Deep Conviction: True Stories of Ordinary Americans Fighting for the Freedom to Live Their Beliefs

Collis (the novel At Any Cost), an attorney who works on religious liberty cases, profiles four Americans whose legal cases reveal “just how crucial true religious liberty is” in his slapdash nonfiction debut. For each profile, Collis digs into how his subjects reveal the complexities of ensuring individual religious liberty in a nation of increasingly diverse beliefs: Anthony Kohlmann, an early-19th-century priest, fought for the sanctity of the confessional; Roy Torcaso, an atheist, resisted taking an oath affirming the existence of God (formerly a requirement to work for the Massachusetts government) during the Cold War; Al Smith, a Klamath man, fought for the legal right to perform a religious practice that required peyote; and Jack Philips, a baker whose refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding took him all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won his case. Despite claims of the “universality” of these cases, Collis carefully avoids historical cases in which the exercise of one person’s religious liberty infringes on the liberty of another person; instead, he focuses on those in which the state alone infringes on personal liberties, for instance, setting up his defense of Philips as a victim of a new oppressive political majority he calls the LGBT Left. While Collis goes into great detail addressing a topic foundational to American democracy, he sells his readers short by not fully grappling with examples that represent the range of complexity in America’s long history of wrestling with religious freedom. (June)