Religion in Public Life–and in Election Campaigns
Since over 40 percent of Americans attend religious services every week and over 90 percent profess belief in God, it is not surprising that religion enters into many public policy debates and election campaigns. Americans are also near unanimous in professing a commitment to the separation of church and state, and they hold the religious freedom language of the First Amendment as nearly sacred. Given the large role religion plays in most Americans’ lives, when combined with their commitment to religious freedom and the separation of church and state, it is not surprising that conflicts between the two have at times arisen. But this need not be so. There is no inherent conflict or even tension.
Most of the perceived conflicts or tensions arise from one of two sources. One occurs when public office holders or candidates for public office relate their religious faith to the policy positions they favor. Then they invariably are charged with violating church-state separation or advocating a theocratic regime (that is, imposing their religious beliefs onto all of society by force of law).
Rick Santorum, a Republican candidate for his party’s nomination this year, is the most recent example of this. Santorum—a sincere, practicing Roman Catholic with conservative views—has argued that John F. Kennedy in 1960 inappropriately separated his Catholic faith from his actions as a candidate for President. Santorum’s campaign website proclaims that he has “fought for the preservation of the traditional American family.” He has expressed the traditional Catholic opposition to artificial birth control, while insisting he does not favor forcing this position onto all by force of law.
As a result a New York Times columnist labeled him a “small-town mullah” and charged he was “telling people how to run their lives.” Another commentator declared, “What Santorum wants is a theocracy in which Catholic dogma is the rule of the land.”
But such persons are confusing the separation of church and state with the separation of religious views and public policy. Church and state are two formal organizations or institutions. They indeed ought to be separate, with the state not attempting to take on the duties of an organized church and the organized church not attempting to act like the state.
However, all of us—whether voters and citizens or candidates for public office and whether deeply religious or more secularly minded—are shaped in our thinking and policy positions by our beliefs, backgrounds, and life experiences. For a deeply religious person such as Santorum that includes his experiences and beliefs as a Catholic. And for a candidate for public office to explain how his or her faith—whether religiously-based or rooted in secular perspectives and experiences—is not only appropriate but also helpful to us as voters.
A second way in which a tension or conflict between church and state can potentially arise is when government directives require certain religious believers to act contrary to one or more of their faith-based beliefs. History yields many examples. A military draft may force a pacifist with religious beliefs against participation in war to choose between taking part in fighting and killing or imprisonment. Seventh Day Adventists have faced the loss of unemployment benefits if they refuse to take a job that involved Saturday work. And in a controversy that has filled newspapers, blogs, and the airwaves in recent weeks, faith-based organizations in the Catholic and some evangelical Protestant traditions have faced the possibility of heavy fines if they do not accede to an Obama administration mandate that they include birth control coverage in their health insurance plans for their employees. (And “birth control coverage” is defined so as to include some abortifacients.)
There are two ways in which this type of threat to religious freedom can be met. One is to do away with the mandate entirely: to repeal the military draft, allow all recipients of unemployment insurance to turn down proffered jobs, and allow all employers to exclude birth control in their health insurance policies. But this can have negative consequences for the common good. A nation’s military may not have the military personnel it needs to protect its people, unemployed workers may destroy the unemployment insurance program by turning down offered jobs, and abortion rates, women’s health, and dysfunctional families may increase as birth control is less readily available. (This last consequence is, at the least, debatable, but let’s go along for now with the argument being made in favor of the birth control mandate.)
We as a nation, however, have usually handled religious objections to mandates that society as a whole has judged to be needed, not by doing away with the mandate, but in a second way: namely, creating an exemption for those with serious religiously-based objections to the mandated policy. In that way no religious group imposes its will onto the nation as a whole; the nation as a whole does not force a religious group to act in violation of its religious conscience. Thus an exemption from the military draft for religious pacifists has usually been included in draft laws. In 1963 the Supreme Court declared that an unemployed Seventh Day Adventist who had turned down a job that involved Saturday work could not be denied unemployment benefits.
How the birth control insurance mandate will be resolved is uncertain. President Obama originally created a very narrow religious exemption, one that he has now broadened. One can hope that we as a nation will follow our historic precedents that have created religious exemptions for persons and organizations in religious traditions that have long-standing, thought-out, faith-based objections to legally imposed mandates. Thereby faith-based organizations—which are an important part of civil society and which government should respect and value—will have their religious freedom rights protected.
