In March 2010, Congress adopted at Barack Obama's urging a healthcare reform aimed at offering health insurance to a majority of Americans. Among the points of the reform, for the collective plans, employers are required to provide their employees with a basket of preventive care. Its content, enacted by the Ministry of Health, includes contraceptive care. The Ministry of Health has dismissed contraceptive care by religious employers in the strict sense, such as churches, and eventually non-profit religious organizations, including universities and hospitals. But these exemptions will not prevent an outcry from the Catholic episcopate, which denounces the contraceptive mandate as an attack on religious freedom. Some bishops call for civil disobedience. They were soon joined by many evangelical organizations, making a common cause to defend the right for Christians to religious objection when the law is conflicting with their conscience. It concerns of course the contraceptive mandate but includes logically the legality of abortion and same sex marriage. Since 2010, several US states, thanks to Republican majorities, have adopted or tried to adopt bills protecting religious freedom as including religious objection in case of conscience conflicts with the law. This article will focus on highlighting the roots of conscious objection in the American religious context and its current direction. It will make an initial assessment of its legal and judicial results.
