I am not a fan of having government officials proclaim a “National Day of Prayer.”

If religious leaders want to proclaim such a day for their followers, that’s terrific — although Isaiah 58 ought to make them a bit cautious about the idea. That passage provides God’s sarcastic dismissal of such a proclamation.

And, yes, Isaiah 58 presents itself as the verbatim words of God, and God’s words there are dripping with sarcasm. You people want to have a special day to honor God? God says. Right. As if …

as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgements,
they delight to draw near to God.
‘Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

(For the full impact of Isaiah 58, try reading the above aloud in a voice like the one Jon Stewart uses when he’s doing the Jersey Tough Guy shtick.)

So, OK, if religious leaders and their followers have already been busily loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing the thongs of the yoke, letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke, sharing their bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless poor into their houses, clothing the naked and remembering that we are all brothers and sisters, then such religious leaders should feel free to proclaim a National Day of Prayer.

But probably not until then.

And as for government officials, they have no business making such a proclamation. That’s not their job and that’s not their business.

As I wrote a couple of years ago:

I’m utterly opposed to the idea that such a day of prayer ought to be nationalized. Once the thing becomes nationalized and official and established it becomes another thing entirely. Prayer is not something to be rendered unto Caesar, nor is it something Caesar ought to be put in charge of, asked to bless, permit, allow or establish. A Nationalized Day of Prayer defeats the purpose and will inevitably wind up with pious posturing in which repentance and thanksgiving are transposed. Politicians offer pompous thanksgiving for national shames about which we ought to be begging God’s forgiveness while at the same time lamenting many of the things most pleasing to God. A Nationalized Day of Prayer — or a nationalized prayer breakfast — is bound to wind up backwards and upside-down.

Yet the National Day of Prayer has been an annual American ritual since 1952. It’s an annual American ritual that flagrantly violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, but that hasn’t slowed it down any.

Every year since 1952, every U.S. president has issued a proclamation of the annual National Day of Prayer. Here is this year’s, from President Barack Obama: “Presidential Proclamation — National Day of Prayer, 2012.”

Bookmark that link. In a few weeks, the Good Christian Bearers of False Witness will be telling you that no such proclamation ever existed because the evil, Kenyan, secret-Muslim atheist socialist in the White House is waging a war against the religious liberty of the righteous white straight people now suffering so much persecution.

Jessica Ahlquist was right.

The sectarian banner that hung at Cranston West High School in Cranston, Rhode Island, should not have been there. Its presence there was both unjust and illegal. And, being unjust, it was also a sin.

The First Amendment is very clear. It defends the free exercise of religion and, therefore, also forbids the establishment of religion. To establish any particular sect — to privilege it with official state sanction — is unfair to everyone who is not a member of that particular sect. And, just as bad, such privileging is extremely corrosive to the privileged sect, pushing it toward either impotent irrelevance or toward inquisitorial coercion. When any sect is privileged with establishment, the free exercise of religion is constrained for everyone outside and inside of that sect.

Cranston’s “school prayer” banner was an obvious establishment of religion and is therefore wrong — not just illegal, but unjust and thus ethically, morally and spiritually wrong. In the big picture, this may not seem like an important matter. It’s just a little evil thing, to borrow a phrase, but this sectarian banner still should not have been there. Its presence was unfair to everyone — students, teachers, staff — who did not subscribe to its particular sectarian version of Christian-ish civil religion. And its presence was a dangerous, subtly corrupting influence for everyone — students, teachers, staff — who was any sort of Christian.

School officials had no business allowing that sectarian banner to remain. Christians ought to have demanded its removal. (And, given that this was in Rhode Island, every history teacher who walked by that banner without tearing it down in the name of Roger Williams ought to be fired for incompetence.)

That it took a teenager to point all of this out should be deeply embarrassing to all the adults and officials who ought to have known better.

You may be thinking that some of the language above is a bit disproportionate. All that talk of justice and injustice and that business about any establishment of religion being “corrosive” and “dangerous” for the established sect.

But consider what happened after U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux handed down the obvious ruling earlier this year, saying that the school prayer banner had to come down. Ahlquist, the 16-year-old plaintiff in a case that ought to have been decided decades before she was born, became the focus of a nasty backlash from civil religion devotees in Cranston.

“Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer,” the New York Times reported:

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica [Ahlquist] has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group.

That’s a tribal response. It shows that, for these angry Cranston residents, this “school prayer” was no longer a prayer at all, but a tribal symbol, a tribal battle flag.

A prayer that included an appeal for divine help “to be kind” ceased to have anything to do with either kindness or prayer once it became an established, state-sanctioned symbol of privilege for a particular sect. Whatever that sect may have been about originally, its establishment as the official, privileged sect of Cranston turned it into something else — into the same thing that every privileged sect becomes.

This is what happens when religion is established and made official. This is what always happens when religion is established and made official. The privileges that arise from being the official, established sect become the entire substance of that sect. The defense of that privilege replaces every other purpose, meaning or reason for existence until it is all that is left.

Jessica Ahlquist was right. So was Roger Williams.

Consider burkhas. In some religious traditions, women are required to wear head-to-toe loose-fitting garments to preserve their modesty and to shield men from the temptations that may follow from glimpsing the female form.

I believe in religious freedom, so I believe that those who choose to wear burkhas must be free to do so. A pluralist society with secular law and government should not seek to limit that freedom.

Traffic sign near Arcola, Ill. (Wikimedia Commons photo by Daniel Schwen)

But what happens when this does not satisfy the burkha believers? Part of the reason for this practice, after all, is to shield the eyes of men — to ensure their freedom to go about their day without encountering the sight of un-burkha-ed women. If only the women of their particular sect follow the practice, then these men will still find themselves constantly barraged by that sight and that temptation — their religious freedom will be under a constant attack. Their freedom to fulfill their religious requirement demands that they should not have to endure that. So for these men, “religious liberty” demands that all women of every faith be required to wear burkhas.

Such a requirement must be passed as a binding law for all women everywhere or else these men are being denied their religious liberty.

It’s a fundamental matter of conscience. Any refusal to enforce such a statute, universally, is an affront to their faith — a “war” on their freedom of religion.

That’s burkha-logic. And it’s utter nonsense.

“It does me no injury,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The advocates of burka-logic disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury — the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

At it’s core, burkha-logic says that my freedom and your freedom are incompatible, and that therefore your freedom must be constrained so that my freedom can be enjoyed.

It says that my religious beliefs must be established, and that therefore you cannot be free to exercise your religious beliefs.

That has nothing to do with religious liberty or with freedom of conscience. That’s just being a bully and a jackass.

Sadly, none of this is hypothetical. We are, right now, hearing this burkha-logic trumpeted loudly and proudly by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and by a distressing number of aging pundits who seem to think that the words “religious liberty” are a magical invocation that allows the speaker to coerce all others to abide by their own sectarian beliefs.

Starkly, explicitly, this is what the bishops are saying. They are saying that they want to coerce everyone else — all employers everywhere and especially all women everywhere — to abide by their sectarian beliefs.

Don’t take my word for it. Just listen to Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said this to USA Today:

“There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

He said this voluntarily. He wasn’t tricked into saying this. Picarello said this because this — exactly this — is what the bishops are demanding.

Not a “conscience clause.” Not a religious exemption for Catholic institutions. Picarello’s honesty has proven those claims to be dishonest.

What the bishops demand is a universal law applying to everyone everywhere. They demand a sectarian establishment of sectarian belief that would apply not just to Catholic institutions but even to Taco Bell. They demand a world in which health insurance does not cover contraception for any woman anywhere.

All women must wear the burkha. All women must be forced, compelled and coerced to wear the burkha — even those who aren’t burkha-believers — or else the burkha-bishops say their own freedom is being impinged upon.

The burkha-bishops insist that their religious freedom to coerce others trumps those others’ freedom not to be so coerced.

It’s just that stark, just that explicit. They are saying so themselves. Pay attention and don’t pretend they don’t really mean it.

Taco Bell, for frock’s sake.

One more example: Consider the Amish. Their religious beliefs prohibit them from driving automobiles (mostly, there are exceptions), so they ride around in buggies pulled by horses. We honor their religious liberty and do not limit their freedom to drive their buggies on roadways built for car traffic. And the Amish, being good people, are pleased to have their sectarian freedoms preserved by our secular laws and government.

The Amish, unlike the bishops, are satisfied with the freedom to believe and practice their religion. The Amish, unlike the bishops, are not calling for a ban on all automobiles everywhere. They are not demanding that everyone else must drive buggies too.

Not being mad with power, the Amish would never think that their religious freedom demands that everyone else be coerced to abide by their rules. And since the Amish are honest people who are not inclined towards disingenuous rhetoric, it would not occur to them to pretend that the non-Amish car-driving rest of us are somehow “oppressing” them and denying them their religious freedom by refusing to follow their particular rules.

You will never hear an Amishman say anything so cruel or foolish or hideously dishonest as to suggest that he isn’t really free to practice his religion until everyone else is forced to take a horse-and-buggy through the drive-through at Taco Bell.

Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. EEOC involved the “ministerial exception” to many laws governing employers and the workplace.

That exception reflects both an effort to avoid state entanglement in religious disputes and, more broadly, a bit of common sense.

For example, say you’re the owner of a pizza place and you’re looking to hire a new delivery driver. You can’t put up a sign that says, “Jews Need Not Apply.” And you can’t put up a sign that says, “Only Jews Need Apply.” Either one would be an illegal form of religious discrimination. But say you’re on the board of a Conservative Jewish congregation and you’re looking to hire a new rabbi. In that case, the essential nature of the job requires that you hire someone who is Jewish — and whose particular religious values are in accord with those of your congregation. Presbyterians need not apply. Hindus need not apply. Orthodox and Reformed Jews need not apply.

That’s the “ministerial exception” at work. It’s not illegal — workplace laws forbidding religious discrimination do not apply.

The case of this hypothetical rabbi is fairly uncomplicated and uncontroversial because nearly everyone agrees that the rabbi’s role is ministerial and thus most agree with the logic of this exception. That logic comports with our basic sense of fairness. It seems reasonable for this congregation to consider religious belief in their hiring decision because religious belief is an intrinsic, essential aspect of the position of rabbi.

It gets more complicated and more controversial when the position or employee in question is in a less obviously or less explicitly “ministerial” role. And it gets even more complicated when the workplace laws or rules in question are not as obviously or explicitly related to religious belief.

Rabbis are understood to belong to the category of clergy and that category is defined clearly enough in nonsectarian ways that the law has a pretty good handle on it. But “minister” is a much broader and fuzzier category. All clergy are ministers, but not all ministers are clergy. Many religious organizations employ many people they commission and designate as “ministers” despite their serving in capacities that are largely, or even primarily, secular.

For some faith traditions, this is an essential aspect of their belief — a matter near the core of their faith. In some Anabaptist churches, for example, there is no distinction between clergy and laity. (The rest of us tend to misunderstand this. We see that they have no priests or pastors and assume that they have abolished the category of “clergy,” but as John Howard Yoder put it, what they have really done is abolish the category of laity.)

The determination of who is and who is not a “minister” serving in an intrinsically sectarian capacity is itself an intrinsically sectarian determination. It varies from sect to sect, denomination to denomination and even from congregation to congregation.

Consider for example the post of church treasurer. Most congregations and denominations have an official who is in charge of the money. It’s hard to get much more secular than that. But for many congregations and other religious organizations, the treasurer is regarded as a kind of minister. The role itself may be intrinsically secular, but the congregation or organization believes this official must be personally committed to the values, goals and sectarian beliefs of the group.*

So is that official also a “minister”? Who’s to say?

That question — “who’s to say?” — was at the heart of the Supreme Court’s approach to the Hosanna-Tabor case. And the court’s answer to that question was “Not us.”

This seems to be the justices’ main focus in their 9-0 decision. “Oh, no. No way. Uh-uh. We are not going to get involved in that decision. We’re the state. You’re the church. If you want to argue about who is and who is not a minister you do that on your own. We are not going to get entangled in that.”

That’s a very rough paraphrase, of course, but based on what I’ve read of and about this decision, that’s the main thrust of it.

