Not simply the right to worship...

As we noted on the pages of this blog, the recent Supreme Court case involving an unfortunate scenario for both sides of the Hosanna Tabor Church and School has grave implications for the state of religious freedom in America.  Even more significant is that the Obama Administration has come down on the side of restricting certain religious freedoms so that higher laws may be enforced -- while at the same time protecting the right to worship.  For a long time only Protestant conservatives raised alarms about the prospect of certain laws (discrimination against protected classes of sexual preference, for example) being imposed upon churches while at the same time reducing the definition of the protected religious rights merely to a right of worship.  I must admit that I was one on whom the finer points of this distinction were often lost.  Now I am beginning to see how far reaching and how different this approach really is.  Furthermore, I am fearful that most folks were/are like me in failing to see the difference -- perhaps until it is too late.

The finer points once seemingly so obscure have become clearer in the light of a number of issues:

• The Illinois refusal to allow exception for those faith-based organizations who administer foster care programs or adoption.  Here the point is that the state can enforce its view that GLABT families or individuals must be accorded the exact same rights and privileges of foster care and adoption as straight individuals and couples and that church run agencies cannot invoke religious doctrine to claim exception or exemption from those policies...  Which may be going national -- read it all here.
• The Obama Administration intention to require birth control and abortion coverage as an essential health care right upon all providers and upon those employers who provide health insurance to their employees.  Here the point is that the federal law would make it impossible for religious organizations and churches who provide health insurance to restrict the coverage for birth control methods or abortions even if these conflict with established church doctrine and teaching...
• The implication that churches and religious groups acting as agents of the state to marry might be required to comply with state laws and therefore would not be able to exclude GLABT couples from receiving premarital counsel or from being married in the church.  Here the issue is a complex tension between the clear fact that churches/clergy are acting as agents of the state to marry and that exemptions or exceptions to laws opening the right of marriage to GLABT couples is a privilege that may be revoked by the state if religious organizations, churches, or clergy refuse to act as a provider of this state sponsored service to certain couples...
• The Hosanna-Tabor case puts into conflict the right of religious groups and churches to define who their clergy are, how they are chosen, and under what rules they serve with the established policy of the federal government to ban discrimination and to impose governmental protections upon certain classes of people whose rights are feared in jeopardy.  Here the issue is that the government may retain the right to force compliance with existing rules and regulations protecting the disabled, for example, but not only this protected class.  In effect, the government could be in a position of telling churches who their clergy are and who may serve as their clergy.  
• The slow erosion of the conscience provision that had, in the past, prevented health care workers from administering health care services and treatments that violated their religious beliefs (mostly abortion).  It may be that in order to keep this right, doctors and nurses will have to sue and their previously existing right to bow out will not stand unchallenged.  Here the issue is of rights once assumed that now must be re-established by the sanction of courts.
• The shift in language from the freedom of religion to the freedom to worship seems more than accidental.  George Weigel noted this in a column a long time ago and others within the Roman Catholic community are waking up to the fact that this shift in language marks more than a change in vocabulary.  Here Weigel summarizes: Religious freedom, rightly understood, cannot be reduced to freedom of worship. Religious freedom includes the right to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square and to conduct the affairs of one’s religious community without undue interference from the state. If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship, then, as noted above, there is “religious freedom” in Saudi Arabia, where Bibles and evangelism are forbidden but expatriate Filipino laborers can attend Mass in the U.S. embassy compound in Riyadh.   

The tide is moving and we need to face up to the fact that the once sacrosanct right of religious freedom may be reduced to merely the right to worship.  Terry Mattingly's column triggered my own thoughts that better now than later when it comes to an orderly but regular protest to the diminution of the precious rights that were the very reason why Germans looked to the USA as a home when their own government encroached upon the free exercise of their faith that made their position untenable.  We could be not far behind...