The Wall of Separation Blog

A Word Of Thanks To All The Clergy Standing Up For Vaccines And Science

boston — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 13:28:48 +0000

A Word Of Thanks To All The Clergy Standing Up For Vaccines And Science boston Thu Aug 19, 2021 - 09:28

Authored by

Image

Not far from my house, there’s a United Methodist church with a marquee that has projected a simple message for months: STAY SAFE. GET VACCINATED.

Every time I see it, I’m reminded that while the outrageous statements and antics of vaccine-denying, conspiracy theory-promoting clergy capture headlines, they, thankfully, don’t represent the majority of the leaders of America’s religious community.

COVID-denying clergy have been with us from the start of the pandemic. They insisted on keeping their houses of worship open when governors were issuing stay-at-home orders. Some of their in-person services became super-spreader events. When vaccines became available, they told their congregants not to get shots – and they’re still at it.

Many, but not all, of these resistors are conservative evangelicals. As we’ve noted on this blog, their short-sighted behavior has prolonged the agony for all of us. We have – and we will continue – to call them out.

But it’s also important to acknowledge the hard work being done, often outside the spotlight, by members of the clergy who are urging vaccines and supporting sound science. I’m thinking of pastors like this one in a rural area of Maryland who’s working to educate a skeptical population. I’m thinking of the Orthodox Jewish rabbis who have made videos urging vaccinations. I’m thinking of the imams in Minnesota who allowed their mosques to be turned into vaccination sites. I’m thinking of Pope Francis and the Catholic clergy who support vaccines and remind their congregants that nothing in church doctrine calls for religious exemptions from the shots. I’m thinking of the pastor who oversees that Methodist church that I often walk by.

This is a country where, for various reasons, some people in our population will listen to a member of the clergy before a scientist. In light of that, religious leaders have a role to play in battling the pandemic. Yes, some have chosen to be reckless and irresponsible, and their disturbing behavior frustrates and angers us. They deserve every ounce of disdain they get.

But let’s remember that plenty of members of the clergy in America and around the world don’t think that way. They’re doing the right thing and telling their flocks that it’s a good idea to roll up their sleeves and take a jab.

For that, we owe them an overdue word of thanks.

Issues

Religious Freedom

Tags

Vaccinations

Protecting Religious Freedom During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Maryland

Pope Francis

Islam

Minnesota

Orthodox Judaism

An LGBTQ-Friendly GOP? Not So Fast.

boston — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 13:25:12 +0000

An LGBTQ-Friendly GOP? Not So Fast. boston Wed Aug 18, 2021 - 09:25

Authored by

Rob Boston

Image

A recent story in Politico asserts that the Republican Party has essentially given up its opposition to marriage equality and is becoming more moderate on LGBTQ issues.

“Party leaders still exhibit strong opposition to transgender rights and the top legislative priorities of the LGBTQ community,” the story asserted. “But on the most prominent battlefield of the past few decades, same-sex marriage, they’ve all but conceded defeat.”

The implication is that even conservatives are coming around on LGBTQ rights. Sorry, but I’m not convinced. Yes, conservatives may have accepted the reality that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld marriage equality six years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges, but that doesn’t mean they’re surrendering or aren’t still working to undermine or overturn that ruling. Christian nationalists simply hold too much sway in the GOP for that type of disengagement.

Consider where we are right now. Obergefell may not be as healthy as it looks. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said the marriage equality ruling was settled law – but he also said he would be willing to put justices on the Supreme Court who don’t support that ruling, and that’s exactly what he did. As a result, there is likely a working majority on the court right now that does not support the core findings of Obergefell.

In addition, the high court is, thanks again to Trump, moving toward an extreme definition of religious freedom that, if fully adopted at some point in the future, could enshrine all manner of discrimination toward LGBTQ Americans.