The principle at work here seems to be that of avoiding “excessive entanglement” of church and state. The case presented the court with an invitation to entangle itself in the definition of a minister and it declined the invitation. As Steve Benen puts it, the court seemed to acknowledge the significance of this definition, but this time around they punted.

Usually that’s the sort of reasoning and the sort of decision that would be celebrated unambiguously by advocates of a strict separation of church and state. But in this case those advocates are divided and a bit unsettled by the way this decision leaves things a bit unsettled.

The reason that the court’s language refers to “excessive entanglement” is because some degree of church-state entanglement is inevitable and even desirable. Church buildings must still be built to meet safety and fire codes, for example. The state is also unavoidably tangled by questions of who is and who is not “clergy” due to the varying circumstances in which clergy and their housing expenses are or are not taxed and due to many other considerations in which the category of clergy must be legally recognized and, therefore, legally defined.

As with marriage laws, a host of rules have agglomerated over the years around that legally recognized category of “clergy.” Some of those rules make a great deal of sense. Some of them once made sense, but linger on even though they no longer do. Some are clearly upheld and others are more contentious or murky. It’s all a bit convoluted. But it’s still far clearer than the category of “minister.”

The justices avoided wading into that in Hosanna-Tabor by washing their hands in this case of jurisdiction over intra-sectarian disputes over the definition of a “minister.” That reluctance to intervene — to refuse to allow the church’s business to become the state’s business — is often commendable, and many observers who followed this case closely say that the particulars here allowed such detachment. But it’s unlikely that the courts or the law will be able to continue perpetually avoiding becoming entangled in this definition.

Hosanna-Tabor affirmed that the category of minister is legally significant, and that means that some day the courts will have a compelling interest in setting some clearer boundaries around that category. When that day comes, this decision may not provide much practical guidance.

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* Another example: Years ago a friend of mine had an occasional paid gig as a soprano in an affluent Main Line church. She regularly sang in their worship services and, because she was an excellent singer, I’m sure that many of the people who attended those services thought of her as “ministering” to them. Yet neither she nor the church that employed her regarded her as a minister. She was hired for secular reasons — because she could hit the E above high C in a way that could make you cry or make you exult. That is why they hired her and what they paid her to do. The minister of music at the church who hired her only cared that she was a good soprano, not that she was a good Presbyterian (which she wasn’t). But note that person’s title — not “choir director,” but minister of music. The church emphatically regarded this non-clerical official as a minister.

Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta points us to a column in the (Ind.) Journal & Courier by Baptist minister Steve Viars, calling on Tippecanoe County commissioners to approve the zoning application for an Islamic center. Viars sounds like a Baptist minister in this column — citing Roger Williams and the First Amendment in an op-ed that reads like a sermon:

Refusing to grant this request simply because the petitioners are followers of Islam would be contrary to our country’s cherished ideals of religious liberty and the importance of the separation of church and state.

… Celebrating the presence of other religions at home is the logical extension of the sacrifice our countrymen have made around the world. Freedom is often most delicious when it is extended to someone with whom you disagree. Our heroes did not fight to protect and promote one particular religious point of view. The fruit of freedom is diversity and a rich tapestry of culture and beliefs.

“Most delicious.” I like that very much. That’ll preach.

* * * * * * * * *

Laura Conaway reports on another, not-so-delicious development regarding church and state in Indiana, and says “This is what theocracy looks like“:

Three Indiana state senators, all Republicans, have introduced a bill that would allow schools to require the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer every morning, if they want to. …

The Lord’s Prayer bill says the point is to help “each student recognize the importance of spiritual development in establishing character and becoming a good citizen,” but you can get out of reciting it if you or your parents want.

The bill comes with a fiscal impact statement … so we can see the cost and revenue from introducing religion into the classroom. Expected expenditures are local, officials write: “There could be some minor impact in deciding the version of the Lord’s Prayer to use; however, it should be able to be done within existing resources.”

Conaway has a bit of fun with this question of “deciding the version of the Lord’s Prayer to use,” recommending that it be recited in Aramaic. But it’s not at all funny that these Hoosier hegemons think it’s appropriate to have government officials decide and decree how everyone’s children must pray. And to whom they must pray. The school board would be assigning every pupil an official “Lord.”

The specific problem the bill’s sponsors acknowledge — which version of this prayer? — refutes the political grandstanding that lets them pretend that some vague “Judeo-Christianity” ought to be privileged as the majority religion. Once you mandate the exclusively Christian Lord’s Prayer, the conceit of an inclusive Judeo-Christianity crumbles, elevating Christians above Jews. And the further business of determining which version of the prayer will be the official version forces the local school board to pit Christian sect against sect, elevating and privileging one denomination or tradition over all the others.

I suspect that Indiana state Sen. Jim Tomes hasn’t really thought this through. Tomes, the primary sponsor of this bill, is Roman Catholic. I don’t think he realizes that his bill would almost certainly have the effect of establishing and privileging an explicitly Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer and, thus, establishing and privileging some form of Protestant Christianity as the official state religion of Indiana.

Tomes’ website lists some of the organizations he’s been involved with, including Indiana Right to Life, Gun Owners of America,** 2nd Amendment Patriots. Groups like those have a long history of, and an interest in, making sure that their followers don’t acquire a meaningful understanding of the Constitution. Groups like those have a long history of, and an interest in, promoting the mythmaking nonsense that “activist judges kicked God out of our schools.”

My guess is Tomes really believes that stuff by now and thus, having been well and truly bamboozled, he really doesn’t understand either what his bill would entail or why it is and ought to be unconstitutional — which is to say illegal.

I’d further guess that the only way to get Sen. Tomes to see past that bamboozlement would be to have him visit a public school somewhere in the heartland of Posey County. “And now, children,” the principle would say in the crowded auditorium, “let us begin our assembly by reciting our Lord’s prayer.”

And then, in perfect unison, all the children say, “Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar …”

Short of that happening, I doubt someone like Tomes can be made to understand what the First Amendment says or why it says it.

* * * * * * * * *

Ginger Strivelli provided just that sort of vivid demonstration to a North Carolina school system. The headline in the local paper read “Woman not allowed to drop off pagan books at Asheville area school.” A more accurate headline might have said something like, “Pagan mom schools Christians on Golden Rule, First Amendment.”

The Buncombe County (N.C.) school system allowed the Gideons in to distribute free Bibles to students. Strivelli complained that the public school shouldn’t be handing out Christian texts to her Pagan children. If you let Christians groups give out their stuff, she said, then you’ll also have to let Pagan groups give out our stuff:

… School officials said they would allow for the availability of her materials, just as they did the Bibles from a local group of Gideons International.

When Strivelli brought the Pagan books to the school Wednesday morning, she said she was told “a new policy is being crafted.”

“I’m not surprised a bit. That’s fully what I expected,” Strivelli said. “Basically, they were calling my bluff thinking I wouldn’t bring in the books.

“They’re changing the policy, which is wonderful. They shouldn’t [allow] it, but they shouldn’t have done it to start with. That makes it unfair after they have given out Christian propaganda.”*

The school system needs a “new policy” here, not because the old policy wasn’t working, but because it seems there was no old policy. Strivelli had both basic fairness and legal precedent on her side when she challenged the school by saying that if they allowed the Gideons in to distribute Bibles then they’d also have to allow other religious groups to do the same.

“Sauce for the goose …” is more or less the legal standard for these questions of equal access. Strivelli provided the school system with a deliciously vivid illustration of what that means.

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* I sympathize with why she’s fired up here, but calling the Bible “propaganda” isn’t accurate. The Bible is far too massive, messy, elliptical and sometimes confusing, contradictory, ambiguous, dull, strange, off-putting and offensive to ever function as propaganda. No one designing a work of propaganda would ever include anything as mind-numbingly boring as all those genealogies in Numbers or Matthew. Or anything as cryptic and weird as, say, the end of Zechariah. Calling it that also runs counter to the essential basis of Strivelli’s argument here, which is one of basic fairness, reciprocity and mutual respect — the Golden Rule.

** Added: Here is Gun Owners of America. Here is an archive of its founder/leader’s columns over the years. Like the “Constitution Party” to which Larry Pratt has many ties, and like the “sovereign citizens” whom Pratt praises as “Constitutionalists,” the GOA talks about the Constitution a great deal, but not in a way that betrays any comprehension of what it says or what it means.