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Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been trumpeting the supposed new commitment of Attorney General Eric Holder to finally put the Obama administration on the side of the angels by putting an end to the pernicious and illegal religious job discrimination by federally funded faith-based organizations that President George W. Bush allegedly authorized.

In a House Judiciary Committee hearing on May 13, in response to questions from Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA)--a persistent critic of the faith-based administration--AG Holder said that the administration would ensure that its interaction with faith-based organizations would uphold American and administration values of nondiscrimination.  

Will the administration allow groups to "discriminate on the basis of race and religion," Rep. Scott asked?  No, said the Attorney General; the administration would uphold the law.

And what is the law on religious hiring by religious organizations that receive federal funds to provide services to the needy?  Long before Bush became President, Congress decided that, except in a subset of federal programs, faith-based organizations that agree to work with the federal government do retain their freedom to take account of religion in making employment decisions.  They may not "discriminate on the basis of race"--whether or not they take federal funds.  But the law--except in that subset of programs--does not regard it to be illegal discrimination for the religious organization to take account of religion in choosing its employees, whether the organization receives federal funds or not.

If Rep. Scott is worried that, because houses of worship are often racially or ethnically rather homogenous, religious hiring by religious service organizations will in effect be racist hiring, he should look at a good sample of actual faith-based organizations, or go to Chicago in early September for the annual conference of the Christian Community Development Association, and enjoy the multi-ethnic, multi-racial worship and workshops.

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Is religious hiring by religious social-service organizations in Ontario legal or not?  The answer from an Ontario court last week was:  Yes.  Puzzled?  So was the court.

The case concerned Christian Horizons, an evangelical faith-based organization that runs residential homes for severely disabled people.  It serves the disabled without regard to religion, but requires staff to be Christian in belief and conduct.  A decade ago, an employee, despite the conduct code, entered into a homosexual relationship, was dismissed, and appealed her dismissal to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

The Tribunal's ruling, in 2008, was pernicious:  religious hiring standards could be maintained only by those religious organizations that only serve fellow believers.  Churches, which mainly serve their members, can insist that employees be Christian.  But parachurch organizations, serving all who are "neighbors"--anyone needing help--are not free to insist that their employees must be faithful believers.  

Last week's decision by the Ontario Divisional Court in Toronto reversed the Tribunal's odd decision, but was itself odd.  The Court acknowledged that it was because the Christian Horizon staff were committed believers that they served everyone without regard to religion.  The religious conduct policy was neither paradoxical nor illegal.

However, the Court added, because the dismissed woman had not been employed to engage in specifically religious activities, such as evangelism, Christian Horizon was not justified in holding her to the religious standard.

Thus:  The organization is free to operate a religious employment policy if it so chooses--except that the government may intervene and say that the policy should be restricted to some job positions.

This is illogical and pernicious.  Don Hutchison, legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, has written that the court sought to follow the biblical King Solomon, who famously showed his wisdom by threatening to use his sword to divide a baby who was claimed by two mothers.  Solomon knew that the woman who abandoned her claim in order to spare the child was the true mother, and gave her the child.  However, Hutchison says, instead of getting to a similarly wise outcome, the court ended up with the baby cut in half.  The religious organization is free to hire by faith except where it is not free to do so.  This is muddled and wrong, allowing Caesar to make decisions that don't belong to him.

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Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, earlier this year spoke at Brigham Young University.  He pointed to a range of important issues, from marriage to abortion, on which Catholics and Mormons hold the same position, unpopular as the position is to powerful forces in our society.  In these circumstances, for Catholics and Mormons to be able to live faithfully requires that government respect their religious freedom--the freedom of believers to live according to their convictions.  

But for religious freedom to be strong, Cardinal George forthrightly said, religious groups have to stand together:  

"In the coming years, interreligious coalitions formed to defend the rights of conscience for individuals and for religious institutions should become a vital bulwark against the tide of forces at work in our government and society to reduce religion to a purely private reality.  At stake is whether or not the religious voice will maintain its right to be heard in the public square."

Amen!  Multifaith action in defense of institutional religious freedom is vital and only growing more urgent.  What is at stake is not only the right of religion to be "heard in the public square" but, as the Cardinal says elsewhere in his speech, the freedom of religious persons and religious institutions to be true to their religious convictions as they act and serve in the public square.

See George Weigel, "The Cardinal Among the Latter-Day Saints," Ethics and Public Policy Center, May 12, 2010. http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4141/pub_detail.asp

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"Collaboration," as in "government collaboration with faith-based organizations," is commonly used as a positive term:  rather than looking upon faith groups skeptically, over the past 15 or so years the federal government has adopted a "level playing field" policy in which faith-based organizations are free to participate in government funding programs without suppressing their religious identity.  

But "collaboration" also has a sinister meaning. Recall the "collaborators" in World War II movies and history:  people of an overrun country who assisted the occupiers rather than resisting the occupation.  This kind of collaboration is negative--not a relationship of equal partners but rather persons or organizations giving up their independence and identity to do whatever the government says and wants.

When religious groups work with the government, there is always the danger that the collaboration will be negative (the groups being co-opted to an alien agenda) rather than positive (an equal partnership to better achieve a genuinely common goal).  

Some are charging that the administration has stepped over the line--"Merging the EPA with Churches" is how Glenn Beck has put it.  One of the recommendations of the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should establish its own Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, as 12 other federal agencies have done.  That could be positive.  Many houses of worship and faith-based nonprofits, whether theologically conservative or liberal, are committed to taking care of the Creation and, both for reasons of theology and economics, want their own operations to become less wasteful, more sustainable.  An EPA Center would help them locate useful government information and grants.  Those houses of worship and faith-based nonprofits that have adopted some kind of environmentalism as an important commitment could find an EPA Center a useful connection to information and networks.  

Yet collaboration on the federal government's policy agenda is inherently risky.  Churches and faith-based groups have to be wary of being absorbed into a campaign that is only partly guided by their own commitments and interests.  The goal of the federal faith-based initiative should be to ensure that the government supports and keeps from wrecking the good work of private organizations.  It must not become a government effort to co-opt private groups into the government's agenda.  

Further Reading:

Glenn Beck, "Why Obama Is Merging the EPA With Churches," Fox News, May 18, 2010. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,593123,00.html

Meghan Clyne, "The Green Shepherd. The White House wants churches to advance its climate change agenda."  The Weekly Standard, May 3, 2010. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/green-shepherd 

Resource
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Stanley Carlson-Thies, "Faith-Based Policy:  Will the Center Hold?" Capital Commentary (Center for Public Justice), May 21, 2010.  http://www.cpjustice.org/content/faith-based-policy-will-center-hold .  The audio version is posted as a Plumbline commentary by KDCR, the Christian radio station at Dordt College. http://kdcr.dordt.edu/cgi-bin/programming/plumblines/detail.pl?id=6628 .