When the State Enters the Confessional

Washington's New Law and the Erosion of Religious Liberty

Last Friday, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed Senate Bill 5375 into law, mandating that clergy report any suspected child abuse or neglect, even if that information was disclosed in the sacrament of confession. In doing so, Washington joined New Hampshire and West Virginia in explicitly criminalizing a priest's duty to remain silent in confession, making it one of only three states to do so openly and directly. Just days later, on May 5th, the Department of Justice announced it had opened a formal investigation, citing potential violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. It was a rare acknowledgment that the free exercise of religion is not a negotiable privilege; it is a protected right. That the DOJ had to step in at all is a sobering reminder of how far many lawmakers are willing to go to regulate the sacred. The speed of the DOJ's response suggests that even within the federal government, there remains some recognition that the line crossed here is not a small one; it is antithetical to our Constitution.

The DOJ’s investigation is a critical and necessary move. But let’s not be naïve; Washington’s brazen disregard for the sacred didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s simply the most recent, most shameless expression of a trend that has been quietly gaining momentum across the country. The outrage this law provoked is justified, but it must not distract us from the larger story. The erosion of religious liberty in America is not a sudden collapse. It’s a slow rot, creeping through state legislatures, camouflaged by moral rhetoric. These attacks rarely declare themselves as such; they hide behind language of safety, progress, and reform. But the effect is the same: The creeping assumption that government has the right to dictate even the terms of moral conscience.

In the Catholic faith — and many others — the seal of confession is absolute. A priest may never, under any circumstances, reveal what is confessed. Not for personal gain. Not under threat. Not even to stop a crime. This isn’t policy, it’s doctrine. Breaking the seal means immediate excommunication. This is not just a matter of conscience, it’s a matter of salvation. To violate the seal is to sever a priest’s connection to the sacrament itself. It would be the equivalent of spiritual suicide. For Catholics, the confessional is not symbolic. It is sacred; a place where the penitent speaks not to a man, but to God. This is not a gray area. This is one of the clearest, most immovable lines in Catholic moral theology.

To those outside the Church, this may seem extreme. But the Constitution protects the right to hold and live out such beliefs, no matter how inconvenient they may be to the state. Religious freedom means nothing if it only applies to beliefs that are socially palatable or politically safe. The test of a free society is whether it can tolerate religious obligations that conflict with civil convenience. Washington’s law fails that test, and it does so proudly. It legislates over the objections of faith communities, deliberately overriding centuries of sacred tradition to make a political point. In doing so, it exposes its own hostility; not just toward abuse, but toward the faith itself.

Washington, New Hampshire, and West Virginia may be the only states that explicitly deny clergy-penitent privilege in abuse cases so far. But they are far from alone. In states like Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island, the law implicitly denies the privilege by designating "any person" as a mandatory reporter, with no stated exemption for clergy, effectively forcing the same outcome by omission. That might sound innocuous on paper, but in practice, it means a priest hearing confession could be prosecuted for obeying the Church’s command. The result is the same: Priests are placed in a legal bind. Violate their vows, or face the full weight of the law.

This dismantling of clergy-penitent privilege has gone largely unnoticed, but Washington’s move makes the pattern undeniable. This ought to send a chill down the spine of anyone who still believes in the separation of church and state; a principle meant not to constrain religion, but to protect it from state intrusion. When the government claims the power to insert itself into the confessional, it claims authority over the most private corners of the human soul. This is not simply an issue of religious liberty; it is an issue of metaphysical sovereignty. Are there places where Caesar must not go? Or do we now believe the state may sit even in the confessional?

All of this is happening while attorney-client privilege remains untouched. Doctor-patient confidentiality is still respected. Only clergy are singled out, as if the sanctity of the confessional is less real, less deserving of protection. This is not a neutral public safety measure. It is a declaration of mistrust. In a culture increasingly hostile to religious authority, the confessional becomes a target. The selective application of privilege betrays the deeper reality: Our culture no longer treats religious belief as legitimate. It treats it as a dangerous curiosity to be managed.

This is not about keeping children safe. If it were, the law would be broader. It would include secular privileges. It would recognize that abuse is not confined to religious settings. But that’s not what’s happening here. This is about which institutions the modern state trusts, and which ones it resents. The Church, with its moral claims and immovable doctrines, is a threat to the ideology of limitless state authority. And so, it must be undermined. The abuse crisis has become a pretext for redefining the place of religion in public life. It is no longer about rooting out evil. It is about asserting dominance.

There is no question that child abuse is a moral horror that must be met with justice. But this law doesn’t deliver justice. It doesn’t give victims recourse. It doesn’t hold perpetrators accountable. It simply declares that the government may intrude into what is meant to be inviolable and sacred. Justice requires prudence, not overreach. Laws like this one confuse vengeance with virtue. They don’t serve the innocent, they satisfy the powerful. That distinction matters. Justice without boundaries becomes a weapon, and in the hands of the state, that weapon is often turned on the very institutions that once restrained it.

This isn’t about stopping future abuse. The Church should certainly be held accountable when it fails, but the answer is not to criminalize confession. The answer is not to obliterate the line between Caesar and God. The sacramental seal is not an obstacle to justice, it is a boundary that prevents tyranny. If the state can force a priest to betray the confessional, it can force anyone to violate their conscience. The principle, once broken, will not be contained.

Even on its own terms, this law fails. Confession, in any context, only works when trust is absolute. Nobody discloses wrongdoing if they expect it to be reported to the state. The seal of confession isn’t a loophole, it’s the very condition that makes confession possible. Eliminate the seal, and you eliminate confession. What this law offers is not transparency, it’s sabotage. It will not help bring abusers to justice. It will only guarantee that they remain hidden. Worse still, it will train the faithful to see their priests not as shepherds, but as agents of the state.

What’s left isn’t a community free of heinous crime. It’s silence. And that silence protects no one. It robs the penitent of redemption, the priest of his vocation, and the law of its legitimacy. It turns a sacred encounter into a legal risk, and in doing so, destroys it. Where once there was a path to grace, there will now be fear and avoidance. The net result is not safety, it is spiritual desolation disguised as public policy.

The First Amendment doesn’t need to be repealed to be destroyed. It only needs to be eroded one law, one court ruling, one precedent at a time. And that’s exactly what’s been happening. Every exception carved into religious liberty is a doorway left ajar. And through those doors creep policies that would once have been unthinkable. We are watching, in real time, the shrinking of the sacred into the permitted. And what is merely permitted can soon be forbidden.

We should be grateful the DOJ is investigating this law. But the battle is bigger than one statute. This is about whether America still recognizes that some things are beyond the reach of state power. We are not simply fighting for priests. We are fighting for a principle; that some things belong to God alone. That there are lines the state cannot cross, not because the Church says so, but because the state has no jurisdiction over the soul.