American Catholics were jubilant recently over a new religious freedom guidance issued by the Trump administration.
Some of it is fine, as far as I can see. I can think of instances where people were bullied or harassed for openly expressing their faith in the workplace, and where they were made to feel inferior for being religious.
Some people have taken the Establishment Clause of the Constitution to mean that to mean that religious expression is sort of vaguely illegal, and should be quashed. So this new guidance says federal employees are allowed to have Bibles and crosses and so on in the workplace. (It’s notable that all the examples it gives are either Christian or Jewish, explicitly mentioning tefillin and rosary beads, for example, but it avoids any mention of Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu practices of faith. Which is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Note this. Note. This.)
Some of the guidance makes me extremely nervous. You can click through and read it for yourself if you don’t trust me to summarize—it’s just five pages—but it essentially says that federal employers and employees can display signs of their religious faith, pray and organise prayer groups in the workplace, and talk about and argue for their faith with others in the workplace, as long as they’re not aggressive about it and respect requests to stop.
Here is what I promise will happen: Decent people will adhere to the guidelines, and indecent people will not. People who are good Christians will quietly wear a cross and pray sincerely at lunch and be welcoming and inviting to others; and people who are bad Christians will bully and harass and intimidate people they don’t approve of, and they will point to these guidelines and say they’re entitled to do it.
This is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human nature thing. If people think they can get away with bullying other people, they’ll do it.
I just wanted to establish that the guidelines are absolutely guaranteed to be abused. They were deliberately written to give cover to people who will abuse them. That is how this administration functions, on every level, and it is what we have come to expect from them.
But let’s assume for a minute that it’s all been done in good faith. Let’s pretend that all they want is for Christians and a few docile Jews to be able to keep worshipping God all day long, and not have the government forcibly stripping away their religious convictions and expression.
It sure sounds like that’s what they’re calling for. The first paragraph says:
“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” including by directing “the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”
And the fourth paragraph says:
“The First Amendment to the US Constitution robustly protects expressions of religious faith by all Americans—including Federal employees. The US Supreme Court has clarified that the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” but also “protect[s] the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life.” Indeed, “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic[.]”
That’s what they say.
What are they actually doing? … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
