State Neutrality and Religious Liberty

So: do public schools have the right to censor graduation speeches of valedictorians when those speeches contain overt Christian evangelizing (i.e., not merely mention of their faith but an explicit proselytizing pitch)? As a matter of law--as demonstrated in the cases I referenced yesterday--the answer is yes. School officials have a right to control speech given by persons acting as representatives of that school at events the school sponsors.

The underlying debate, however, relates to why schools feel the need to censor said speeches in the first place. One conservative evangelical commentator (posting a comment on a conservative news site report about the story) wondered if the students' remarks would have been censored had the students been speaking about a divisive issue that had nothing overt to do with religion, such as global warming. Of course no one but the school officials in question could offer an answer to that inquiry; I suspect that school officials are fairly controversy-averse and that a screed either for or against environmentalism would at least get some heavy scrutiny.

Clearly, however, the feeling in these situations seems to be--whatever might be the status (censored or allowed) of nonreligious controversial speech--religious speech is certainly suspect. Public schools strive to maintain a "separation between church and state," interpreting this idea (a Jeffersonian turn of phrase that doesn't actually appear in the Constitution) to mean that state entities must avoid any appearance or substance of preferring a specific faith over another. Indeed, the reality of people who do not profess any religious belief at all pushes many institutions to step back from making or endorsing any affirmation of faith (e.g., a reference to a Higher Power, "in God we trust," "one nation, under God").

The evangelical argument I rehearsed yesterday argues that such strict faith-neutrality contains and demands a particular understanding of faith that in and of itself qualifies as religious. In the neutral-state view of religion, faith is a private affair with optional public features. A person may enjoy the right to believe in their heart of hearts whatever they'd like. They furthermore have the right to associate with others of similar belief and practice faith rituals in private space (provided said rituals do not themselves involve illegal activity, such as human sacrifice, polygamous marriage, or drugs).

But, when operating in public space or when acting as an agent of the government, the believer must submit the practice of their belief to norms of social commerce. When private belief and public duty conflict, government agents are expected to prioritize their public duty. A police officer may not arrest a Wiccan simply because the officer is Southern Baptist and believes witchcraft to be evil. A teacher may not use class time to proselytize students in public school.

The counter-argument to this logic would say that faith does not--cannot--map cleanly onto a logic of public and private separations. An evangelical is a Christian no matter where she works or where she travels. She does not shed her Christian convictions when she leaves church or when she arrives at work; indeed, most varieties of evangelicalism would teach that "part-time Christianity" isn't Christianity at all. Faith is all-encompassing, un-ignorable, or it is nothing. For the state to suggest that faith must be otherwise--that it should be privatized--is a religious imposition.

Now, several objections to this line of thinking present themselves. If religious liberty--the freedom of conscience so prized by evangelicals--is to have any real effect, the state must refrain from endorsing any one faith formally. Were the state to declare one faith the "correct" or "official" faith, all other faith practices (including atheism) would instantly assume second-class status. Christian conservatives often draw on authors like David Barton to argue that the US is in fact "a Christian nation," that Christianity (as opposed to other faiths) plays a privileged historical role in US history and is thus due for some acknowledgment and deference. They would contend that such acknowledgment need not translate into hardships on other religions. The UK boasts the Church of England as an official faith but allows the full spectrum of religions to flourish.

I suspect, however, that such Christians would not find this argument nearly so convincing were the US's historical tradition seen as Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu rather than Christian. Calls for a faith-based nation as compatible with a scheme of religious liberty evaporate when the faith in question ceases to be a particular variety of Christianity. At the very least, having an official recognized faith suggests that conflicts between religions would likely be decided in favor of the predominant religion. If the state is to stay out of the business of promoting one religion above another, if the state is instead to maintain space for all religions to co-exist in the same society, then the only sensible scheme involves strict state neutrality.

That neutrality, and the general religious liberty it seeks to ensure, forms the Greater Good to which an individual's otherwise always-everywhere-no-matter-what practice of faith gets submitted. The right to religious expression, after all, exists in concert with other rights and other Goods. The government would ban the practice of a religion that called for the murder of a next-door neighbor, for example, because the neighbor's right to life outweighs the individual's right to practice a murderous faith.

To be sure, the scheme of religious liberty that allows for a thousand faith flowers to bloom does not reflect the exclusivity that is the property of many faiths. A die-hard Missouri Synod Lutheran, for example, believes his faith is uniquely correct. Other faiths aren't just variations; they are heresies, and their beliefs are false teachings. By taking a neutral stance, the state grants a kind of practical legitimacy to all faiths in general that few if any of those single faiths would endorse. But what of it? The alternative would seem to be some form of state theocracy, either soft or hard. Christian conservatives often stray dangerously close to calling for just such a theocracy (indeed, some Christian groups overtly assert that God's law ought to be the law of the land--that's a whole other argument for later).

Thus, religious liberty, state neutrality, and therefore the willingness of state agents to submit their faiths to a public/private division all form part of the given circumstances, the social compact, of what it is to be a US citizen. Those unable or unwilling to accept that the state won't echo their personal religious beliefs should, to put it brutally, find another country.

Clear enough, no?

Perhaps--but I think there's some room in this religious debate for a bit of Devil's Advocacy.

More tomorrow,

JF