When The State Takes Over The Church

When you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

Florida passed a law just before Christmas last year aimed at allowing schools to hire chaplains. It was carefully worded to avoid seeming as if it were promoting one particular religion to provide chaplains. The mere 26 lines of text include this sentence:

Parents must be permitted to select a volunteer school chaplain from the list provided by the school district, which must include the chaplain’s religious affiliation, if any.

Emphasis mine. That would certainly seem to indicate that a chaplain could have any religious affiliation, or none at all. 

Not so fast. In a completely predictable move, one of the groups that expressed interest in chaplaincy was the Satanic Temple. And Governor Ron DeSantis was not having it, never mind what the English language words in the law say. Only real, legit religions need apply.

So now we take the next logical step, in which the Florida Department of Education issues some "clarification" on what a chaplain should really be (never mind the law) in the form of a model policy for schools to imitate. Commissioner Manny Diaz announced that "Florida welcomes only legitimate and officially authorized chaplains to become volunteers at their local schools and to provide students with morally sound guidance." Sound moral guidance--there goes the original claim that chaplains would just be like counseling helpers.

The actual model (it's right here--at least for the moment) is just a two-pager, but it sets out to do so much.

It lays out some of the specific requirements for communication with parents. It layers on six more requirements for the chaplain job. The law only mentions one--pass a background check. But this adds on several other professional requirements, very much reminiscent of the job description highlighted by actual professional chaplains when objecting to the Texas version of this law. So things like an actual degree, and experience, and counseling training. And also, a "sincere desire" to do the job; the principal will have to desire how sincere the applicant is. It's unclear if an expressed desire to treat the school as a mission field would count here or not.

But beyond all of that, the model policy includes an official government definition of "religion."

Really. The policy offers definitions for three terms-- "chaplain," "local religious affiliation," and "religion." Here it is:

“Religion” means an organized group led, supervised, or counseled by a hierarchy of teachers, clergy, sages, or priests that (1) acknowledges the existence of and worships a supernatural entity or entities that possesses power over the natural world, (2) regularly engages in some form of ceremony, ritual, or protocol, and (3) whose religious beliefs impose moral duties independent of the believer’s self-interest.

This definition, of course, covers Certain Religions that Florida approves of, and rules out a few others, depending on who's judging what exactly is a "ceremony, ritual, or protocol" as well as what constitutes imposing moral duties. That "independent of the believer's self-interest" is yet another in a long series of ill-considered phrases-- if I follow religious teachings because I don't want to go to hell, is that not a moral duty that is all about my self-interest and not at all independent of it?

The ACLU has already noted that the model policy is "extremely problematic and raises several constitutional concerns." But it ought to outrage and/or scare the heck out of people of faith as well.

Look, once you open the door to religion in the public school system, and you don't like some of what walks through that door, you have two choices.

1) You admit that you really only meant for your brand of Christianity to be in schools. 

2) You set up state oversight of religion, a state agency that will decide which religions are legitimate and which are not.

Choice 1 probably won't be a winner in court (at least not yet), so you end up with Choice 2, and here is Florida, right on schedule, deciding that the state will decide what is a real religion and what is not, with a vague definition that will inevitably require someone (looks like it'll be the Department of Education for now) to sit and hold hearings over any religion that thinks it has been unjustly rejected. 

This is a terrible law now buttressed by terrible policy. Nobody on any side of the issues should support this. This is state-controlled religion, and it's useful only as a dynamic civics demonstration of why the Founders wanted a wall between church and state in the first place.