Whose Religious Freedom?

Ryan Walters has drawn some more press in Oklahoma over a trip to DC to appear at the Family Research Council Summit in DC. Say one thing for Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief; while there may be plenty of officials out there who want to see the nation's education system christianized, Walters is plenty clear about what he wants.

There should be no separation of church and state. "We will bring God back to schools and prayer back to schools in Oklahoma and we will fight back against that radical myth," Walters said.

The Family Research Council was founded by James Dobson and is currently led by Tony Perkins, and they're an explicitly evangelical activist group. They've been designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Policy Law Center and a source of considerable misbehavior. FRC is an exemplar of that saying, "When you mix religion and politics you get politics."

These are the folks that are pushing for what they call religious freedom. These are the folks who are looking to smash the wall between church and state even as they argue that any such wall is a myth.

But if the wall is destroyed, exactly which religion is supposed to come strolling through the rubble. Religious freedom for whom, exactly?

Walters is one of those advocates who likes to pretend that "religion" and "Christianity" are synonyms. It's a rhetorical sloppiness with a purpose, a recognition that we are not, as a nation, quite ready to propose that the First Amendment is for Christians only (yet). And some conservatives understand that once that wall is gone, all manner of beliefs can waltz through. 

We don't even have to talk about Sharia Schools and Satanic Temple Academy to see how fraught this question is, how filled with danger for both state and church.

Consider this statistic from The Great De-Churching, a book by two evangelical pastors trying to understand why people are leaving the Christian church in record numbers; one quarter of the dechurched evangelicals in their survey believe that the United States should be declared a Christian nation—but they don’t attend church.

And they are a big part of this. Inside a New York Times article about Iowa pastor reactions to the "God made Trump" video, in which Trump is discussed in messiainic language, we find this line about the guy who created the video:

The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, describes himself as Christian and a man of faith, but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church.

What brand of Christianity is that, exactly, other than one that apparently leaves room for the literal worship of Trump and what Dilley calls his "God-tier genetics." Is that what Walters demands should be in the classroom?

Whose faith are the taxpayers supposed to finance? Which church should the government choose to support? When the United Methodist Church breaks apart over LGBTQ issues (sadly, the issue up for debate is "should the UMC discriminate against LGBTQ persons, or really really discriminate against LGBTQ persons), should the government side with both sides, or just one? And what happens when some evangelicals start to bristle at paying taxes to support the nation's primary provider of religious education, the Catholic Church, or, as some evangelicals like to call it, the Whore of Babylon?

"Well, they don't have to side with any of them," you may say. "Just leave them alone to freely worship as they will." Except that under the Supreme Court's current version of the First Amendment and the dreamed-of future of folks like Walts and FRC, they can't freely worship unless they are free to discriminate as they wish and be subsidized by taxpayers to do it. 

Walters is confident that once the wall is gone, only favored "Judeo-Christian" churches will stroll through. This is a silly thing to think (and former history teacher Walter should know better). "Church" means hundreds of different denominations in the United States, not counting guys like Dilley who, I guess, each represent a "church" of one. Oh, and also, all those other religions.

It would be hard enough to parse all this if it were just about faith. Trying to lump a boatload of faiths together by talking pretty about "Judeo-Christian tradition" may sound nice, but anyone who has worked in any kind of community ministerial forum knows, differences in faith traditions are not so easily papered over.

And it's not just about faith. The Catholic Church loves school choice because they need the money. For many others its about power, the power to impose their will on the education system. 

When churches are turned loose to scrabble over the power and money involved in schools and other parts of society, what can be the result except for more squabbling and fighting and maneuvering and--well, you know. Politics. And who is going to settle this other than the government. 

Walters and the folks at FRC may not see this as a problem, because they keep making the same mistake, which is imagining themselves and their allies holding the reins, thereby guaranteeing that when those difficult calls have to be made, they will end up on the winning side. This is a failure of imagination, a failure to learn the lessons of history. This is picking a fight based on an unrealistic belief that you will kick everyone else's collective keisters. 

When someone starts making noise about getting rid of the wall so that there can be religious freedom, ask these questions:

Will that be freedom for all faiths? And if not, who will decide who wins and who loses? And if yes, how do you plan to make taxpayers pay for it?