And no one should allege a violation of church-state separation when a political leader or candidate for public office urges such an exemption or our government in fact does so. Instead, we are then following historic precedence and acting in keeping with freedom of religious belief and action for all.
Stephen V. Monsma
What Santorum does not appreciate about JFK's speech was that as President, Kennedy would not give the Pope or his Archbishop a veto over official action by submitting to Church discipline over official acts – an issue that is not entirely settled in the Catholic Church. This was a legitimate concern, especially as certain bishops were excommunicating Catholic politicians over support for segregation. It is no accident that this speech took place in Texas. This issue is still current, as some Bishops believe that Canon 915 dictates that they not give Communion to pro-choice politicians, even though the USCCB policy statement says otherwise. Frankly, the legalization of abortion, as well as the mandate to provide birth control, are equal protection issues. Although contraceptive coverage is required under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which was enacted under the authority of the commerce clause, it is implementing the ideals of due process and equal protection. Public officials really have little freedom to maneuver on these issues and cannot be disciplined for following their constitutional oaths. As Catholic bishops are appointed by the Holy See, which has the status of a foreign state, the attempt to make politicians chose amounts to sedition. It would not be so if bishops were elected locally by their flocks, their clergy or even the national conference of bishops or a national patriarch.
What Santorum does not appreciate about JFK's speech was that as President, Kennedy would not give the Pope or his Archbishop a veto over official action by submitting to Church discipline over official acts – an issue that is not entirely settled in the Catholic Church. This was a legitimate concern, especially as certain bishops were excommunicating Catholic politicians over support for segregation. It is no accident that this speech took place in Texas. This issue is still current, as some Bishops believe that Canon 915 dictates that they not give Communion to pro-choice politicians, even though the USCCB policy statement says otherwise. Frankly, the legalization of abortion, as well as the mandate to provide birth control, are equal protection issues. Although contraceptive coverage is required under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which was enacted under the authority of the commerce clause, it is implementing the ideals of due process and equal protection. Public officials really have little freedom to maneuver on these issues and cannot be disciplined for following their constitutional oaths. As Catholic bishops are appointed by the Holy See, which has the status of a foreign state, the attempt to make politicians chose amounts to sedition. It would not be so if bishops were elected locally by their flocks, their clergy or even the national conference of bishops or a national patriarch.
What Santorum does not appreciate about JFK's speech was that as President, Kennedy would not give the Pope or his Archbishop a veto over official action by submitting to Church discipline over official acts – an issue that is not entirely settled in the Catholic Church. This was a legitimate concern, especially as certain bishops were excommunicating Catholic politicians over support for segregation. It is no accident that this speech took place in Texas. This issue is still current, as some Bishops believe that Canon 915 dictates that they not give Communion to pro-choice politicians, even though the USCCB policy statement says otherwise. Frankly, the legalization of abortion, as well as the mandate to provide birth control, are equal protection issues. Although contraceptive coverage is required under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which was enacted under the authority of the commerce clause, it is implementing the ideals of due process and equal protection. Public officials really have little freedom to maneuver on these issues and cannot be disciplined for following their constitutional oaths. As Catholic bishops are appointed by the Holy See, which has the status of a foreign state, the attempt to make politicians chose amounts to sedition. It would not be so if bishops were elected locally by their flocks, their clergy or even the national conference of bishops or a national patriarch.
I agree with Mr. Bindner that the thrust of JFK’s speech was to make clear that the Roman Catholic hierarchy would have no control over his actions as a President. As such, he was reaffirming his commitment to the separation of church and state. The institutionalized Catholic Church would have no say over his decisions as President. But the point I was making is that this is different than saying that his Catholic background, including Catholic social thought—concepts such as the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity—would have no influence on his thinking.
I am not sure of your point in regard to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, etc. This law illustrates my point by including a clear exemption for religious organizations, a religious exemption that was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court (Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 1987). Equal protection claims are always tricky, since at the heart of law is setting up categories and making distinctions. No one argues that everyone should always be treated the same. For example, juvenile offenders are treated differently than adult offenders, residents of a certain city differently than nonresidents, farmers differently than nonfarmers, etc. Thus any claim based on equal protection that persons and organizations with religious beliefs against a certain action should be ignored and these persons and organizations treated the same as those without religiously-based concerns runs into religious freedom problems. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as I note above, recognized this, as have many other laws and legal precedents.