The McGurn column is a fundraising brochure disguised as a Fourth of July reflection, written by an operator who knows exactly what he is doing. I used to do the same work. On June 30, 2026, the Wall Street Journal opinion section ran William McGurn’s piece under the title “What Real Diversity Looks Like,” profiling the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s annual Canterbury Medal dinner and its record at the Supreme Court. Here is the operator’s-eye-view of the moves.
The column’s opening move is a minor-prediction structure on Jefferson. McGurn reminds readers that Jefferson’s expectation about American religious diversity — that it would be temporary, that the minority of faiths would eventually be overcome — has been falsified. The structure is the workhorse: name a small failure of a great man, then announce that the reader’s own frame must be revised. It softens the reader’s defenses and prepares them to receive the “real diversity” thesis that is about to be sold. We built versions of this in the cable years — the old founder, the minor prediction, the new frame. The structure is older than Becket. It is older than the WSJ.
The column then pivots to the Becket Fund itself via the Twelfth-century Thomas Becket martyrdom as institutional brand. The reference is decorative — the gap between a 12th-century archbishop and a 21st-century litigation fund is not engaged — but it does its work. It tells the reader: this is a serious institution, with a long lineage, doing principled work. Mark Rienzi, the fund’s president and CEO, is introduced as a law professor at Catholic University, with the advocacy role placed second. The rule we operated under: lead with the degree, place the institution after a “who,” never lead with the advocacy role. A law professor sounds like a scholar. The president and CEO of a litigation fund sounds like a lobbyist. Same person. Different hat. Different reader reaction. McGurn was a speechwriter. The credential ledger is a speechwriting move.
The case-selection shell game is the column’s central rhetorical operation. McGurn offers three exhibits: a Native American pastor, Robert Soto, who won the right to use eagle feathers in religious ceremonies; the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Roman Catholic order that fought the Obama-era contraceptive mandate; and Jewish students at UCLA whom Becket defended against a designated exclusion zone on campus. These are presented as equivalent proof of “Anglicans to Zoroastrians” breadth. They are not equivalent.
The Soto case is a religious-liberty win for a minority plaintiff — the kind of case any civil-liberties organization, ACLU or Americans United included, would have taken. The Little Sisters case is not about religious exercise but about an employer’s right to refuse a federally mandated insurance coverage on religious grounds — a structural exemption from neutral law, and the precise kind of case that defines Becket’s actual docket. The UCLA case is a civil-rights enforcement action against a public university’s failure to protect Jewish students — the kind of case the ADL, the Brandeis Center, or the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would handle. A reading of Becket’s Supreme Court and major appellate docket from 2010 through 2025 shows the majority of the docket on the conservative-Christian-exemption side. The cases McGurn cites as proof of breadth are the minority-plaintiff cases that allow the brochure to claim ecumenism. The marketing works because the cases are presented without comparison, without docket context, and without acknowledgment of which cases are typical and which are exceptional.
The next move is the borrowed brand. McGurn deploys the phrase “God’s ACLU,” attributed to Viet Dinh, a former assistant attorney general. The ACLU is a recognized nonpartisan civil-liberties organization whose docket spans the ideological spectrum — it has defended the speech rights of Nazis, of Westboro Baptist Church, of Black Lives Matter protesters, of Citizens United, of the NRA. Becket’s docket does not span any spectrum. Becket’s highest-profile cases have almost all been against Democratic or liberal policies, on behalf of religious conservatives seeking exemptions from neutral laws. The ACLU has sued Republican and Democratic administrations with equal vigor. Becket has sued the Obama administration three times on the contraceptive mandate. The relabeling is the entire point. “God’s ACLU” tells the donor-class reader: we have the credibility of the ACLU, but we are doing it for our side. The moderate reader hears: a balanced civil-liberties group. The brochure needs both audiences. It gets them by borrowing a brand name.
