How LRRP’s bold, pluralist vision extends Union Theological Seminary’s century-long mission of faith in action.
When the Law, Rights & Religion Project (LRRP) moved from Columbia University’s Law School into its new home at Union Theological Seminary, it felt less like a relocation and more like a reunion. For more than a century, Union has insisted that faith belongs in the public square—where real people face real harms and real hope. LRRP has spent the last decade working at that very intersection, translating complex religion-law scholarship into tools activists, advocates, and communities can actually use. Welcoming LRRP to Union simply places a thriving engine of rights-affirming scholarship and strategy inside an institution built to power it.
“We’re not trying to be an ivory-tower shop,” says LRRP Director Elizabeth (Liz) Platt, who joined the project in 2015 and has led it since 2016. “Our role is to bridge academic thought with activism—to be a resource on a complicated area of the law for a range of faith communities and grassroots organizations.”
Platt didn’t plan a career in religion law. She arrived through reproductive rights and justice, after stints at A Better Balance, Planned Parenthood, and in public-interest legal work. But she quickly discovered that religious liberty cuts across nearly every fault line of American life—gender justice, LGBTQ equality, immigration, racial justice, church-state boundaries, pluralism—and that progressive movements needed more than a defensive crouch against harmful uses of religion. They needed an affirmative vision.
“Instead of only saying what religious liberty shouldn’t be, we started asking what it should look like—religious liberty to do what, and for whom?”
That turning point came into focus around 2017, when LRRP convened advocates on religious liberty and immigration. Faith-based humanitarian aid workers were being prosecuted for living out their beliefs—including for leaving food and water in the desert for migrants—forcing tough questions: Could religious liberty protect acts of conscience that safeguard the vulnerable? What principles should guide those claims?
Six Principles, One North Star
Out of sustained case-reading and multi-faith convenings came LRRP’s touchstone report, All Faiths and None, which distills a baseline framework for religious liberty that is nondiscriminatory, non-coercive, pluralistic, democratic, and oriented toward protecting those with less power—not expanding privileges for those who already have it (like large employers or corporations). It’s not a silver-bullet legal test so much as a moral compass—centered on preventing harm and expanding freedom without sacrificing others’ fundamental rights.
That “harm” lens, Platt notes, is the crucial difference between a claim to deny emergency healthcare and a claim to leave water in the desert so migrants don’t die of dehydration. Both invoke religion; only one protects life.
Centering Race in Religion Law
LRRP’s Black Religious Liberty Curriculum is another watershed. Frustrated by conferences where speakers of color were often absent and race was treated as an afterthought (if that), LRRP created a free, 12-part teaching series that reframes religious liberty through Black history and experience—from slavery and Reconstruction to civil rights, Black Power, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The curriculum’s thematic modules—education, national security, incarceration, sexuality, and reproduction—equip classrooms and community programs with rigorous, conversation-shifting content used by thousands of learners.
The message is simple and long overdue: you cannot understand religious liberty in America without understanding race.
A Faith-Forward Response to the Immigration Moment
If 2017 was LRRP’s inflection point, 2025 has been an alarm bell. As administrations shift policies on enforcement, detention, and the public square, faith communities are again on the front lines—operating food pantries, running refugee support, holding vigils outside detention centers, and, in some cases, facing prosecution or sanction for doing so.
In response, LRRP produced a new immigration report mapping how religious liberty arguments can protect faith-rooted humanitarian work and the people it serves. The goal isn’t to romanticize litigation; it’s to add an underutilized tool to the kit at a time when many immigration pathways feel barricaded. Platt, who is married to an immigration attorney, sees the need up close: “The doors are closing in so many areas. Religious liberty certainly isn’t a cure-all, but in the right cases it could open an avenue to relief, either for migrants or the people that serve or worship with them.”
Why Union, Why Now
Union’s ethos—scholarship that serves movements, faith that confronts harm—is the spirit that fuels LRRP’s mission. The Seminary’s deep ties to communities of practice, and its own centers working at the seams of justice (from the Center for Earth Ethics to new public-facing initiatives), create fertile ground for collaboration. Platt points to possible intersections around sacred sites and Indigenous land protections, a religion-law issue with profound environmental justice implications. She also anticipates partnering with Union scholars and public theologians whose work spans religious liberty, pluralism, and civic life.
And yes, there may be teaching in LRRP’s future at Union—a chance to translate the project’s public-interest orientation into the classroom. “I’m excited—and a little humbled—by the prospect,” Platt laughs. “But if we can train more leaders to navigate religion law with nuance and courage, that’s impact.”
The People Behind the Project
Though LRRP’s voice is distinctive, it is never singular. Platt is quick to center the team:
Dr. Christine Ryan (Senior Fellow for Reproductive Rights) anchors LRRP’s reproductive rights portfolio, bringing sharp legal analysis and movement partnership to a relentlessly evolving landscape.
Daniela Sweet-Coll (Director of Operations & Design) stewards the connective tissue—research support, problem-solving, and outreach to get tools into the hands of litigators, organizers, journalists, and faith leaders.
Together, the team embodies LRRP’s method: listen widely, analyze deeply, build tools that travel.
A Movement-Building Theory of Change
If LRRP resists one-size-fits-all tests, it also resists siloed advocacy. The project works where law, narrative, and lived faith meet—briefs and reports for litigators, curricula for classrooms and congregations, convenings that put scholars, faith leaders, organizers, litigators, and students in the same room. The approach aligns with integrated advocacy models used by national civil-rights organizations: litigation + policy + grassroots education. Union’s platform supercharges that integration, connecting LRRP’s scholarship with a seminary whose community is already preaching, protesting, writing op-eds, and organizing across the country.
What’s at Stake
Platt names the threat plainly: a coordinated effort to inscribe a narrow, government-favored theology into law. History shows that when the state officiates doctrine, everyone’s religious freedom is endangered—majorities and minorities alike.
And yet, she is hopeful. Hope lives in people who persist—the church volunteers keeping a food pantry open; the lay leaders holding weekly detention-center vigils; the congregations funding a family’s move to access care; the interfaith coalitions defending their neighbors. Hope lives in coalitions broad enough to include Catholic bishops and desert humanitarians, united by a conviction that faith compels protection, not punishment.
Union + LRRP: Faith in Action, Rights in Practice
Union’s mission has always insisted that theology must touch the world. LRRP brings a decade of proof that religious liberty—understood rightly—can expand freedom and reduce harm, not the other way around. Together, they offer a public witness for this moment: rigorous, pluralist, unapologetically justice-oriented, and relentlessly practical.
Because religious liberty, when it serves the common good, doesn’t merely defend belief.
It defends people.