When Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty, they often really mean theocratic supremacism of their own religious beliefs inscribed in government. The evangelical Protestant Christian Right and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are intensifying their campaign to carve out arenas of public life where religious institutions, individuals, and even businesses may evade civil rights and labor laws in the name of religious liberty.
This brilliant article by Paul Rosenberg proves this. It is by Paul Resenberg and was first published in SALON. I’m reprinting it here in full by written permission of the author and the editor of Salon.
SATURDAY, JAN 16, 2016 08:00 AM EST
This is the religious right’s radical new plan: The very real efforts to create an American theocracy in plain sight
The religious right can’t win at the polls. But that will not stop them from pursuing this dangerous, scary path
In the past several years, as the inevitability of gay marriage has grown clear, the religious right has unceasingly shifted focus to a new field of battle—one that they call the battle for “religious freedom.” “Gay rights will trample Christians’ religious liberty!” they claim.
But the worst violations of religious liberty actually came from the anti-gay religious right itself—from a 2012 constitutional amendment in North Carolina, which criminalized the performance of gay marriage. The law was successfully challenged by the United Church of Christ in 2014. “By depriving the Plaintiffs of the freedom to perform religious marriage ceremonies or to marry,” the UCC argued, “North Carolina stigmatizes Plaintiffs and their religious beliefs”—and the court agreed, finding it to be an unconstitutional violation of their rights
Which is why it’s not surprising that UCC’s general minister and president, the Rev. John C. Dorhauer, wrote the preface to a major new report, shedding new light on the right’s decades-long campaign to redefine religious freedom into a tool for their own theocratic domination. “Removing someone’s civil rights by empowering the government to protect and preserve my religious homophobia is not my idea of religious liberty,” Dorhauer writes. But that’s exactly how the religious right has tried to stand the idea of religious freedom on its head. “What they want to call religious freedom is in fact the kind of oppressive religious tyranny that my ancestors left their homeland to escape,” Dorhauer added.
“When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right,” published by Political Research Associates on Jan. 12, was written by Frederick Clarkson, PRA’s Senior Fellow for Religious Liberty, author of “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy” and co-founder of the blog Talk to Action. The title highlights a key aspect of the religious right’s long-term strategy, taking the time-honored principle of religious exemption, intended to protect the individual right of conscience, and expanding it recklessly to apply to whole institutions, even for-profit businesses—as seen in the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in a process designed to fragment the common public sphere and carve out vast segments of American life where civil rights, labor law and other core protections simply do not apply.
This strategy was kicked into high gear back in 2009 with the “Manhattan Declaration,” a widely endorsed manifesto linking “freedom of religion” specifically to “sanctity of life” and “dignity of marriage,” which religious progressives are just beginning to effectively counter-organize against. This report represents a significant beacon, shedding light on that strategy, the battlefield it’s waged on, and the kinds of long-term responses needed to counter-organize against it.
Rooted In Discrimination
“When Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty, they often really mean theocratic supremacism of their own religious beliefs inscribed in government,” Clarkson points out. The report presents a detailed account of how their Orwellian agenda is unfolding, combining up-to-the-minute analysis of recent developments with an historical account dating back to the 1970s and the birth of the modern-day religious right, defending Bob Jones University’s “right to discriminate,” based on religion. As noted in the report:
As recently as the 1980s, Christian Right activists defended racial segregation by claiming that restrictions on their ability to discriminate violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom….
Instead of African Americans being discriminated against by Bob Jones, the university argued it was the party being discriminated against in being prevented from executing its First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed….
Two things are worth noting here: first, the primacy of discrimination as a political motivation, and second, the “envious reversal” of victim and victimizer that lies at the heart of the conservative victimhood shtick. Elaborating on the first point, the report also notes:
The case, which began during the Nixon administration, became a cause célèbre of the then-budding Christian Right as it advanced over the course of a decade. The late conservative strategist Paul Weyrich and historian Randall Balmer, among others, credited Bob Jones as the catalyst that politicized a wide range of conservative evangelicals….
…..even before the issues of abortion and homosexuality became the policy priorities of a newly politicized Christian Right, its leaders fought the perceived threat of racial equality at conservative Christian academies by claiming their religious freedom to discriminate. This legacy should remind us that the Right’s religious liberty campaigns mobilize old arguments around new targets, and that their agenda extends beyond questions of contraception coverage, or marriage and nondiscrimination in the LGBTQ context.
In short, Bob Jones University is not just an old case, irrelevant to what’s happening today. It represents, at its core, the exact same argument that conservatives are making today. As Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.”
We see this as well with regard to the second point, the “envious reversal” of victim and victimizer. Portraying themselves as victims, uniquely, if not solely threatened with the loss of religious liberty, is the central premise of the right’s “religious liberty” crusade, even though, as the UCC case shows, their phony claims of victimhood can lead to actually victimizing others instead.
As the UCC case underscores, the cause they are actually advancing is neither religion nor freedom, but the antithesis of both: theocratic political control. No church, minister or priest anywhere in America has ever been forced to perform a gay marriage against their will—the kind of scenario that so-called “religious freedom” advocates supposedly fear. Yet, for almost two years, UCC ministers in North Carolina faced criminal chargesif they dared to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony. UCC’s case made it stunningly clear which side was really interested in religious liberty, and which side was deceptively hijacking the concept to force its own narrow-minded religious views onto the rest of society—the exact opposite of what most Americans instinctively know religious freedom to be.
The Struggle Intensifies
In the 30-plus years since the Bob Jones decision, the religious right’s basic argument hasn’t changed, but they’ve put enormous effort into changing the cultural and political environment, particularly by building organizational infrastructure—think tanks, law schools (like Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law and Jerry Falwell’s law school at his Liberty University), and legal advocacy groups. Over the same period, they’ve advanced anti-gay and anti-reproductive choice agendas which have been much easier to defend in terms of a moral high ground based on traditional hierarchies of power. But ever since the ground began clearly shifting on gay rights, a new phase has been entered.
“The evangelical Protestant Christian Right and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are intensifying their campaign to carve out arenas of public life where religious institutions, individuals, and even businesses may evade civil rights and labor laws in the name of religious liberty,” Clarkson writes in the executive summary. “By creating zones of legal exemption, the Christian Right seeks to shrink the public sphere and the arenas within which the government has legitimacy to defend people’s rights, including reproductive, labor, and LGBTQ rights.”
These efforts have powerful outside allies as well, Clarkson notes. “In this, it is often aligned with the antigovernment strategy of free market libertarians and some business interests, who for a variety of reasons also seek to restrict arenas where government can legally act.” And while their actions are largely fueled by recent developments, particularly the sudden dramatic shift toward acceptance of gay marriage, and LGBTQ rights in general, the scope of their reaction is vastly more far-reaching:
This conservative Christian alliance is challenging a century or more of social advances and many of the premises of the Enlightenment underlying the very definition of religious liberty in the United States. Its long-range goal is to impose a conservative Christian social order inspired by religious law, in part by eroding pillars of undergirding religious pluralism that are integral to our constitutional democracy.
In the end, he explains:
Their goal is to impose a conservative Christian social order inspired by religious law. To achieve this goal, they seek to remove religious freedom as an integral part of religious pluralism and constitutional democracy, and redefine it in Orwellian fashion to justify discrimination by an ever wider array of “religified” institutions and businesses.
Clarkson describes religification as “a tactic … by which an organization rewrites mission statements, contracts, and job descriptions in an attempt to exempt institutions from the law in as many ways a possible,” and he points out that “The groups promoting this tactic, such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Institute, have issued handbooks to help organizations protect against ‘dangerous antireligious attacks.’”
One such “dangerous antireligious attack” involved 2,800 employees of the St. Peter’s Healthcare System of New Brunswick, New Jersey, whom the hospital tried to cheat out of their pension benefits under the guise of “religious freedom.” The hospital had underfunded its pension plan by $30 million, claiming a religious exemption from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which protects individuals in most private pensions by setting minimum standards, including mandatory fiduciary and funding requirements. “Pensioner Laurence Kaplan was concerned that the plan was underfunded and his lawsuit showed that indeed it was,” Clarkson reports: