Kim Davis and Religious Freedom: A Supernova of Religious Scruples

Kim Davis and Religious Freedom: A Supernova of Religious Scruples September 2, 2015

A county clerk in Kentucky says her religious freedom is threatened by signing government documents. A flight attendant for ExpressAir in Detroit says her religious freedom is violated by being asked to serve alcoholic drinks. We have two people refusing to do one of the jobs they are paid to do because it violates their freedom of religion.

It is confusing. First many of their co-religionists (Christian and Muslim respectively) have no moral scruples about doing these jobs. And it isn’t easy to see from outside where the problem lies. After all, signing a marriage license isn’t the same as performing the marriage, nor is passing out alcohol on behalf of an airline the same as drinking it one’s self. Secondly, both took their jobs knowing the moral hazard. The county clerk was bound to sign licenses for bad marriages. The flight attendant knew she would be expected to serve alcoholic beverages. (Both came to their convictions after a kind of “conversion” experience brought them to new standards of personal conduct. This raises another set of problems in a religiously fluid society like the US.) And finally, both embrace a moral framework that maintains an individual is morally responsible if she facilitates in any way the legal participation by others in activities that the individual herself regards as immoral.

Even if such a teaching is found in a small segment of each religious community, one can only imagine what a social nightmare will unfold when every single person adopts the stance of these two individuals.

What if every Muslim store clerk refused to handle products that were not halal? What if every Hindu refused on principle to be engaged in selling or transportation of meat products? Or every Orthodox Jew store clerk refused to participate in the trade in cotton-wool blend fabrics? Or every ovo-lacto vegetarian refused to be associated with eggs or egg product? Or Christian school teacher or professor refused to teach anything that didn’t align with his moral compass. “Sorry, freshmen, I can’t teach you about an atheist like Voltaire. Maybe professor Laizze-faire can give you a tutorial before the final.”

And then what if all of these people also insisted that every business from grocers, to restaurants, to wholesalers, to trucking companies, to schools, to movie theaters was obliged to hire them without regard (for it would be illegal under federal law) for their religious scruples. And then insisted that the entire business owed them an accommodation to those same principles.

My guess is that all efforts at inter-religious understanding are going to fade if every day each of us has to negotiate a minefield of religious particularity by people different from ourselves, played out in every dimension of public life. At some point we’ll get tired of mutual understanding and just insist that people do their jobs. Well, that is already happening to the detriment of any semblance of social solidarity.

Well regardless of hypotheticals, both employers in these cases have refused to accommodate the religious/moral scruples of their employees, and in both cases there will be lawsuits pitting the expectation that people will do the jobs they were hired for against their assertion of religious liberty.

And those will be the beginning of thousands of lawsuits to follow. Because these are not going to be unusual cases. They may become the norm rather quickly.

The vast majority of religious people have managed to both participate in the wider society and economy by understanding that their moral obligations are personal to them, and not to be imposed on others by either commission or omission. Yet that consensus is fraying at the edges.

Charles Taylor has pointed out that in the US we are in a “supernova” of expanding ethical and spiritual frameworks as bonds between individuals and religious communities are loosened and they form their own personal moral and spiritual outlooks, working within their increasingly idiosyncratic moral frameworks. (A Secular Age)

A county clerk and a flight attendant are simply the leading edge of that supernova. Each has adopted a personal set of moral scruples that exceed those put in practice by the majority of their co-religionists. And they are not the only ones.

The problem is that a fecundity of moral codes whose expression is seen as a human right make social life increasingly unsustainable. The case of the flight attendant sharpens this. While her supervisor could accommodate her scruples other crew members who had to do her work were unwilling to do so. And what, one wonders, if both stewards on a plane refused to serve alcoholic beverages? The customers just can’t buy? Does the company change its entire employee deployment plan? What if not just one county clerk, but every clerk in a state was accommodated in his/her refusal write marriage licenses. Personal moral scruples would write public law.

The result of these kinds of refusal to provide service on the basis or personal moral standards will cause internal dissension in businesses, increasingly strident demands of customers to be served by people who don’t want to serve them, clogged courts, and individualism triumphant over the good of society, because individual self-expression will have become the highest good.

And this is the odd irony. In both of these cases the protagonists claim to be faithful to God’s law. Yet in both cases they appear to be held captive by the romantic ideal of absolute personal integrity of self-expression. Thoreau in a county courthouse, Whitman in a regional jet. It is hard to tell if they  fear God’s wrath, or their own failure to realize their human potential.

What all of us who are religious need to realize is that from the outside it is hard to tell the difference between complete submission to God’s law, and making one’s self into God.  . . . Namaste.


Browse Our Archives