Add to this the fact that LGBTQ rights across the board suffered sustained assault during the Trump years, and the picture looks far less rosy. To appease his Christian nationalist base, Trump put into place numerous policies and regulatory changes that eroded hard-fought rights for members of the LGBTQ community. President Joe Biden has overturned many of them, but they could be put back in place by a future conservative administration.

Thus, same-sex couples could find themselves in a situation where they have the right to marry but see their rights in many other contexts slipping away. They might face barriers to receiving health care, service in secular businesses or face difficulty in adopting children because a Trumpified Supreme Court allows religious belief to be used to justify discrimination and harm.

We also need to consider what’s going on in the states, where a raft of mean-spirited bills attacking the rights of the transgender community have been introduced by conservative lawmakers, with some already becoming law.

Sure, a small number of GOP officials have said positive things about LGBTQ rights and issued tweets for Pride Month. Measured against what conservative legislators have done to the courts and the laws they seek to pass in the states, that is cold comfort indeed.

Issues

Marriage Equality

LGBTQ Rights

Discrimination In The Name of Religion

Tags

On Vaccines, White Christian Nationalists Suffer From A Leadership Vacuum

boston — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:45:24 +0000

On Vaccines, White Christian Nationalists Suffer From A Leadership Vacuum boston Tue Aug 17, 2021 - 09:45

Authored by

Rob Boston

Image

This blog has chronicled vaccine resistance among white evangelical Christians, noting that it’s a serious impediment to overcoming the COVID pandemic. The statistics tell a sad story: As the Associated Press reported recently, 40% of white evangelical Protestants are flatly refusing to get vaccinated, compared with 25% of all Americans.

Part of the problem is that white evangelicals are cursed with poor leadership. While there are responsible pro-vaccine figures out there, such as Russell Moore, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, their voices tend to get drowned out by a noisy kook brigade fond of peddling conspiracy theories.

Consider Mat Staver, for example. Staver runs Liberty Counsel, a Christian nationalist legal group that used to focus on the typical mean-spirited and harmful political ideology that’s the cash cow of the Religious Right, such as attacking LGBTQ people, moaning about humanism in the public schools and eroding reproductive freedom.

Since the pandemic erupted, Staver has decided to go full-on anti-vax. He recently granted an interview to an evangelical ministry during which he said things that can charitably be described as nuts.

According to Staver, the vaccine is part of a fiendish plot to depopulate the world by causing infertility.

“What is involved in this is depopulation, population control to reduce the population of the planet, and to control everyone, and to do it by force and to have a tracking mechanism to determine whether or not you’ve had one of these particular injections,” Staver said. “COVID is being used as a mechanism for a bigger global agenda.” (Is Bill Gates is involved? You bet! Staver even managed to drag Adolf Hitler into it. Thanks to our friends at Right Wing Watch for the video.)

The claim COVID vaccines cause infertility has been debunked several times, as have the tinfoil-hat assertions that the shots contain tracking chips. Staver’s claim that it’s all a twisted scheme engineered by a shadowy cabal of elites to depopulate the world – with a current population of 7.6 billion people, that will be quite a task – is too ridiculous to merit a reply. That’s one step removed from QAnon.

The vaccines are designed to keep people from catching a potentially deadly sickness. Full stop. Responsible religious leaders know this and are urging their congregants to take the jab.

I wish evangelicals would listen to them instead of the outlandish conspiracy theories coming from Mat Staver.

Photo: Screenshot of Mat Staver

Tags

Mat Staver

Liberty Counsel

Religious Right

Protecting Religious Freedom During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Vaccinations

Russell Moore

Your Beliefs May Be Sincere – That Doesn’t Mean You Can Ignore The Law

boston — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 13:11:15 +0000

Your Beliefs May Be Sincere – That Doesn’t Mean You Can Ignore The Law boston Mon Aug 16, 2021 - 09:11

Authored by

Rob Boston

Image

As a growing number of government agencies and private employers are mandating COVID vaccines, a schism has erupted in the Catholic Church over the validity of religious exemptions from the shots.