The board chair is the donor-class signal. Bill Mumma, named twice in the column, is a 30-year Wall Street veteran. The column does not name the donor network that funds Becket — the hedge-fund and private-equity fortunes, the family foundations, the dark-money networks documented in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. The reader who knows the conservative legal movement knows that Becket is part of the same donor ecosystem that funds the Federalist Society, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious-liberty litigation pipeline, and the state-level policy networks. The reader who does not know that just sees “Wall Street veteran” and thinks: successful guy, well-run shop. The brochure is for both audiences. The insiders recognize the signal. The outsiders are given a reassuring credential. The actual question the column cannot answer — and will not, because the column is the brochure — is whose money funds Becket’s litigation, and what those donors want in return. The answer, traceable through the public record, is a network of wealthy conservative donors seeking to use religious-liberty litigation as a vehicle for rolling back the administrative state’s regulatory reach. The product is opt-outs from neutral law, packaged as religious liberty. The brochure is the packaging.
The frame-engineered relabeling is the column’s load-bearing move. “Religious liberty” does real work in the McGurn column. It smuggles the entire Becket legal agenda — exemption from the contraceptive mandate, exemption from anti-discrimination law, exemption from public-accommodation requirements — under a label that virtually no American will refuse. The phrase does what we called the liberty play. You name the thing something the audience already believes in, and you never have to argue the actual policy.
Here is the move the label hides: Becket does not litigate for the freedom to pray, worship, or believe. Those freedoms are secure. What Becket litigates for is the freedom to operate an institution — employ people, serve the public, take government contracts — while refusing to comply with the laws that govern everyone else who employs people, serves the public, and takes government contracts. That is not “liberty” in any sense Jefferson would recognize. It is an exemption. An exemption that, once granted, transfers its cost onto the people who lose the healthcare, the job protection, or the equal service the law was written to guarantee.
The specific relabeling McGurn executes is the one Becket itself runs as its institutional brand. “Religious liberty” is the container; the contents change depending on the case. In Little Sisters and the contraceptive mandate trilogy — Hobby Lobby, Zubik, the cases Becket argued or briefed — the content hidden in the container is the right to deny employees contraceptive coverage. In Agudath Israel v. Cuomo, named by McGurn, the content is the right to exempt institutions from pandemic-era public health orders. In Holt v. Hobbs, also named by McGurn, the content is a Muslim inmate’s right to a beard — a sympathetic fig leaf used to normalize the broader institutional exemptions. The employment-discrimination exemptions and the public-accommodation refusals that also sit inside Becket’s broader legal agenda do not appear in McGurn’s column. He lets the cases he does name, and the container of “religious liberty” itself, do all the work. That is the con.
The Little Sisters passage is where the austerity-thrift archetype runs. Look at the lexical mechanics: McGurn writes that Obama “tried to force them … to provide contraceptives.” The verb-object construction — “force” paired with “provide” — is where the magic happens. The syntax relocates the agency and the duress. The institution is positioned as the victim of a coercion (“forced”), and the act of “providing” is framed as an affirmative burden imposed on the Sisters. The women who lose contraceptive coverage when the exemption is granted do not appear in the syntax. They are the grammatical object of the exemption, not the sentence.
What actually happened: the Affordable Care Act required employer health plans to cover preventive care, including contraception. Religious nonprofits were offered an accommodation — they could file a form shifting the coverage obligation to their insurer, at no cost to the nonprofit. Becket argued that even filing the form was a burden so intolerable it constituted a violation of religious exercise. The Supreme Court agreed, in a series of rulings whose reasoning has been, shall we say, evolving.
The operational move here is Bandura’s euphemistic labeling — “forced to provide contraceptives” — in concert with distortion of consequences, because the column does not name the consequence of the exemption: the employees of religiously-affiliated hospitals, universities, and charities who lose access to a benefit that every other employer of their size is required to offer. The Sisters’ religious exercise is real. The employees’ loss of healthcare access is also real. McGurn writes about one and not the other. That gap is the piece.
We called this the damsel-in-distress framing. The institution is the damsel. The government is the dragon. The employees who lose the benefit are the villagers who don’t make the shot list. The audience is invited to sympathize with the damsel and never to ask about the villagers.
