Arkansas Surges to the Top of America’s Religious Liberty Ranking as States Compete to Strengthen Legal Protections

(ZENIT News / Washington, 07.16.2026).- Arkansas has emerged as the leading state in the United States for legal protection of religious liberty, according to the 2026 Religious Liberty in the States index published by the First Liberty Institute.

The result marks a dramatic rise for the state, which ranked sixth in 2025. Arkansas now leads all 50 states with a score of 89 percent, followed by Tennessee at 85 percent. Both received the index’s highest rating, «excellent», the first time any state has crossed the 80 percent threshold since the ranking began measuring state-level religious liberty protections.

Florida, which held the top position previously, fell to third place.

The annual report, produced by the institute’s Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, does not attempt to measure how religious a state is or how frequently its citizens attend worship. Instead, it examines the legal framework surrounding the free exercise of religion.

Researchers assess 50 specific legal protections grouped into 20 safeguards and six broad areas: government, health care, economic life, religious life, family and education. The resulting percentage is intended to show how extensively each state has adopted legal protections designed to shield religious individuals and institutions from government coercion or other conflicts with religious convictions.

Arkansas’s rise was driven in large part by the enactment of HB 1615, which protects individuals and institutions from being compelled to participate in wedding ceremonies that conflict with their religious beliefs.

The legislation reflects one of the most persistent questions in contemporary American religious-liberty debates: whether the government may require a person or organization to participate directly in an event that contradicts a sincerely held religious conviction. Supporters regard such protections as essential to freedom of conscience; critics in similar debates have argued that exemptions can create conflicts with equal-treatment principles.

The index places Arkansas 63 percentage points above New York, which ranked last with a score of 26 percent. New York returned to the bottom position for the first time since 2022, replacing West Virginia.

The report, however, does not portray Arkansas as having achieved complete protection of religious liberty. The state still lacks seven of the specific safeguards examined by the index.

That caveat is important because the ranking is intended less as a declaration that one state has solved every problem than as a legislative scorecard. Jordan Ballor, executive director of the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, wrote that every state still has room for improvement and suggested that the report could encourage further progress.

The sharpest movement in this year’s ranking came from Tennessee. The state climbed from tenth place to second after adopting what the report describes as an exemplary medical conscience law.

The legislation protects health-care providers and institutions that, because of religious convictions, decline to perform, provide or pay for certain medical services. Such protections have become increasingly significant as disputes over medical ethics, conscience and the boundaries of professional obligations have expanded across the United States.

The ranking also highlights developments outside the top ten. Georgia and Wyoming adopted Religious Freedom Restoration Acts in 2025, although the two states ranked 23rd and 45th respectively. These laws are designed to protect individuals and organizations when government regulations impose a substantial burden on their religious practices.

The remaining states in the top ten included Montana, with 71.3 percent; Illinois, 70.4 percent; Mississippi, 66.7 percent; Ohio, 66.3 percent; Idaho, 64.2 percent; South Carolina, 62.9 percent; and Washington, 60 percent.

The broader pattern identified by the report is one of gradual competition among states over the legal protection of religious exercise. States can observe measures adopted elsewhere, reproduce those considered effective and expand their own safeguards.

That possibility points to a potentially important dynamic in American federalism. Because states retain considerable authority over areas such as education, health care and many aspects of economic regulation, religious-liberty protections can vary dramatically depending on where a person lives.

The 63-point gap between Arkansas and New York illustrates the scale of that divergence.

For advocates of religious freedom, the central issue is not simply whether citizens are permitted to worship inside a church, synagogue, mosque or other house of worship. Modern religious-liberty disputes increasingly concern whether people may carry their convictions into professional, educational, charitable and family life without being forced by the state to act against them.

The 2026 index therefore offers a snapshot of a broader American debate: how to reconcile religious freedom with other legal rights in a pluralistic society.

Its authors clearly believe that the answer should involve stronger protection for conscience, rather than a shrinking of religion into the private sphere. Their hope is that legislative experimentation among the states will create a cycle in which successful protections are studied, adapted and adopted elsewhere.

Arkansas’s leap from sixth to first place, and Tennessee’s rise from tenth to second, suggest that such a process may already be underway.

But the report’s own findings also point to the unfinished nature of the debate. Even the highest-ranked state has not adopted every protection evaluated. The future of religious liberty in the United States, therefore, may depend less on the emergence of a single model state than on whether lawmakers across the country continue to recognize that freedom of religion includes more than the right to hold a belief.

It also includes, the report argues, the freedom to live according to that belief.

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