The civics examination required of those applying for U.S. citizenship has come under criticism for a question that mentions “freedom of worship,” rather than “freedom of religion,” as a constitutional right. Peter Berger adjudicates the distinction between the two, and the connection between that distinction and current debates over the meaning of religious liberty:

[T]he two phrases are by no means synonymous: “freedom of worship” refers to an activity commonly undertaken in a specific location—a home, a church, a mosque. “Freedom of religion” is a much more expansive concept, including a person’s right to exercise his religion freely anywhere at all, including the public square. This might seem to be a trivial distinction, were it not for the fact that the narrower understanding of this freedom animates various non-trivial actions of the Obama administration and other positions taken by American progressives.

In a broader context what this means is the privatization (or, if you will, the domestication) of religion. There is an underlying, unspoken (perhaps unconscious) assumption: religion is okay if engaged in by consenting adults in private, not so if it spills over into public space. The similarity with pornography is telling: it comes through the mail in plain brown envelopes; you are free to view the contents in the privacy of your home; just don’t view them in a public place.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.