The battle of Indiana and the promise of battles to come.

• Author: French, David
• Position: National Affairs - Religious liberty

"These battles will stop only if Christians abandon their historic faith on a truly national scale or if the Left decides that it is content to 'live and let live'--to work, attend school, and share the public square with people who express moral disagreement and who work actively to promote a cultural return to traditional morality."

THE DUST has cleared from the Twitter and Facebook battlefields; the people of Indiana are out from under the white-hot glare of the national media; and both sides haven taken stock. Who won the Battle of Indiana? Who lost? What is next for religious liberty in the U.S.? While conservative pessimists looked at Indiana, watched its politicians immediately compromise, and saw defeat, a closer look shows something else: a cultural stalemate. Nobody truly won in Indiana. From the grassroots to the intellectual elite, conservatives are girding themselves for the long war, and a long war it will be.

Four truths are emerging: first, the battle is not between gay rights and religious liberty-although religious liberty certainly is at stake --but between the sexual revolution and Christianity itself. This means that Christians are faced not with allegedly "minor" or "insignificant" theological changes to gain leftist acceptance, but with wholesale changes to the historical doctrines of the church.

Second, not a single orthodox denomination is making or even contemplating such changes. This means that tens of millions of Americans will remain--indefinitely--opposed to the continued expansion of the sexual revolution.

Third, rather than going quietly, cultural conservatism is showing increasing strength at the grassroots--opposing leftist campaigns at the ground level, bypassing politics to support those most embattled by radical hate campaigns.

Fourth, the conservative grassroots and conservative public intellectuals are united--from Ross Douthat at his lonely perch at The New York Times to the pages of National Review and the Weekly Standard, from First Things to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, there is no wavering among America's most influential conservative writers and thinkers.

In short, if the cultural Left is hoping to dominate the culture--and feels strong in its coastal bastions--it is overreaching, extending beyond the limits of its power. It is exposing itself to embarrassing cultural defeats and succeeding mainly in hardening conservative resolve. In the fight over religious freedom, the Left will not prevail.

First, a bit of history: the battle of Indiana began when Indiana's legislature passed a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), an act that provided, simply enough, that any state action that substantially burdens religious exercise is lawful only if it is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. In other words--as Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner recently tweeted--when you can, you should avoid compelling people to act against their consciences.

This legal standard was common enough. In fact, it is the same general legal standard in the Federal RFRA and in similar RFRAs in 19 other states. There were, however, two differences from the norm. First, the statute explicitly allowed for-profit businesses to assert religious liberty rights (something the Supreme Court allowed Hobby Lobby to do in its challenge, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), under the Federal RFRA, to the ObamaCare contraception mandate). Second, the statute allowed a religious individual to utilize RFRA in defense against a lawsuit brought by a private party. In other words, if a person believed that his religious liberty substantially could be burdened by a court order resulting from private litigation, that person could assert that the court order would be lawful only if it met the RFRA test.

Neither provision is particularly...