Several Colorado bishops produced a document insisting that church doctrine allows for religious exemptions from mandatory vaccines.

“In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, we are convicted that the government should not impose medical interventions on an individual or group of persons. We urge respect for each person’s convictions and personal choices,” the bishops wrote in response to an order from Denver Mayor Michael Hancock requiring that all city employees be fully vaccinated by the end of next month.

But Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego holds the opposite view. He recently issued a letter to priests under his jurisdiction asserting that nothing in Catholic teaching requires religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.

“[T]he Holy See has made it clear that receiving the Covid vaccine is perfectly consistent with Catholic faith, and indeed laudatory in the light of the common good in this time of pandemic,” McElroy wrote.

The internal squabbling is indicative of an ongoing struggle in the church between a hard-right conservative faction and a more moderate wing. But at the end of the day, it may be irrelevant to the debate over religious exemptions. The Supreme Court has made it clear that a person’s religious views are not limited by whatever denomination he or she may choose to join. People are free to augment those beliefs with their own views.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case called Frazee v. Illinois Department of Employment Security. It concerned a man named William A. Frazee who, after being laid off from a government job, was denied unemployment benefits because he refused to take a retail position that involved working on Sundays.

Frazee explained that, based on his Christian beliefs, he could not work on Sundays. But while Frazee identified as a Christian, he did not belong to any particular denomination or church. Nor did he rely on any particular Christian body’s teachings in concluding that it was wrong to work on Sundays.

An Illinois appellate court ruled against Frazee. The court concluded that “the injunction against Sunday labor must be found in a tenet or dogma of an established religious sect.”

The Supreme Court disagreed. In a unanimous opinion, the court observed, “Never did we suggest that unless a claimant belongs to a sect that forbids what his job requires, his belief, however sincere, must be deemed a purely personal preference rather than a religious belief.”

This makes sense. A person’s religious beliefs need not be tied a larger body of believers. When it comes to religion in America, you are free to do your own thing. Religious freedom means that you can adopt some church doctrines while rejecting or augmenting others. Your religious freedom does not hinge on what your bishop, rabbi, imam or pastor believes. It rests on what you believe.

But the fact that you may believe something sincerely doesn’t mean you automatically deserve an exemption from a law or policy that everyone else must follow – and that is what has been so far missing from the debate over all kinds of religion-based exemptions from secular law. A belief, after all, can be sincerely held yet still dangerous or not in society’s best interest.

Religious exemptions from vaccines exist in some states because of laws. Those laws can be changed, and the exemptions can be curbed or done away with entirely.

As we face spiking COVID cases due to the Delta variant, giving some religious believers – and those who merely claim they have a certain belief – an automatic exemption from sensible public health regulations designed to protect us all is a reckless policy we can no longer afford.

Issues

Religious Freedom

Tags

Protecting Religious Freedom During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Illinois

Supreme Court

Colorado

After My Internship At AU, I’m More Anxious About Church-State Separation Than Ever – And That’s A Good Thing

boston — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 12:34:13 +0000

After My Internship At AU, I’m More Anxious About Church-State Separation Than Ever – And That’s A Good Thing boston Thu Aug 12, 2021 - 08:34

Authored by

Ethan Magistro

Image

For the past eight weeks, I’ve been working with the Americans United Communications Department to spread the word about the importance of church-state separation. I’ve learned a colossal amount about the issue during my time here, but, as I prepare to leave, I’m more concerned about the separation of church and state than I ever have been – and that’s the way it should be. It means that AU has successfully impressed upon me how serious the fight for the wall of separation is, and it drives me to spread the word and get others involved in church-state activism. More than anything, I’m eager to share information about Americans United and support its work long after my internship.