The column addresses four distinct audiences simultaneously, each receiving a different message from the same words. The wealthy donor audience receives: Becket’s annual gala is prestigious, well-attended, and consequential — your money is going to a winner. The religious-devout audience receives: your faith community’s values are under siege and Becket is the institution that defends them. The populist audience receives: identity confirmation. The political-class audience receives: the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission has delivered a report; Becket is undefeated at the Supreme Court; this is a winning issue. The trick is that none of these messages survives the scrutiny of another — the populist framing of “real diversity” cannot survive the technocratic reality that “diversity” here means “the right to deny employees a benefit,” and the technocratic framing of six unanimous victories does not tell the populist reader what those victories actually permit. The column works because the audiences do not compare notes.
The threat-inflation closer is the column’s final and most engineered move. McGurn writes that the free exercise of religion continues to be threatened in America, citing the Trump Religious Liberty Commission’s report. He does not specify the threats. He does not name them. The actual threats to religious free exercise in America — zoning restrictions on mosques, state-level bans on sharia, the rising antisemitism McGurn himself names in passing, hate crimes against Sikhs, vandalism of Black churches — are precisely the threats that the ACLU, CAIR, and the Sikh Coalition fight in court. They are not the threats Becket’s donor base funds litigation to fight. Becket’s donor base funds litigation to fight contraceptive mandates, LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws, and public-health regulations. The column cannot say this, because the real agenda is narrower than the branding, so the threat must remain vague. The brochure is effective precisely because it is blurry. The reader fills in the menace with whatever feels threatening. The donor class’s preferred targets are not the targets the reader is invited to imagine.
The column closes with Rienzi’s line that nothing is more American than fighting for religious liberty — even when we disagree. That is a beautiful sentence. It is also a permission structure. It tells the reader that opposing the Becket agenda is un-American. It tells the reader that the fight itself — the litigation, the exemption claims, the institutional demands — is an expression of patriotism. It does not tell the reader what the fight is actually for: the right to deny a woman contraceptive coverage, the right to refuse service to a same-sex couple, the right to take government money while declining government obligations.
The closing cadence is the most important sentence in the column because it is the one the scanner carries away. “Continues to be threatened” does the work. “Continues” implies ongoing assault. “Threatened” implies danger. Neither word names a specific threat, a specific law, a specific case, or a specific harm. The vagueness is the engine — it lets the audience fill in whatever threat they already believe in. For the evangelical reader, it is the culture war. For the Orthodox reader, it is COVID-era restrictions. For the donor reader, it is the next regulatory mandate. For the political reader, it is the next election cycle.
So here is what McGurn’s 900 words actually are, taken together. The column is a brochure. It is a piece of donor-class advocacy wrapped in a clerical collar, published by the Journal’s opinion section as if it were a Fourth of July reflection, and the man who wrote it is one of the sharper operators we have ever read in the genre, which is the only reason the piece deserves the operator’s-eye-view at all. He was a speechwriter. He knows what the column is doing. We used to do it. We used to write openings like that — the famous founder, the minor prediction, the frame readjustment, the credentialed authority, the case-selection shell game, the borrowed brand, the suppressed variable, the vague threat, the closing cadence. We wrote those lines for the board. We wrote them for the donor class. The brochure is clean, the brochure is effective, and the brochure is a lie.
The Becket Fund is not “Anglicans to Zoroastrians.” It is the legal arm of the religious conservative donor class, and its marquee wins — Hobby Lobby, Zubik, the contraceptive mandate trilogy, Masterpiece Cakeshop (where Becket filed an amicus brief while the Alliance Defending Freedom did the actual courtroom work) — are about the rights of conservative Christian employers and institutions to opt out of neutral laws. The cases McGurn cites as proof of breadth — Agudath Israel, Holt v. Hobbs, the UCLA settlement — are the minority-plaintiff cases that allow the brochure to claim ecumenism. The cases McGurn does not cite — the wave of religious-exemption cases against LGBTQ nondiscrimination, the trans healthcare cases, the Catholic Social Services cases — are the actual product. The product is the agenda. The brochure is the wrapping. The reader is the mark. The long con is still the long con, and the chair is the only place from which you can see the whole thing, and the whole thing is a fundraising brochure dressed in a Fourth of July costume, and the costume is the product.
— Phukher Tarlson