The Supreme Court could hear cases next term that have important ramifications for Americans of faith, according to legal experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.- The ruling in Groff v. DeJoy blew apart a nearly 50-year precedent regarding religious accommodations in the workplace, and Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said that he believes numerous cases on this topic will pour in — allowing the court to set a new standard.
- “It’s really interesting if you look at last decade, or a little more, since 2011, the Supreme Court has heard 25 cases involving religious freedom issues and 24 out of 25 have been in favor of the religious freedom side,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told the DCNF.
The Supreme Court will potentially weigh several faith-based cases involving free speech, sidewalk counseling outside of abortion clinics and workplace accommodations after handing down several religious freedom victories this past year, according to legal experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The court handed down two highly-anticipated decisions in June, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis and Groff v. DeJoy — the former dealing with the right of business owners to not be compelled to use certain types of speech and the latter regarding an employee’s right to a religious accommodation. These cases have set the stage for several other cases to be brought before the Supreme Court next year, legal experts told the DCNF.
“So far the court has only filled up around a third of its docket, maybe 20 out of 60 cases, or 20 out of 70 cases, and hasn’t really started filling in religious liberty cases yet,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told the DCNF. “So we’re more in a position of like, what are the big cases heading up to the Supreme Court in the near future?”
One such case that could be heard involves Christian baker Jack Phillips, who won a Supreme Court case in 2018 for refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. Despite his initial win, Phillips was sued again in 2021 for refusing to decorate a cake for a gender transition party and is currently awaiting a decision from the Colorado Supreme Court, according to John Bursch, senior counsel and vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
“What it will come down to in the Colorado Supreme Court is whether they think that cake artistry qualifies as speech,” Bursch said. “The US Supreme Court in 303 Creative cited an amicus brief … favorably, when it was talking about visual artists and that brief talks about cake artists. So if the Colorado Supreme Court just looks carefully at what the Supreme Court ruled in 303 Creative, that should control the outcome in Jack’s case, but if for any reason they disagree, then we’ll have to go back to the Supreme Court and ask for relief again.”
Another religious battle in the works is Hittle v. The City of Stockton, which is currently being fought in the Ninth Circuit Court regarding Fire Chief Ron Hittle, who was fired for attending a Christian leadership conference. Hittle’s case is about to get a lot of attention because of the Groff decision, according to Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute (FLI).
The Groff case involved a postal worker who was forced to leave his job after being unable to obtain a religious accommodation to not work on Sunday. The Supreme Court ruled in the case that an employer could only deny such a request if they could prove it would cause “substantially increased costs in relation to the conduct of [an employer’s] particular business,” which changed nearly 50 years of legal precedent that had required an employee’s request be “reasonable” to prevent an “undue hardship” for the company, according to Shackelford.
“[Groff] changed the protection for religious liberty in the workplace and actually restores religious freedom in the workplace,” Shackelford told the DCNF. “But [the Supreme Court] didn’t go into detail on exactly how that would look and by laying out the new standard, they threw out the old standard. So you’re gonna have all these future cases that are going to come up that are going to play out with this new standard.”
The Supreme Court could also take up a case involving Catholic pro-life activist Debra Vitagliano, who, under a Westchester County, New York, law that creates a bubble zone 100 feet around abortion clinics, would not be able to pray outside of or minister to women considering an abortion.
Becket sued on behalf of Vitagliano in 2022, arguing that the law violated her rights to express her faith and her concerns about abortion under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld a similar law in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, in which the justices said that the First Amendment right to free speech was not infringed by limiting protestors or sidewalk evangelists from coming within eight feet of a woman or clinic worker.
The decision has been criticized by many judges over the years and Vitagliano’s case will go straight to the Supreme Court, if accepted, to challenge its earlier decision, according to Goodrich.
“[W]e challenged that under the free speech clause and the court said, there’s a lot of criticism of Hill, but only the Supreme Court can overrule its own decisions,” Goodrich said. “So we’re about to take on the Supreme Court and say, ‘Here’s the vehicle you’ve been waiting for to set your free speech jurisprudence straight.’”
All three attorneys expressed that while they could never predict how the court will rule in any given case, the justices’ record over the past decade has indicated a strong stance on protecting the rights of religious Americans.
“It’s really interesting, if you look at the last decade, or a little more, since 2011, the Supreme Court has heard 25 cases involving religious freedom issues and 24 out of 25 have been in favor of the religious freedom side,” Goodrich said.
“When religion flourishes, culture flourishes too,” Bursch told the DCNF. “The court has been [protecting] that because the language of this the US Constitution, is so plain and so broad in protecting those rights, and that going all the way back to our founding, the protection of religious liberty and free speech has been so strongly a tradition in our country, that the court is reluctant to curtail that in any way, even though government officials seem to be doing that with increasing frequency.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.