Government Approved Religion

Freedom for Good Religion, Not Bad Religion

Rick Plasterer on March 7, 2022

Religious freedom is the ground zero for the tensions dividing American society, and has been so for at least the last twenty years. At issue is the right to live life according to the religious precepts of which one is persuaded.

The attempt to deny this right by those pained by particular religious precepts has caused this tension, commonly called the “Culture War.” Powered by the entertainment industry, the educational system, and the mass media, and powerfully reinforced by Supreme Court decisions, leftist enemies of religious liberty advanced from the latter part of the twentieth century until the Trump era. President Donald Trump’s administration made significant efforts to reverse the tide. But now the Biden administration has endeavored to undo Trump administration efforts. A view from the American left cheering the Biden administration’s efforts on was presented in a panel discussion by the Center for American Progress on February 25. The Left’s view of developments in the conflict over religious liberty, in which the concept of religious liberty is amended exclude sexual morality, the right to life, or whatever causes hurt feelings among the Left’s constituencies, was on full display with respect to domestic religious liberty.

The presentation included an address by the new Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom, Rashad Hussain, which was in striking contrast to the treatment of domestic religious liberty, as it showed a traditional concern for the right of people to practice the religion of their conviction, including Christians in countries in which freedom of religion is severely restricted or denied. He observed his quick appointment and the filling of positions in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) by the Biden administration, and said it was “powerful signal with our overwhelmingly bi-partisan support for protecting international religious freedom.”

Hussain mentioned that as American Special Envoy at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation he worked to combat the “Defamation of Religions” proposal, which would have set an international legal standard against criticizing religions. He said that the U.S. government’s annual International Religious Freedom Report is one of the “strongest contributions” America makes to international religious freedom, and that it has “a strong impact on U.S. policy.” In connection with the report, the U.S. government designated Russia a Country of Particular Concern last November for its serious violations of religious freedom.

Perhaps because the administration was widely criticized for removing Nigeria from the list of CPCs, he did mention the need to address religious tension in the Sahel region of Africa, including in Nigeria. He also mentioned the violent persecution of Christians in Afghanistan, Uyghur Muslims in China, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, and Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners in China, as examples of his concern. Seemingly conscious that religious freedom is a highly controversial issue, he said “we’ve seen the greatest success when we join together across lines” in defense of religious freedom. Religious freedom is under attack in many places, he said, “and we must stay united.” Unity is possible, however, because the concerns he mentioned are classical, Wilsonian, liberal internationalist concerns, in line with a classical vision of religious freedom, in which people can live their lives in accordance with religious precepts.

Maggie Siddiqi, Senior Director of Religion and Faith at the Center for American Progress, who moderated the panel on domestic religious liberty, then observed that starting on his first day in office, President Biden rescinded a number of the Trump administration’s regulations concerning religious liberty. She said that Trump’s regulations “undermined religious liberty,” but the Biden administration is “seeking to protect religious communities from white supremacist violence, protecting sacred lands for religious communities, [and] advancing the rights of religious communites under threat around the world.” She proposed to look at “what the administration can accomplish for religious liberty over the remaining three years of President Biden’s term.”

Nevertheless, she believes there is still a problem in that “public discourse on religious liberty too often focuses on the narrative of the religious right, which has distorted the principle of religious freedom as a means of overriding regulations which might protect our public health in a pandemic, or prevent discrimination against LGBTQ people, and more.” She said that “religious freedom should never be about using religion as an excuse to harm others – it is essentially about allowing all people the freedom to worship or choose not to worship without fear – it is about protecting the safety of religious minority groups.”

This assessment, of course, inescapably involves the claim that the doctrines and practices “the religious right” seeks to protect are wrong and “harmful” and deserve no religious liberty protection. This was the overarching theme of the panel.