Of course, I’m sure much of my passion for AU comes from the nurturing and educational environment my colleagues created for interns. I can’t gush enough about how great of an organization AU is. From day one, my colleagues welcomed me warmly, shared their stories and impressed upon me how important church-state separation is. Even while working virtual, I had the chance to speak to members of each department and even Rachel Laser herself. Speaking with the CEO of an organization is something I figured an intern never did, yet she was happy to talk with all the interns. It was plain from the start that AU cares about its interns, and that made for an immensely rewarding experience.

Through my research for the blog posts and my conversations with AU experts, I’ve become cautiously optimistic about the future of church-state separation, although the pragmatic side of me knows that many threats challenge the wall and that widening cracks have been inflicted upon it. I know that defending the wall is an unending duty. Nonetheless, my time here has made me ready and willing to accept that duty. It has fired me up about issues that more need to know about, issues that make me lean back in my chair, put my hands on my head and go “Ohhhhh my gosh” in awe at the kind of dystopia religious extremists envision. A few people here at AU have probably witnessed me do that as we discussed upcoming legal battles, Supreme Court cases or the extent Christian nationalists will go to get their way.

Above all, I want to echo the sentiments of Allie, one of my fellow interns, who called for more of our generation to get involved in church-state separation. The issue is the hidden keystone of most civil rights work that Gen-Zers are passionate about. The efforts of other activists to secure equality for LGBTQ people, minorities and others all depend on the ability of church-state separation advocates to prevent religious institutions from weakening civil rights protections. Any progress that champions of cultural equality have made would be quickly neutralized if the law carves out a religious freedom bunker for bigotry to hide behind. Be it from Project Blitz in the state legislature, the federal courts or simple misinformation about religion’s role in our nation, Christian nationalists are mobilizing to attack the wall of separation on all fronts. My generation must be ready to defend it from all sides, or else it will lose the battle for equality before it even began.

As I wrap up my summer at Americans United, I feel overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity to learn and develop this internship provided me. I am even more grateful for the connections I have made here at AU and the many people who have helped me succeed as a young advocate. Most of all, I’m grateful to the many members of AU who make our good work possible. Without you all, the wall would already be destroyed, the fight already over. Americans United has an impact because of your support.

I can only hope that my blog posts have helped make an impact and spread the word about church-state separation. To quote George Washington’s Farewell Address, “I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize without alloy the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”

I am only excited to see how Americans United defends our good laws and defends my fellow citizens.

Issues

Tags

Florida Exploits COVID Public School Health Policies To Expand Voucher Scheme

boston — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 15:54:34 +0000

Florida Exploits COVID Public School Health Policies To Expand Voucher Scheme boston Wed Aug 11, 2021 - 11:54

Authored by

Samantha Sokol

Image

If this pandemic has taught public school supporters anything, it’s that school voucher proponents will take advantage of any opportunity to drain public funds from public schools and funnel it to private, religious schools. For example, last year, former President Donald Trump and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos exploited the pandemic to promote private school vouchers paid for with COVID relief funds. And in 2021, several state legislatures, including Georgia, Illinois, and Colorado, considered bills to give private school vouchers to students whose public schools could not offer in-person instruction due to the pandemic.

The latest attempt to exploit the pandemic to expand ballooning voucher programs is currently under way in Florida. On Aug. 6, Florida’s State Board of Education unanimously voted to allow students to receive a voucher to attend a private school if their public school district requires certain health and safety measures, such as requiring kids to wear masks. Any student who does not wish to comply with mask wearing, COVID testing or quarantining may receive taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition.

How did we get here? It started with a standoff over masks in public schools. Kids in Florida wore masks last school year without incident. But on July 30 – acting against the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) issued an executive order barring public school districts from requiring masks. Given that Florida’s COVID surge is at an all-time high, and children have not been spared, some district superintendents pushed back. Officials in four districts, including Broward, the second largest in the state, announced that they would keep mask mandates in place. In response, DeSantis threatened to withhold funding from public school districts with mask mandates. But the districts are holding strong.

