September 2026

A Note from Our Director

This month marks two years since LRRP launched the Black Religious Liberty Curriculum (BRLC): a free, 12-session resource built with 24 interdisciplinary scholars to fill a gap in how religious liberty is taught and understood. As students and professors return to classrooms this fall, we hope you will bring the curriculum with you: into law schools, religious studies departments, congregations, and book clubs.

— Liz Reiner Platt, Director of LRRP

The central argument of the Black Religious Liberty Curriculum is a simple one: that the history of religious freedom in the United States cannot be understood without examining its racial history. Laws once made it a crime for enslaved people to gather for worship without white supervision. The right to worship has been repeatedly violated to enforce white supremacy, and Black religious communities have fought, generation after generation, to claim the promise of religious liberty for themselves and for everyone. We created this curriculum because we believe that story belongs at the center of the mainstream legal debate, not at its margins.

What the Curriculum Covers

The BRLC is free, virtual, and self-paced. Across 12 sessions, 24 scholars of law, history, religion, and African American studies examine religious liberty through the lens of Black religious communities: a perspective largely absent from mainstream legal education. Contributors include scholars such as Dr. Sabrina E. Dent, Rev. Dr. Corey D. B. Walker, and Rahmah Abdulaleem.

A few sessions to start with:

• Session 2: Religious Liberty & Slavery — how the law criminalized Black worship, and how enslaved people practiced their faith anyway.

• Session 3: Religious Liberty & Reconstruction — the explosion of independent Black churches after emancipation, and the backlash that followed.

• Session 5: Religious Liberty & Civil Rights — the Black church as the institutional home of the civil rights movement.

Two Years of BRLC: Why The Curriculum Still Matters

Two years since launch, the questions this curriculum raises are anything but historical. Whose faith counts? Whose violations matter? Which communities can expect courts to vindicate their rights, and which cannot? These questions run through the religion cases courts are deciding today, and they will run through the Supreme Court term that opens this fall.

As BRLC contributor Rev. Dr. Corey D. B. Walker has written, religious freedom is “not only a constitutional arrangement; it is a moral discipline that requires restraint, reciprocity, and a willingness to truly host human difference.” The curriculum is our contribution to building that discipline: one classroom, one congregation, one reader at a time.

If you teach, we would love to see the BRLC on your syllabus. If you have already used it, we would love to hear how it went. And if you know a professor, student, or faith leader who should see it, please forward this email to them.

The Law, Rights and Religion Project at Union Theological Seminary works to advance a vision of religious liberty that protects everyone—not just those with the most political power. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.