Supreme Court Ruling Exposes the Bankruptcy of Religious Liberty in a Secularized Order

The National Register commentary by Andrea Picciotti-Bayer reports on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in *Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety*, which held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) does not allow prisoners to sue individual prison officials personally for money damages for religious‑rights violations. The author laments that Damon Landor, a Rastafarian inmate whose dreadlocks were forcibly cut despite prior accommodations and a federal court ruling protecting them, will receive no compensation. She frames the case as exposing a “gap in the law” and urges Congress to remedy it. The commentary treats the decision as a technical legal problem, ignoring the deeper theological and moral collapse of a legal order that has severed rights from objective truth and reduced religious practice to a conditional privilege granted by the state.