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Be good stewards of our religious freedom
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Threats to religious freedom do not come only from those who oppose religion or who value other rights above the right of religious exercise; religious people and faith-based organizations can undermine religious freedom, too.
One example: commentators who note that the religious freedom problems encountered in the US are minor compared to the beheadings, torture, loss of jobs, mob violence, etc., that Christians (and others) undergo in many other countries--and then say, or imply, that Christians should just stop "whining" about the tiny irritations they are suffering.
A more common example: the many faith-based organizations that pay little attention to the negative religious freedom developments around them, or don't pay enough attention to see that the separate incidents reveal a serious negative trend. Because this is a land that broadly respects religion and religious freedom, it is easy enough to regard alarming stories as aberrations, rare exceptions that need cause little concern.
Both views are inadequate. There are real and serious negative trends as our society becomes more religiously diverse, government is increasingly active, new rights are pressed, more and more people become skeptical about the goodness of religion. These trends do not amount to the persecution and terror visited on religious people and organizations in many countries, and yet the negative trends do undermine faith-based services, they do hamper people of faith who desire to conduct their businesses to bring honor to God, they do make it more difficult for people of deep convictions not only to believe but also to act in accordance with their convictions.
In the United States we are heirs of a splendid legacy of respect for religion and for religious freedom. But religious freedom cannot defend itself. Those who know its value, whether they be religious or secular, need to be good stewards of it, teaching its value, alert and active when it is eroded, vigilant not to cave-in when government would casually demand that persons and organizations violate their religious convictions.
Believers persecuted in other lands will hardly be helped if Americans allow our own religious freedom legacy to fade away. Faith-based services and companies of conviction will find it ever more difficult to flourish while they maintain their religious identity and practices if we don't become more active to protect and enlarge our nation's commitment to religious freedom.
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Audio and handouts available from religious hiring briefing
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On September 24th, IRFA organized a briefing for congressional staffers on the important right of faith-based organizations to consider religion when hiring staff. The freedom is controversial and poorly understood, there is considerable congressional staff turnover, and advocates against the freedom are often visiting Hill offices to push initiatives to restrict religious freedom. The briefing was an opportunity to make a clear case for the religious hiring freedom, including how important it is to strengthen the religious protections in the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA) bills that are circulating in the House and Senate.
IRFA distributed a handout quoting specific congressional language that protects (that's good!) or erodes (that's bad!) the religious hiring freedom, a 1-page primer on the freedom, and a recommendation for how the religious exemption in the current ENDA bills should be strengthened in order to be effective. Interested staffers received a copy of the Esbeck, Carlson-Thies, and Sider book, The Freedom of Faith-Based Organizations to Staff on a Religious Basis (2004).
The speakers were Steve McFarland of World Vision, Kim Colby of the Christian Legal Society, and Stanley Carlson-Thies of IRFA.
Audio of the hearing and links to the handouts and a pdf of the book are available on the IRFA website, here.
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HHS contraceptives mandate update
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August 1, 2011--more than two years ago. That's when the federal government announced that employer health plans would have to cover all FDA-approved contraceptive services. That's also when the government announced an exemption for "religious employers"--but defined the term so narrowly that only churches would be exempt from the mandate.
More than two years later, the widespread opposition prompted by these twin actions has yet to dissipate, notwithstanding a refinement of the exemption and the promulgation of an "accommodation" for non-church religious nonprofit organizations. Many religious organizations regard the accommodation to be a sham. A significant number of businesses that have pro-life or Catholic ethical standards or whose owners are people morally opposed to some or all contraceptives have sued the federal government in the hope that the courts will give them relief even though the administration insists that businesses have zero religious freedom claims.
So opposition continues and the court cases continue to be filed, or to be refiled.
* The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty's indispensable HHS Mandate Information Central notes that there are now 73 cases with over 200 plaintiffs.
* For-profit companies have filed 39 of these lawsuits, and in 30 of the 35 cases that have proceeded to some form of ruling on the applicability of the mandate, the businesses have won at least temporary relief from the mandate.
* In the cases brought by nonprofit religious organizations, such as colleges and hospitals, the courts have generally delayed consideration of the lawsuits or simply dismissed them as not ripe for action because of the temporary enforcement safe harbor, now extended to January 1, 2014 (no need to rule until the mandate is actually applied), or the late date of the final "accommodation" regulations (June 28, 2013)--how could a court rule before seeing those regulations?
* Religious nonprofits that sued are not dropping their lawsuits because of the final accommodation rules. Rather, new lawsuits are being launched--e.g., one by four Oklahoma higher education institutions: Southern Nazarene University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Oklahoma Baptist University, and Mid-America Christian University. And organizations whose lawsuits had been dismissed have re-filed--e.g., Colorado Christian University and Ave Maria University.
* The US Supreme Court may rule this term, perhaps next summer, on one or more of the religious business lawsuits. The Third Circuit federal appeals court ruled against Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Mennonite-owned company; the Tenth Circuit court went the other way, ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby. The Supreme Court has been asked to take up both cases, resolving the differences between these two rulings. Note that a Supreme Court decision need not resolve all the questions, but might be limited to deciding whether a business or business owners can even have a valid religious freedom claim, kicking the decision whether the mandate can or cannot be imposed on the specific company back to a lower court.
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Initiatives to protect religious freedom = covert campaign against civil rights?
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Political Research Associates, which proclaims as its mission producing "investigative research and analysis on the U.S. Right to support social justice advocates and defend human rights"--or more briefly, "challenging the right, advancing social justice"--earlier this year published "Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights," a report by Jay Michaelson.
Religious freedom defenders would do well to read the report, because it lays out clearly an increasingly popular argument: when religious people and organizations seek an exemption from an anti-discrimination law, they are not really seeking freedom to exercise their own faith (for example, by creating an organization that embodies a biblical sexual ethic) but rather simply requesting permission to oppress people different than themselves.
Michaelson is too good a scholar to make the argument quite so crudely; for example, he admits (with puzzlement) that various highly respected constitutional scholars, such as Douglas Laycock, have agreed that anti-discrimination laws sometimes do wrongly suppress religious freedom, and he states, "The free exercise of religion is, itself, a civil right," so that the real issue is how different civil rights should be simultaneously honored or balanced.
But his basic argument is that whenever LGBT or reproductive rights advance, religious freedom rightly is pushed back. The current coordinated right-wing campaign (as he labels it) that purports simply to protect religious freedom is really part of a master strategy to impose Christian values on the nation.
And yet, for religious persons or organizations to plead for the freedom to maintain for themselves and in their organizations their faith-shaped practices and conduct guidelines is hardly the same thing as seeking to impose those practices and guidelines on everyone else!
Of course it is true that if a religious organization is free to consider religion in hiring then applicants who don't share that religion will be turned away-and yet there are multiple other employers with very different job qualifications. Of course it is true that if a faith-based adoption agency insists on placing children only with religious mother-father married families, a single person, a gay couple, or a cohabiting heterosexual couple will be turned away from that one agency-and yet there are multiple other adoption services, many of which explicitly seek to serve gay persons.
Laws that would require the religious organization to ignore religion when hiring or that would force the adoption agency to place children without regard to sexual orientation, religion, or marital status necessarily suppress religious freedom, even if the laudable goal is simply to advance other civil rights. Saying that such laws are required in order to end discrimination is to say that religious freedom can be suppressed whenever the government disapproves of what various religious persons and organizations believe their religion requires them to do. That's no balance, that's not respect for religious exercise.
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| Rod Dreher, "Does Faith = Hate?" The American Conservative, Oct. 9, 2013
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