DeSantis decided to try another route to defund public schools. The governor and the Florida Board of Education worked together to adopt a rule change that allows students who oppose masks to get a school voucher under the “Hope Scholarship” program. Since 2018, the program has spent an estimated $40 million per year on private school vouchers for students who have been bullied in public schools. DeSantis’ rule change adds so-called “COVID-19 harassment” – including something as simple as asking a student to wear a mask, take a COVID test, practice social distancing or quarantine – to the definition of bullying. The result: any student who does not want to comply with COVID protocols in public school can get a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend private school.

This voucher program should be suspended, not expanded. First, it doesn’t even achieve its intended goal of protecting kids from bullying. The voucher actually strips students of important federal and state protections. For example, public schools must adhere to the state’s Jeffrey Johnson Act, which requires that they have anti-bullying protections in place, and federal civil rights laws require that public schools prevent discrimination. Private schools that accept vouchers do not adhere to these laws. The bill simply forces bullied students out of the public school system and into schools with fewer protections, letting the bully, who faces no consequences and stays in their school, win. Even if this program could help kids who are bullied, it’s deeply insulting to those children facing relentless abuse, trauma and violence that the Board of Education has now reclassified having to follow COVID protocols as “bullying.”

Kids who accept this voucher aren’t likely to receive a good education, either. Studies across the country show that vouchers like the Hope Scholarship do not improve student achievement. A study of another Florida voucher program found that voucher students showed no gains in math or reading, and even saw their standardized test scores decline.

Additionally, the expansion of this voucher program to more children won’t end the COVID pandemic or keep kids healthier. COVID doesn’t discriminate between public schools, private schools and religious schools: it spreads equally at them all. This rule change will herd vulnerable kids into private schools with little oversight and a history of violating health and safety protocols. A 2017 investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that at least eight Florida voucher schools submitted falsified fire and health reports to the state. If these private schools couldn’t be trusted to follow basic health protocols pre-pandemic, there’s no reason to believe they’ll protect kids now.

Unfortunately, several other states are considering following Florida’s lead in expanding vouchers for students to avoid mask mandates. In Arkansas, lawmakers recently introduced SB 2, a bill to allow students to opt out of their public school if they don’t agree with mask or COVID-related policies and receive funding to attend a different public school, private school, virtual school or for homeschooling. And Tennessee’s House Speaker Cameron Sexton threatened to convene a special session to create private school voucher legislation if school districts issue mask mandates, close physical school buildings or segregate vaccinated students.

Instead of solving the public health and education crises at hand, these lawmakers are pursuing private school vouchers instead. As Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” For voucher proponents, the COVID pandemic is the perfect opportunity to exploit a crisis for their goal of funneling public money to private schools. We must fight back to protect public education and pursue evidence-based public health policies to protect our students.

Issues

Taxpayer Funding Of Religion

Tags

These Legal Battles Expose The Discriminatory World Religious Extremists Want

boston — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 12:24:40 +0000

These Legal Battles Expose The Discriminatory World Religious Extremists Want boston Wed Aug 11, 2021 - 08:24

Authored by

Ethan Magistro

Image

Defending the church-state wall is hard work, and the battle has only grown fiercer over the years. Recently, Christian nationalist legal groups filed three petitions for review in the Supreme Court, looking for a favorable decision to allow them to discriminate against those who don’t share their values. The cases they’ve filed sound a bit convoluted, but the motive behind the petitions is dangerous.

The three cases, Gordon College v. DeWeese-Boyd, Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission and Trustees of the New Life in Christ Church v. City of Fredericksburg all may affect the scope of something called the “ministerial exception,” a legal doctrine which gives religious institutions the freedom to select their own ministers. Religious organizations have frequently sought to broaden the exception to apply to people who are clearly not ministers to sidestep civil rights laws. Two of these cases aim to do just that in the employment realm, while another seeks to expand who counts as a minister under existing tax law.

