Abstract The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded by custodians of state governance and religious conservativism in public disputes and how particular grammars of protection are rendered authoritative over others. The article excavates how the staging of authoritative grammars of protection by state and religious conservative actors forecloses an understanding of the subject‐positions that manoeuvre at the sidelines to integrate ways of being and protect a space for difference. Through the framing of an arm‐wrestle, the article critiques negotiations over policy and legal reform as it is grasped in social worlds, and explores how state and religious conservative actors move within the conventions of secular liberal governance to maintain their authority and stakes amidst challenges to continuity.