Is religion in the crosshairs? Don't confuse private pressure with repression by the state.

• Author: Slade, Stephanie
• Position: 'It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies' by Mary Eberstadt - Book review

It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom audits Enemies, by Mary Eberstadt, HarperCollins, 192 pages, $25.99

In December 2015, the state of Oregon seized the contents of Melissa Klein's checking and savings accounts. A judge had ordered the bakery owner to pay $135,000 as punishment for declining, on the basis of her religious beliefs, to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. She objected, pledging to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court if necessary, so the state's labor commissioner took the money by force.

One month earlier, a black teacher named Madeline Kirksey lost her job at a Texas day care center, allegedly for refusing to call an anatomically female 6-year-old student by a boy's name.

Question: What do these two incidents have in common?

Answer: It depends entirely on your ideological persuasion.

For progressives, both are social justice victories. In each case, this view goes, a religious bigot attempted to impose her beliefs about morality on other people and the authorities slapped her down for it.

For conservatives, both show a heavy-handed secularism working to stamp out traditional mores. Descriptions of these incidents appear together, in fact, in the introduction of It's Dangerous to Believe, a new book by the Catholic writer Mary Eberstadt, as commensurate examples of the "soft persecution" that increasingly befalls Christians in the West.

For libertarians, the two are really not alike at all.

To follow the latter logic, you need to distinguish between public and private behaviors. Where the state can use coercion and compulsion, private actors must turn to persuasion and negotiation. Because private individuals operate in the realm of voluntary interactions, they have to accept that sometimes they won't get their way. (To the demand "Work for my company!" a person can say "No!"To the demand "Pay your taxes!" there is no legal right of refusal.) So what happened to Melissa Klein, who was punished by the state, and what happened to Madeline Kirksey, who was punished by her employer, are different not just in degree but in kind.

The core weakness of It's Dangerous to Believe is a failure to draw this conceptual distinction between governmental oppression and mere social stricture. Truly egregious violations of people's rights (a campus police officer shutting down a street preacher by falsely claiming it's illegal "to offend the students") are listed alongside nonviolent pressure (former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich...