by Christine A. Scheller | Jan 13, 2012 | Feature, Headline News |
It’s been a monumental month in United States Supreme Court religious liberty decisions. First the court decided against hearing the Bronx Household of Faith’s appeal of a New York City Board of Education policy banning worship in public schools. Now the court has ruled that a teacher who taught religious classes at a Lutheran school was not protected under anti-discrimination employment laws because religious bodies have a right to hire and fire ministers as they see fit.
The Most Significant Decision in 20 Years
The New York Times reported that the Lutheran school decision may be the “most significant religious liberty decision in two decades” because, for the first time, it “recognized a ‘ministerial exception’ to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference.”
The case against the school was brought by Cheryl Perich, who spent 45 minutes each day on religious instruction, but “was a ‘called’ teacher who had completed religious training and whom the school considered a minister.” The school said it fired her for pursuing litigation against it in violation of church teaching, The Times reported.
In an op-ed at CNN.com, the attorney for Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School said the decision was “a huge win for religious liberty.”
“Churches do not run the government, select government leaders, or set criteria for choosing government leaders. And government does not run the churches, select religious leaders, or set criteria for choosing religious leaders. The Court unanimously reaffirmed that principle on Wednesday,” said Douglas Laycock.
At USA Today, University of Notre Dame law professor and associate dean Thomas Messner said the ruling affirmed the “foundational principle” that “in a constitutional democracy like ours, secular governments lack the power to resolve religious disputes, to answer religious questions, or to select religious ministers.”
What About Sexual Abuse Reporting?
The Los Angeles Times reported that “lower courts have long recognized that churches are protected from lawsuits involving their internal workings.” But The New York Times noted that “at the argument in October, some justices expressed concern that a sweeping ruling would protect religious groups from lawsuits by workers who said they were retaliated against for, say, reporting sexual abuse.”
“Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Wednesday’s decision left the possibility of criminal prosecution and other protections in place. ‘There will be time enough to address the applicability of the exception to other circumstances,'” The Times reported.
Peyote, Polygamy, and “Internal Church Decisions”
At Spiritual Politics, Religion scholar Mark Silk said, “The big deal is that two decades ago, the Court substantially undermined the constitutional right to free exercise in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a 6-3 decision written by Antonin Scalia that held that two Native American drug counselors could not go to federal court to claim a religious right to sacramentally ingest peyote as part of their membership in the Native American Church.” The Smith decision referred back to an 1878 decision in which the Supreme Court “turned down the Mormon claim to have a free exercise right to polygamy,” Silk noted.
“Maybe ingesting peyote is an outward physical act distinguishable from being employed or not employed as the result of ‘an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself.’ But anyone who knows anything about Mormon theology knows that the LSD Church’s embrace of polygamy–‘plural marriage’–was an internal church decision that affected its faith and mission profoundly. … The bottom line is that, having been forced by the Justice Department to confront Smith directly, the conservatives on the Court significantly walked the Scalia doctrine back,” Silk concluded.
More Pastors Protest Eviction from NYC Public Schools
Meanwhile, reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s other big religion decision regarding worship in New York City public schools continues to heat up. Thursday, 13 pastors and 30 lay people were arrested as they held a prayer rally at Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City address, according to A Journey Through NYC Religions. The New York Times barely noticed.
What Do You Think?
Are these decisions good for religious liberty or do some of their implications concern you?
by Christine A. Scheller | Jan 11, 2012 | Feature, Headline News |
RESPECTING THE OTHER: Author and social activist Lisa Sharon Harper.
Lisa Sharon Harper is director of mobilizing for Sojourners and was the founding executive director of New York Faith & Justice. She holds a master’s degree in Human Rights from Columbia University and an MFA in Playwrighting from the University of Southern California. UrbanFaith talked to Harper about Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, in which she and co-author D.C. Innes discuss sometimes controversial issues from different political and biblical persuasions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
URBAN FAITH: From reading your book, Left, Right, and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, it seems that you and your co-author D.C. Innes hold fundamentally different views about the role of government. What are the essential differences in your positions and/or your views on the role of government?
LISA SHARON HARPER: We debated on Patheos.com and one of the things that we discovered in the midst of this is that our differences on the role of government and also on the role of business actually stem from our differences in the way that we approach Scripture.
For me, Scripture is not supposed to be used as a formulaic, how-to textbook where you can pick a verse and it tells you exactly what you’re supposed to do, out of context. What we have is lots of stories, histories, poems, poetry, song, prose, and together they tell a meta-narrative. They tell the story of the fall, the reconciliation of all relationships that God created.
So, I think the fundamental difference between us is the way that we view the Scripture and in particular the story of what is the gospel, what is the good news, then I think it really permeates the way that we approach the Scripture for our understanding of those basic questions of the role of government.
UrbanFaith columnist Andrew Wilkes wrote
about a panel discussion that you participated in with Innes and others. He noted that you tended to draw from the Old Testament and Innes drew from the New Testament. Was that coincidental?
Yes, I think so. If you look at the book and at discussions that Innes and I have had since then, the foundation of my argument is based in the biblical concept of shalom, which has its foundation in the very beginning, in Genesis 1, but it’s woven through the entirety of Scripture. We find the establishment of the people of Israel and the law and government of Israel in the Old Testament, but then we see Jesus’ priorities on who needs to be protected in our society when he gives his very first speech in Luke 4, where he proclaims that he has come to pronounce freedom for the captives, good news to the poor, and sight for the blind.
The last speech he gives before he faces the cross is Matthew 25. When someone asks me what my political agenda is, I say, “Look at Matthew 25.” You actually see there the things and the people that Jesus was most concerned with. He’s looking at hunger. He’s asking the questions of food distribution. He’s looking at thirst. Who has access to water? I’m not just imposing that on the text. Jesus says, “The righteous will say, ‘When did we do all of this for you Jesus?’” What that word righteous means is “ones of equitable action and character.” It means “the just ones.”
When you start talking about equity, you’re talking about systems, the way things work. And so what Jesus is really saying is the ones of equitable action will say, “When did we do this?” And Jesus will say, “When you did it to the least of these.” Also, we have legislatures that will one day stand before Jesus, and Jesus will ask them, “What did you do for the hungry? What did you do for the thirsty? What did you do for the stranger, for the immigrant in our borders? Did they feel welcomed? What did you do for the sick? Is there an equitable distribution of health in our society? What about the prisoner? Is there equitable distribution of justice in our society? How about the destitute, those who are naked? What did you do for them?”
We are all going to be held to account for the ways that we treated the most vulnerable, and not just on an individual level, but on a societal level, and in the way that we create our systems.
Continued on page 2.
(more…)
by Christine A. Scheller | Jan 9, 2012 | Feature, Headline News |
Pastors were among those arrested in New York City Thursday as they protested the city Board of Education’s ban on religious groups using public school space for worship, The New York Times reported.
In December, UrbanFaith talked to two sources about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a Bronx church’s appeal of a lower court ruling that affirmed the ban. The Supreme Court’s decision was a catalyst for this protest.
“It’s just crazy that they’re forcing the churches to leave in six weeks,” Democratic councilman and pastor Fernando Cabrera told the Associated Press after he and the others were arrested for trespassing at the city’s Department of Law in Manhattan. “They should absolutely allow the houses of worship to continue doing what they are doing. It has never negatively affected anyone.”
Rev. Bill Devlin of Manhattan Bible Church was taken into custody with Cabrera, according to WORLD Magazine, as was Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) pastor Rev. Michael Carrion, ECC reported on its website.
“The protestors fear that the city will use the same separation of church and state rationale to evict churches from all public buildings. The New York City Housing Authority already has said it is reconsidering allowing churches to meet in buildings it oversees,” the ECC article said.
“Over the Christmas holidays, several local directors of facilities of the New York City Housing Authority notified religious groups, mostly Christian churches, that they could no longer rent community rooms and other facilities. NYCHA officials gave little or no warning of the change of policy and did most of their communicating with the religious groups through word of mouth or email,” Tony Carnes reported at A Journey Through NYC Religions.
“One director of a Manhattan community center at a public housing project sent the administrator of Manhattan Borough Community Operations a copy of the newspaper article about the case. The implied question was, what should I do? The administrator emailed back, ‘NYCHA will not be able to rent to Churches based on a recent circumstance. Our Apologies,'” Carnes wrote.
Echoing sentiments author and NYC public school parent Katherine Stewart shared with us, Sheila Stainback, a spokeswoman for NYCHA, told PolitickerNY that no one had been evicted because none of the churches who used their facilities had leases. “That language would be incorrect,” said Stainback.
Cabrera called foul on this interpretation of the situation, however, noting that one church had been worshiping in the same public space for six years.
“We are getting the perception that we have an anti-religion mayor,” Cabrera told PolitickerNY. “I have never been arrested for anything. I don’t even drink beer. This is how desperate I am.”
“Not only is it unconstitutional, but on a very practical level we have partnered with our community and our school to serve our children, mentor and we also pay rent,” Rev. Rick Del Rio, pastor of Abounding Grace Ministries, told The Christian Post.
Del Rio attended the rally, but was not arrested. In a note on his Facebook wall, Del Rio said, “When we consider Jesus and all His confrontations and ultimate death, to the disciples and their witness that was turning the world upside down and their courage to stand and ‘Speak’ and ‘DO’ what they knew was true, always at the risk of peril, why should we be so non-confrontational. And what of the examples of Wlberforce and Martin Luther King. … What I saw last Thursday were believers who chose to take a stand, raise their voices and speak truth to power, challenging the authorities to do the right thing and staking their claim to what is rightfully theirs as tax paying citizens of the US and NYC.”
What do you think?
Should Christians protest their eviction from public space or submit to it quietly as Rev. Sam Andreades suggested when UrbanFaith spoke to him?
by Christine A. Scheller | Jan 6, 2012 | Feature, Headline News |
Deportation Leads to Death?
First, in a story that reminds me of why I never put a Christian bumper sticker on my car, an undocumented 21-year-old Mexican immigrant who was paralyzed in a construction accident died a little more than one year after the Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, sent him back to Mexico, where he presumably received inferior care. The hospital “expressed regret for its handling of the process” and said “it is working with advocacy groups to improve its policies on international transfers,” The Chicago Tribune reported.
Legal Immigrants Are Citizens Too
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, legal immigrants will gain access to the state’s Commonwealth Care health insurance plan after the state Supreme Court ruled that “the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of legal immigrants were violated when the state stripped them of their health care coverage in 2009” in order to save money, Colorlines reported.
Run Away Accidentally Deported
Next, news broke that a Dallas teenager who had been missing for more than a year had been arrested in Houston and was accidentally deported to Columbia. The teen, who had run away from home, “gave the police a false name and her new alias just happened to match up with the name of a 22-year-old Colombian citizen who had been in the United States illegally,” Yahoo News reported. Talk about your “Scared Straight” experience.
Detention Centers Reopen Trauma Wounds
Speaking of trauma, Colorlines got a rare look inside six U.S. immigration detention centers, and reported various humiliations and abuses, but concluded that “for many detainees, the worst part of awaiting expulsion is not the acute trauma inflicted inside the jails,” but “the unhealed wounds of violence from life on the outside that the humiliating baseness of life inside these jails reopens.” Still, a detainee reportedly lost sight in one of his eyes after being denied medication for an infection.
Connecting Immigration Dots in Alabama
At the God’s Politics blog, Lisa Sharon Harper connected her family history of forced immigration to the state with her mobilizing efforts there on behalf of undocumented immigrants. “These current day restrictions on immigrants are exactly what African Americans across the south faced during nearly 100 years of Jim Crow law, from about 1870 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Tears rolled down my face. I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it is… again,” said Harper.
Politicians Flip Flop on Immigration
On the presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney’s threat to veto the DREAM Act is gaining traction with Latino voters, “the nation’s fastest growing voting group – with an estimated 12 million set to vote in the election,” according to ABC News.
The 2008 Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, has endorsed Romney, even though McCain “was once a principal architect of comprehensive immigration reform,” according to MSNBC’s First Read blog. McCain has apparently had a change of heart on the issue, but conceded that Republicans need to “fix” their “problems with the Hispanics.”
“President Obama gave Republicans a political opening to Hispanic voters by deporting one million illegal aliens, a record number and a source of enormous irritation to many Hispanics. For Republicans to exploit that opening, however, and fix their ‘problems’ with Hispanics, the party must first fix its policies,” Bloomberg View editorial board member Francis Wilkinson opined in response.
Obama Administration Leaks Plan
Perhaps the president too has had a change of heart. An anonymous “senior administration official” told The Associated Press that the administration is planning to relieve some of the strain undocumented immigrants and their families face with a rule change that will “help reduce the time illegal immigrant spouses and children are separated from citizen relatives while they try to win legal status in the United States.”
What do you think?
Is the news this week on the immigration front good, bad, or ugly?
by Christine A. Scheller | Jan 3, 2012 | Feature, Headline News |
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As Republican presidential candidates make their final pitches to the 41 percent of “likely caucusgoers” who are still undecided, charges of bigotry are flying. Here’s a breakdown:
Evangelicals Oppose Romney’s Faith; He Opposes Dream Act
Republican front-runner Mitt Romney faces prejudice in Iowa from evangelicals who are “suspicious” of his Mormon faith, The Washington Post reports, and Romney himself risks alienating Latino voters with his promise to veto the Dream Act for everyone except those who serve in the military. The act would conditionally allow undocumented immigrants who entered the country under the age of 16 to be eligible for legal status.
Santorum Opposes Gays; Journalist Opposes Him and the ‘Jesus Freaks’ Who Support Him
Meanwhile, social conservatives are rallying behind former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, even disillusioned ones like Chris La Tondresse, founder and CEO of an organization called Recovering Evangelical. In a column at CNN.com, La Tondresse said “there’s no questioning Santorum’s social conservative bona fides,” but “more than any other Republican candidate (and even more than some Democrats), Santorum speaks openly and passionately about his concern for poor and vulnerable people in the U.S. and around the world.”
David Brooks concurred at The New York Times, saying the working class raised Santorum “goes out of his way in his speeches to pick fights with the ‘supply-siders,'” “scorns the Wall Street bailouts,” and couches his economic arguments as “values arguments” that root “long-term competitiveness” in strong families and “wholesome communities.”
This is where Santorum gets in trouble with folks like Michelangelo Signorile, editor-at-large for The Huffington Post’s Gay Voices channel. Signorile said Santorum, who opposes same-sex marriage, wants to “forcibly” break up those marriages, giving “‘special privileges’ to people based on sexual orientation.” And, at Buzzfeed, Andrew Kaczynski reminds readers that in January 2011, Santorum said President Obama should oppose abortion because he is black.
Ron Paul Opposes the Civil Rights Act, Can’t Escape Racist Newsletters
The bigotry discussion that has dominated the race lately, however, is all about U.S. Congressman Ron Paul—specifically his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his connection to racist newsletters published under his byline in the 1980s and 1990s.
At Salon, Michael Lind succinctly said that “by equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.”
“It certainly is possible that Ron Paul never read [the] publications produced in his own name, just as it’s possible to sincerely believe that the Civil Rights Act destroyed personal liberties, and it’s possible to sincerely believe that if you are going to vote, you should be able to read the names of the candidates, or that Lincoln destroyed the original values of the republic. But it’s also true that those beliefs have long been used to shield more odious ones,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic.
Calling Out the Watchdogs?
Finally, while The Week offered five theories as to why the Iowa caucuses are important, New York Times columnist Gail Collins said they’re not. “On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican,” said Collins, with nary a hint of bias.
Perhaps she should read Get Religion, where media critic Mollie Hemmingway turned the spotlight back on journalists by excoriating University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen G. Bloom for writing an apparent diatribe in The Atlantic that allegedly characterized Iowans as “uneducated Jesus freaks.” Hemmingway reported that both Columbia Journalism Review and The Associated Press also came down heavy on Bloom and The Atlantic.
What Do You Think?
Is bigotry an important issue in the 2012 race or is it a distraction?