Gordon College v. DeWeese-Boyd and Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission both deal with employment protections. The first case involves Margaret DeWeese-Boyd, a professor of social work at Gordon College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Wenham, Mass. Officials at the college argue that DeWeese-Boyd is a minister because she had to integrate a “Christian perspective” into her teaching.

The two courts that have heard the case have both ruled in the professor’s favor, with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court stating that her “duties as an associate professor of social work differ significantly from cases where the ministerial exception has been applied, as she did not teach religion or religious texts, lead her students in prayer, take students to chapel services or other religious services, deliver sermons at chapel services, or select liturgy.” Nonetheless, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is asking for U.S. Supreme Court review in this case, contending that DeWeese-Boyd is somehow a minister because of her contract, despite the fact that she does nothing a minister is considered by law to do.

In Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, Matthew Woods filed a complaint against a gospel mission in Washington state, claiming that it refused to hire him for the seemingly un-ministerial position of staff attorney because of his same-sex relationship. Unlike in DeWeese-Boyd, the gospel mission and the ADF are focusing less on the ministerial exception, arguing rather that the mission has a constitutional right to hire only coreligionists.

According to the mission, whether a person counts as a coreligionist is totally up to the religious institution, and religious institutions should be permitted to discriminate based on protected characteristics – like sexual orientation – if they believe the person has violated their religious tenets. This argument presents an even broader attack on anti-discrimination laws than do efforts to expand the definition of a minister, because if accepted it would give religious institutions the ability to discriminate against all people – not just ministerial employees – who don’t believe in and follow an institution’s religious tenets.

Finally, in Trustees of the New Life in Christ Church v. City of Fredericksburg, religious organizations are trying to expand the definition of who counts as a minister under Virginia tax law, a parallel move to the ones the ADF is pushing for in its cases. Taxes, oddly enough, are the latest civil law religious institutions seem to want out of.

These cases all have similar throughlines. Among other things, religious organizations want to claim that if, say, a janitor, has ministerial duties written into her contract, that she can be considered a minister despite not ever performing those responsibilities. In my mind, I don’t think of janitors as particularly ministerial, and it seems odd to me to suggest that people who don’t preach, proselytize or promote a religion are ministers.

As bewildering as all these cases may sound, they reveal a striking amount about the goals of religious extremists: They want to blow an enormous hole into employment protections to discriminate against others. These extremists and their lawmaker allies are aiming to carve out a constitutional right to hire and fire people without legal scrutiny. Their ultimate goal is to empower organizations to fire someone because of, say, their race, their age or their sexuality. Worst of all, those people who were fired would have no legal mechanism for recourse. In other words, religious extremists are pushing to remove the basic employment protections of millions of people.

One of AU’s ongoing cases, Gregory Tucker v. Faith Bible Chapter International, offers similar insight into religious extremists’ attempts to exploit the ministerial exception and sidestep civil rights and employment protections. In this case, Director of Student Life Gregg Tucker conducted an anti-racism symposium with his school administration’s support after witnessing unchecked racism in the school. While the event was overwhelmingly well-received, a handful of parents objected and demanded that Gregg be fired, which he eventually was. In June 2019, Gregg sued the school for violating his civil rights. The school is now trying to shirk responsibility for unjustly firing him by exploiting the ministerial exception. Yet Gregg is anything but a minister. He not only had no important religious functions and did not teach theology, but he was explicitly told by the school that he was not a minister when he inquired about a ministerial tax deduction.

In the United States, civil rights protections are something we all assume we have, and something we all assume won’t disappear at the drop of a gavel. Yet religious extremists are intent on cutting up these protections in the courts. These organizations ought to remember, as Will Hunting said in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting” that “liberty … is the soul’s right to breathe. And when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girded too tight.”

Christian nationalists should not constrict Americans’ right to work free of discrimination, and they should not use the law to punish people for living and believing as they choose.

