When do laws against abuse become weapons against faith?

On my office wall hangs a framed copy of George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, R.I. In it, America’s first president promised that the new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It was more than a gesture of tolerance. It was a radical pledge that this country would never criminalize belief.

More than two centuries later, that promise is being tested again — this time not in a church or a synagogue, but in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn.

In the United States vs. Cherwitz et al., federal prosecutors cited the Trafficking Victims Protection Act — a law designed to stop modern slavery — to convict members of a spiritual community called OneTaste. The group’s alleged crime? Leading a practice known as “orgasmic meditation,” which the government claimed amounted to “forced labor” because some participants were psychologically manipulated. No allegations of violence. No threats. No physical restraint. The prosecutors simply argued that influence and belief — that elusive, human web of persuasion and trust — was itself coercion.

That is not what Congress meant when it passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000. The law was intended for victims of real trafficking: people forced or tricked into labor or sex work under threat of harm. It was never meant to punish those who freely joined a community, or to turn regret into retroactive victimhood.

The Supreme Court warned us about this danger decades ago. In the United States vs. Kozminski (1988), the court made clear that psychological pressure alone does not amount to involuntary servitude. “Involuntary” means force, threats or abuse of law — not persuasion, not loyalty and certainly not spiritual devotion.

Yet prosecutors in the Cherwitz case did exactly what the court cautioned against. They revived long-discredited “brainwashing” theories and rebranded them as “coercive control.” They turned adult autonomy into government paternalism. In doing so, they crossed a constitutional red line — criminalizing a spiritual practice because it made people uncomfortable.

You don’t have to like OneTaste to see the danger here. Many Americans, I am certain, find its rituals strange. But America’s genius has always been its willingness to protect unpopular expression — from fringe churches to new age communes to breakaway sects. The same country that once ridiculed Quakers, Catholics and Mormons now embraces their right to believe differently. Freedom of conscience doesn’t mean the freedom to conform. It means the right to be wrong in the eyes of others.

Once the state starts deciding which forms of persuasion are acceptable, faith itself becomes unsafe. Think about the many religious communities whose adherents live under strict rules: the Amish Ordnung, Catholic monastic vows, Hasidic codes of dress and conduct, Islamic prayer discipline or evangelical missionary zeal. Any of these could be painted as “psychological coercion” by a creative prosecutor armed with this new precedent.

Faith, by its nature, involves surrender — to a deity, a doctrine or a discipline. That surrender may look irrational to outsiders. But it is not illegal. Adults have the right to devote themselves, even unwisely. The government has no constitutional power to declare their devotion a form of slavery.

The broader risk isn’t limited to religion. We live in a time when many Americans, from both left and right, are quick to label speech or influence as “harm.” Universities, corporations and now prosecutors are tempted to treat persuasion as force. That is a recipe for authoritarianism cloaked in empathy.

Congress should act to correct this misuse of the trafficking law and restore its original purpose. Lawmakers need to reaffirm that “trafficking” means actual compulsion and require objective evidence of real harm or threat — not subjective emotion — to make clear that defendants must have knowingly and willfully coerced others through force, fraud or true duress rather than spiritual conviction. Otherwise, prosecutors will have a new tool to target unpopular communities, and every minority faith will be one cultural controversy away from criminalization.

Today, the defendants are members of an obscure wellness movement. Tomorrow, it could be your pastor, rabbi or imam. When government power turns belief into evidence of crime, it doesn’t just endanger one group, it endangers the very freedom that defines America.

The 1st Amendment wasn’t written for the comfortable. It was written for the outcasts, the eccentrics and the believers whose faith defied consensus. Once we let the state punish people for what they believe rather than what they do, we betray the spirit of Washington’s promise — and we give bigotry sanction.

Alan Dershowitz is an emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School. He has argued landmark cases on free speech and religious liberty and serves as counsel on the legal team representing OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone in United States vs. Cherwitz.