Rabbi Jack Moline, President of Inter-Faith Alliance, was asked what domestic religious freedom agenda should look like and what challenges there are with “current public narrative on religious freedom.”  He said that “we’re tempted to make any agenda a negative agenda.” Unavoidably it’s negative, because the American left does not like everything religious freedom protects, but wants it only for the vision of culture it favors. He expanded by saying that the “main task of people of faith” is to “move the country to make progress towards civil rights and freedom … We have to take back a true understanding of religious freedom … It is not permission to cry that I have deep personal beliefs, and therefore I’m exempt from this or that aspect of the law. It is instead guaranteeing that there is nondiscrimination in business and in employment in the same way that there’s nondiscrimination in housing and education, at least on paper in this country … and it is returning to constitutional standards of the separation of church and state rather than playing a game of trying to create an excuse for people to place their personal beliefs over the requirements of our collective responsibilities and rights.”

Moline’s statement might well be summarized by saying that religious freedom should protect good religion, not bad religion. But the state cannot judge or correct religious doctrine, which is essentially what Rabbi Moline wants. Protecting religious beliefs based on sacred texts, including doctrine about sexual morality and the right to life, is most surely what religious freedom is about, if it is about anything. It is “religion,” and “the free exercise” of it that the Constitution protects, and the doctrines and commandments that believers understand as divine revelation must be binding on a believer above any state requirement, as James Madison so well expressed in the Memorial and Remonstrance.

Siddiqi said that “one of the most significant Biden administration undertakings has been to review over 25 Trump era regulations that welcomes the misuse of religious liberty to discriminate against LGBTQ people, minorities, and reproductive health care.” She asked “what steps has the administration taken so far to undo these harmful regulations, and why is that effort so significant in protecting religious freedom?”

This very question, of course, assumes that traditional religious sexual morality is bad and should have no legal protection, because it pains people who violate it.

Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, responded that the Biden administration re-introduced regulations requiring health service providers to notify clients that they are entitled to “a referral to secular service provider if they wish” (i.e., providers must make referrals to services they understand to be sinful or immoral, which implicates the provider in sin), and rescinded another Trump era regulation allowing government contractors to place religious conditions on their workers, (which is natural for a religious organization that happens to be a government contractor). 

The Biden administration has also stated its intent to rescind religious exemption to federally funded child welfare organizations, which allowed these organizations to decline to provide services they deem to be sinful. The administration has also announced that regulations interpreting the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) “are going to return to a policy of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, removing the religious exemption provision from that antidiscrimination rule.” In today’s environment, this could require a religious health care provider to facilitate “gender transitioning,” or provide counseling services in homosexual relationships.

Platt said that there was an “overarching threat” from the Trump administration’s rules which “took a lot of steps to really enhance the religious liberty of already powerful institutions: so employers, big government funded service providers, health care systems, and these were granted really at the expense of the folks that we are usually trying to protect from discrimination – the workers, people who are in need of social services, foster care children, families, patients, and others.” She said that Trump’s regulations “erodes, rather than protects religious liberty when in order to keep your government funded job you have to follow not your own religious beliefs, but those of your employer.”

To state the obvious, religious freedom should apply to everyone, including large employers. No one has to be employed by a religious organization; if they are, they should follow its rules, which may reasonably be religiously based. People who receive religious social services are in fact harmed if religious social services are not available, as they will not be if the service closes, as religious foster care and adoption agencies have done. They exist first and foremost in obedience to God, and cannot be obedient if they comply with requirements to provide sinful (and wildly unreasonable) services, such as removal of healthy organs, or accommodation of men in facilities for abused women.

Inescapably, today’s antidiscrimination policy involves requiring religious believers to take action against religious precepts and conscience. Conscience is our sense of right and wrong, and to act against it is obviously wrong. Nor should religious freedom, as an overarching and central principle in our society, as it was for James Madison, vary based on an ideological assessment of oppressor and oppressed groups, which seems to be essentially Platt’s reasoning, and that of the panel.

