Religious activity challenges liberal societies
Public spats involving religion are increasingly common in Canada and other Western societies. In Great Britain, an unholy foofaraw erupted over the rights of faith schools to deliver sex education in accord with their religious values and traditions. In the United States, World Vision is facing litigation over its right to hire with like-minded belief as a criterion. In Canada, secular organizations are aggressively questioning the rights of Christian universities and other faith-based schools to receive governmental support.
Money is typically the presenting issue. Should taxpayer dollars be allocated to faith-based organizations to provide specific social services? And if so, what strictures should be put on those groups to ensure full value to the taxpayer and to avoid providing special status to any particular religion? Can faith-based agencies use public monies for social good when they hew to moral positions that run against the prevailing tide?
These are good questions that Christian communities should relish engaging. The fact is, religious groups tend to be players in the fields of health and education. They also deliver a wide array of social services both at home and abroad. Religiously motivated people are frequently at the vanguard of those addressing human need, showing up with resources and sticking around for the long haul. Few dispute that they do a lot of good.
But religion also has a way of raising hackles. In the current climate, faith groups who access public funds to deliver such services are considered interlopers siphoning money from other, more neutral, organizations. The work they do to address human need may well be cast as a religious recruiting effort. They are apt to be accused of discrimination for insisting their personnel adhere to their faith. They are deemed prejudicial for maintaining moral positions consistent with their traditions. In all these things, they are seen as limiting freedoms.
However, secular demands seeking to exclude organized religion from participating in the public sphere also pose a threat to freedom. Fair-minded people can agree that faith-based organizations would not be faith-based if they could not hire employees who share their values and embrace their mission. The same is true for any group with an advocacy edge, be it Planned Parenthood or World Wildlife Federation or a humanist association.
And most public funds already come with caveats. Religious nonprofit agencies can hire employees who share their faith while using public funds to serve people in need provided the money is not used directly for religious purposes and they serve all people regardless of faith. This makes sense.
Jonathan Chaplin, an adjunct faculty member of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, helpfully observes that the deeper struggle is "between two distinct models of public diversity—individualism and pluralism." In the individualist model, the state enforces diversity by "enforcing rights, which compel universal respect for particular aspects of individual identity: gender, nationality, sexual orientation and so forth."
The pluralist model, he continues, "holds that the state must not only protect a robust regime of individual equality rights but also underwrite the legitimate autonomy of many independent social institutions—families, schools, religious organizations, trade unions, universities, businesses, cultural associations, and so on." Communities and traditions are part of the diversity legitimately contending to speak and to serve in the public sphere.
Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Congregations of the Commonwealth, is similarly concerned that the laudable campaign for human rights has morphed from "a defense of human dignity, which is their proper sphere, and become instead a political ideology, relentlessly trampling down everything in their path."
Key point: Communities and traditions also contribute to public life. As Sacks puts it: "Religious beliefs [should] have no privileged status in a democratic society. Religions should have influence, not power....In a free society, the religious voice should persuade, not compel."
Forcing religion entirely into the private sphere is not a truly liberal outcome, but that will surely happen if the ideology of individualism is given full sway.
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