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The Real Test of Religious Freedom: Why Eloheh Matters

Logan Martin Isaac

• 3 min read
The Real Test of Religious Freedom: Why Eloheh Matters

I've just sent a letter to the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners supporting Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice in their appeal of permit restrictions that would make their religious practice nearly impossible. You can read the full story in Randy and Edith Woodley's own words at eloheh.org, but I wanted to tell you why this matters and why I'm using everything I have to support them.

The Short Version

Edith and Randy Woodley (PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at George Fox, ordained minister, Keetoowah Cherokee and Eastern Shoshone) run a teaching farm in Yamhill County where they practice and teach Indigenous spirituality centered on sacred relationship with land. Yamhill County has imposed permit restrictions that limit overnight camping to one event per year, prohibit them from serving food they grow themselves, and treat their composting sanitation as "sewage" despite WHO guidelines.

Why This Is The Actual Test

Religious freedom is meaningless if it only protects people whose worship looks familiar to those writing the regulations. That's the entire point of constitutional protection—preventing the tyranny of the majority from crushing traditions without political power.

The restrictions assume legitimate religious practice looks like an hour in a building on Sunday morning. Indigenous spirituality requires extended land-based gathering—ceremonies that happen through the night, sacred stories that may only be told after dark, traditional star navigation that can only be taught under actual stars. The regulations weren't written to target Indigenous practice, but they were written by people who couldn't imagine religion might look fundamentally different from their own experience.

This is where I've spent my adult life: working with communities that institutions reliably fail to understand. Combat veterans. The religiously marginalized. People navigating systems designed without them in mind. I know what it looks like when facially neutral regulations crush minority communities. The pattern is always the same: rules make perfect sense to the people writing them, then someone outside that experience discovers the rules functionally prohibit their practice.

The Theological Stakes

If you've been reading my work, you know I talk about (what I will eventually explain) are called "paleonymic traces"—the ways marginalized voices leave marks in hegemonic texts that can't be fully erased: Hebraic judicial confederation before Israelite monarchy; Nazarite populist piety that outshone Levitical high/priesthood; Samaritan worship that persisted despite Jerusalemite temple economy.

Those traces only survived because communities refused to let their traditions die even when institutions made practice difficult or dangerous. Indigenous spiritual traditions in North America survived centuries of explicit legal prohibition. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act wasn't 👏 passed 👏 until 👏 1978.

The Woodleys are asking for what any church assumes: to gather when their tradition requires, to share sacred food, to maintain their facility according to their values. The difference is "Christian" congregations don't need permits for weekend retreats. Our industrializing understanding of "worship space" is already encoded as the default. Indigenous spirituality becomes the exception requiring accommodation precisely because the regulations encode Christian-normative assumptions.

Why You Should Care

Rights that only protect the majority aren't rights, they're privileges. If Yamhill County can effectively prohibit land-based Indigenous spiritual practice through facially neutral regulations, so can any jurisdiction anywhere. You don't need to ban Indigenous religion explicitly—you just write regulations that assume Christian patterns and require everyone to comply.

Throughout Scripture, the stranger and the marginalized are precisely where God shows up to test whether God's people actually mean what they claim. Every generation faces this test. This is ours.

I'm standing with Eloheh. I hope you will too.

Read Randy and Edith's full story: eloheh.org

Ways to Support: