An editorial in today’s New York Times, “Using Tax Dollars for Churches,” nicely if unintentionally reveals the reigning confusion over what we mean by “discrimination.”
According to the NYT, the president’s policy gives faith-based organizations “a green light to discriminate in employment,” i.e., Methodist organizations could insist on hiring Methodists, etc. (The editorial mentions a pending case of a Jewish psychologist suing a Methodist children’s home for failing to hire him as a therapist.) In the NYT’s preferred world, the “wall of separation” between church and state would be so high and so impregnable that virtually every conceivable kind of organization could qualify to receive federal funds to provide social services … except religious organizations.
To many observers, that is the essence of discrimination, in this case against religion.
There has always been an inherent tension between the ban on establishment of religion and the right to free exercise of religion. The traditional American approach to this dilemma — it is not a clean solution but a standard to apply — is to insist on official governmental neutrality, as applied to conflicts among religions or sects and also to conflicts between religion and non-religion. Neutrality, in short, has proved to be the best, and maybe the only, road that avoids discrimination.
If we attempt to follow that road here, the question becomes: does neutrality require banning federal aid to religious organizations providing social services, or removing the barriers that allow federal aid for all types of providers except the religious?
Banning all religious aid has proven impossible, in theory or practice. Religious colleges receive tax exemptions even though they can discriminate in hiring. The armed forces supply chaplains of all (or at least many) faiths. Cities provide paved roads, police and fire protection to churches and synagogues just as to secular buildings and organizations.
According to the NYT,
It is ironic that President Bush is working to tear down the separation of church and state at home, given the battles he is waging abroad. It is clearer today than ever that one of America’s greatest strengths is that we are a nation in which people are free to practice any faith or no faith, and the government keeps out of the religious realm. This is a tradition that has served America well since its founding. There is no reason to tamper with it now.
This is true. But it seems to me that it is not true that the best way to keep the government out of the religious realm is to exclude religion from the public realm. With religion, as with race, neutrality is the best policy. The government should be religion-blind just as, and in fact for the same reasons that, it should be color-blind.
I’m keeping an open mind on social services provided by religious institutions that don’t discriminiate. (Many Church-affiliated universities, for example, discriminate only in their theology departments.)
I don’t have an open mind about any sort of government support to institutions that discriminate. There, the answer should be “NO.”
From your posting, it isn’t clear how this distinction applies.
Andrew – Well, if this were an easy question it would have been solved by now. My own preference on this issue would be to allow religious organizations seeking federal aid to perform social services to discriminate in hiring their staffs but not in offering their services. That is, I would allow a Baptist child welfare organization to hire only Baptists but not to serve only Baptists, or indeed not to refuse service to anyone based on race or religion.