Framework

Religious liberty is for people. Capture is for power.

Genuine religious freedom protects conscience, worship, dissent, minority faiths, and unbelief. Religious capture uses liberty language to privilege a faction, punish outsiders, or turn public power into theological leverage.

Genuine liberty.

Applies across faiths and to nonreligious conscience where law protects it.
Protects worship, speech, association, accommodation, and equal access without state theology.
Recognizes that believers can dissent from governments, parties, markets, churches, and movements.

Religious capture.

Uses the state to favor a politically useful religious faction.
Treats neutrality, civil-rights enforcement, or policy disagreement as persecution without adequate proof.
Leaves minority faiths, dissenting believers, secular people, and vulnerable groups with less practical freedom.

Archive test.

When reviewing a policy, ask whether the same rule would protect a Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Pagan, atheist, dissenting believer, and unpopular speaker on equal terms. If the answer changes with political usefulness, the machine has entered the sanctuary.