Fred Davie, who serves on U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and is Executive Vice President at Union Theological Seminary, commented that “it is unhelpful, to say the least, to create a hierarchy within the human rights framework, or to prioritize some rights over others. In our view, the Biden administration understands this, and has sought to strengthen religious freedom within the larger human rights framework. It has done this over the past year on a global scale, by including religious freedom as the fundamental right within U.S. foreign policy.”

This, of course, ignores that religious freedom is the first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights, and historically is regarded as the “First Freedom.” The rights of the First Amendment are inter-related, but they support, rather than cancel each other. The Biden administration’s place for religious freedom is where it does not contradict the dicta of the sexual revolution, and dovetails with the efforts of the LGBT movement to export its coercive and conscience denying policies to non-western countries, in reality prioritizing its own “other rights” over religious freedom, as detailed in an earlier article.

Siddiqi said that “houses of worship are frequently targeted by white supremacists and other hate motivated violence. Why is it important for advocates to address this as an issue of religious freedom?”

Moline said that it’s important that houses of worship be protected as a matter of religious freedom. But he believes it’s also important to because attackers are “coming from places of white supremacy, other hate motivated violence that is itself pretending to the role of freedom of religious expression … and that’s simply intolerable. Just because someone who is able to grab the language of discussion doesn’t mean that they’re accurate in the way that they’re deploying it and weaponizing it.”  This of course conflates, in an outrageous way, the violence of say, the Ku Klux Klan, or neo-Nazi groups, with the religious freedom of conscience to object and decline to be complicit in violations of religious sexual morality and the right to life.

Siddiqi then directed the panel to the Equality Act. The Equality Act, she said, “expands religious freedom protections as well as protections for other classes. Why is this a bill that religious freedom advocates support along with other civil rights groups?”

Platt said in response to Siddiqi’s question that “if someone knows that they can’t be fired” for marrying someone of the same sex, “they might be more able to live out their faith by getting married.” This response shows a strategy by the enemies of religious liberty that people immersed in a religious subculture may not think of, i.e., claiming that religious rules in a religious organization violate the religious freedom of employees. But again, no one has to belong to a religious organization that prohibits homosexual behavior. She said that the proposed act includes protections against “all forms of discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of religion.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, the Equality Act covers “a lot more places”: health care providers, banking services, legal services, transportation, etc. “Greater protections across the board, and people of faith will be able to live out their faith in the public square without fear of discrimination.” This claim confuses religious freedom with equal protection. What the Equality Act does is greatly expand the areas of life which are covered by antidiscrimination law, and includes religion as an antidiscrimination category. It does not expand religious freedom, but radically reduces it by making business and employment decisions on a religious basis illegal.

In a question and answer session, it was asked what the Biden administration should do with respect to religious freedom in its remaining three years?

Moline said that two things are important. “Continue enfranchising the diverse communities of faith and philosophy that make up this nation, with an eye toward making sure that it is truly a large tent. On the negative side, we need to resist entirely the agenda and rhetoric of Christian nationalism. Which I want to emphasize, is Christian in name only. It is not an expression of Christianity.” Moline is hardly one to define true Christianity. But presumably he means that Christianity, and all other religions, should be about liberation, not about submission to the will of God or gods as it is stated in sacred texts. But submission to divine will, however painful that might be, is exactly what religion is about.

Throughout the panel, there was a palpable sense of frustration at seeming to be against religious liberty, which the panelists in fact are against. The American Left wants religious freedom for “good religion,” that advances secular ideals of personal and social liberation and self-actualization, but not “bad religion,” based on ancient texts and tradition, that is condemnatory and painful to those who violate it. But obedience to religious precepts is the most basic thing about any religion. Involvement in sin is sin itself, and is clearly prohibited by Scripture (very well explicated in the Catholic Catechism), and well defensible in our legal tradition. The Constitution clearly protects religious freedom, however much anyone is pained. The American founders very reasonably recognized that humans are mortal, and we face the threat of death and giving an account for our lives. The government cannot justly or constitutionally restrict the freedom to live out religious sexual morality, nor respect the right to life, however much the Left wants it to.

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