Religious freedom, 1997: churches and consensus-building

Christian Century, August 13, 1997 by Robin W. Lovin

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have sent mixed messages on the constitutional problems of church-state relations. The court allowed states to provide special education programs in the classrooms of religious schools, suggesting that cooperation between church and state to deliver services to people is not necessarily an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The court also invalidated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, warning individuals and institutions that the exercise of their religious freedom is not exempt from state and local regulations.

Attention in the religious community has centered on the fate of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and questions about legal safeguards for religious practices. Legal opinions on this matter are sharply divided, as a recent exchange between Oliver Thomas and Marci Hamilton in the Century (July 16-23) indicates. The legal arguments will continue, as the courts seek clear guidelines for future cases and as Congress debates versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act redrafted to pass constitutional muster.

Religious bodies will be participants in this debate about law and politics, but it is also time for them to do some thinking of their own about the scope and use of their freedom in American public life. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act focused on the right of religious people to be left alone to fulfill their religious duties, gather for worship and educate their children in the faith. These freedoms, often denied in countries around the world, are important. But the freedom to be left alone is not the only freedom that a vital Christian community requires.

Christian faith also takes an interest in the human good. Concern for people, not just commitment to patterns of worship, specific religious duties and religious education, brings the church into conflict math the state. The friction occurs when Christians believe that the political community is mistaken in its understanding of the human good, or seems to be pursuing it in the wrong way. Thus, churches criticize consumerism and advocate charitable giving, community service and voluntary simplicity as alternatives to a culture that equates the human good primarily with material prosperity. Churches may also see the human good as requiring mutual assistance and religious participation in public efforts to meet human needs. Both Roman Catholic social teaching and Social Gospel traditions in Protestant Christianity have understood social involvement as essential to their Christian faith.

For traditions that seek not only to exercise their faith but also to have some transformative influence on their society, constitutional protections alone are not enough. We can claim a constitutionally protected right to hold and live out an understanding of the human good. We can even speak of a constitutionally protected right to proclaim that understanding to the wider society -- a right not to be excluded from the public argument. We can claim our right to think, do and speak. But we can't claim the right to force others to accept our religious visions. We do not have a constitutional entitlement to win the public argument.

This suggests that churches which understand their purposes to include social transformation as well as personal salvation and communal praise of God need to be somewhat circumspect in claiming their constitutional entitlements. A church that aims to shape the understanding of the human good in its community may want to engage the public in a discussion of the elements that make up that good. Such discussions will often be very local, involving conflicts between church programs and local zoning laws or historic preservation regulations. A congregation caught in such a conflict might wisely choose to exercise some restraint in claiming the right to act for its own religious purposes, seeking instead to build a consensus on what the good of the whole community requires.

To act with such restraint risks losing the argument, of course. But it may in the long run be more risky to win with a constitutional trump that bypasses the larger community discussion. Winning an exemption for a religious purpose just because it is religious reduces the church's claims about the human good to the status of a group preference. Christians have never understood their visions of the human good as mere preferences, even in societies in which their rights to those preferences are legally protected.

Though a prudent self-limitation on claims based on religious freedom is in order for churches, that doesn't mean that religious freedom is a mistake or that its legal protection should be withdrawn. The free-exercise clause is important, and churches must take an appropriate interest in further efforts by Congress and the Supreme Court to clarify its scope. But the restraints that free exercise may impose on the state cannot tell us everything that wise and faithful Christians need to know as they and their churches participate in the political pursuit of the human good.