends, both across the country as a whole and within states. Advocates can provide information to lawmakers using insights on a state’s relative ranking, the change in the ranking over time, or the safeguards that the state lacks, falling short in its protections.
