Religious freedom is seldom handed to the passive; it is claimed by those who exercise it even when a hostile culture says they may not. That reality came home to me this week as two very different arenas — Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the marble halls of the U.S. Supreme Court. In both instances, they posed the same enduring question: Will people of faith fight for the liberties our Creator endowed, or will they surrender them to bureaucrats and bullies?

While the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. debated whether Oklahoma may authorize St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School for public funding, I stood on the Temple Mount with Rabbi Yehudah Glick. Rabbi Glick has been arrested scores of times for the “crime” of praying aloud at Judaism’s holiest site. Why would a whispered psalm be treated like a felony?

The answer begins with geography and history. The Mount lies inside the territory diplomats still call the “West Bank,” a military ceasefire line drawn in 1949 that every participant agreed was never meant to become a border. Yet that dotted line hardened into dogma for half a century of two-state “solution” proposals. Even after Israel reunited Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, international pressure compelled the Jewish state to place daily control of the Mount in the hands of a Jordanian Islamic trust. That arrangement grants Muslims unrestricted worship while permitting Jews only silent, time-limited visits — no Bibles, no Torah scrolls, no audible prayer.

Incremental change, however, happens when courageous souls test the limits. Because of Rabbi Glick’s persistence, Jews today may at least ascend the Mount during restricted hours and — since last August — kneel and whisper brief prayers in a small area along the eastern wall. One inch of freedom, once claimed, becomes the platform for the next yard. His tenacity reminds us that history bends toward liberty only when principled people lean hard against its hinges.

Rabbi Glick has paid dearly for that inch: repeated arrests, social ostracism, and even a failed assassination attempt. Yet instead of retreating, he enlarged the space for everyone’s freedom by exercising the sliver he possessed — proving that the defense of conscience always begins with the courageous use of conscience.

That vignette previews what’s at stake in St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Oklahoma. Opponents chant the tired mantra of “separation of church and state,” insisting that any institution touching public funds must muzzle its faith. Governor Kevin Stitt (R) and State Superintendent Ryan Walters (R) are rightly defending their charter statute as neutral toward religion: if secular innovators can design tuition-free online schools, so can Catholics, Jews, evangelical Christians, and others. A favorable ruling would ripple through the 45 other states with charter school laws, broadening educational choice and rooting religious expression more firmly in the public square.

The lesson from Rabbi Glick’s quiet prayer is clear: Use the liberty you still possess, however small, to expand the liberty you lack. If Oklahomans prevail, parents across America will gain the right to choose schools that reinforce rather than undermine their deepest convictions — fortifying civil society, renewing our covenantal heritage, and handing a sturdier, freer republic to our children and grandchildren.