Issues

Employment Discrimination

LGBTQ Rights

Tags

Ministerial Exception

What My Summer at AU Taught Me About Youth Advocacy And Church-State Separation

boston — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 13:10:24 +0000

What My Summer at AU Taught Me About Youth Advocacy And Church-State Separation boston Tue Aug 10, 2021 - 09:10

Image

By Allie Schiele

This summer, I have been fortunate to work at American United as an intern in our outstanding Legal Department. It has been such an amazing experience learning about the importance of church-state separation and furthering my interest in legal advocacy.

As a self-described “elder Gen Z,” one of the key takeaways from my summer is how important church-state separation is to the lives of young adults. Although the clearest impact on youth is through public education, where schools are prohibited from endorsing prayer or other religious activities, the connection between church-state separation and youth is not limited to this subject. The mission of AU covers a broad range of issues – from employment discrimination to LGBTQ+ rights to racial justice – meaning just about everyone has a personal connection to this fight.

For example, church-state separation is also an issue of racial justice. As one of my fellow interns PY Liu explained last week, the rise of white Christian nationalism has posed significant dangers to people of color, contributing to xenophobic and racist attitudes that have contributed to religiously and racially motivated hate crimes. As such groups attempt to maintain their religious privilege through strategic political efforts, like the Christian right’s Project Blitz, it is even more important to fight for a strong wall of separation.

There is also a close connection between church-state separation, employment discrimination, and religious schools. In fact, this is the exact issue that started my own advocacy experience in this issue area. Under the ministerial exception, through which religious organizations are exempted from employment discrimination laws for certain employees, religious institutions can fire teachers based on race, gender, sexual orientation and other protected categories. This happened at my high school while I was a student, where our new college counselor was fired for being in a same-sex relationship. Despite not being a faith leader, this decision was justified under a broad interpretation of who is considered a “minister” under the exception. Luckily, through the organizing work of my classmates, we were able to get our school to adopt an anti-discrimination policy protecting employees based on their sexual orientation.

Religious schools, however, still try to use the ministerial exception to circumvent anti-discrimination laws. That’s why AU has fought back in court to protect the rights of these employees to live how they choose without fear of harm from their employers. We have fought to protect all kinds of employees from being discriminated against, such as Shelly Fitzgerald, a school counselor fired for her sexual orientation, and Gregg Tucker, a teacher and director of student life fired for organizing an anti-racism assembly.

Learning about the numerous ways church-state separation impacts my own life and the lives of my peers has made me even more passionate about the issue. In fact, I encourage young people to learn more about the connection of church-state separation to their own lives and get involved in the fight for the wall of separation. You do not need to be an intern, employee or youth fellow at Americans United to join the fight – you can start right at home!

The easiest way is to simply learn more about church-state separation, including the rights of students in public schools, which you can read more about here and here. You can also keep up-to-date with Americans United’s work on our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Witness a violation of church-state separation? Report it to us! Whether you’ve heard a school-sponsored prayer at a football game or your school is allowing religious student clubs to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students, we want to hear about it.

Interested in taking the next step in church-state advocacy? Apply to be a Youth Organizing Fellow next year! Our fantastic Youth Fellows collaborate with young adults across the country to build their organizing skills and advocate for church-state separation in their communities. You can also participate in AU’s annual student essay contest, where high school students reflect on topics related to church-state separation.

Even simple acts such as gathering a few friends and calling your representatives to pass the Do No Harm Act can make a difference. Advocacy work is not limited to large-scale movements, small acts of change can also make a positive impact.

Youth advocacy has proven to be a powerful force for change, including in church-state separation. Whether you are a long-time advocate for the wall of separation or are just getting started, we welcome you to the fight to build a stronger democracy by ensuring the right for all persons to live and believe as they choose.

Allie Schiele has spent the summer working as an intern in AU's Legal Department.

Issues

Tags

Ministerial Exception

Youth Activism

Racism

Religious Right

Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandates Undermine The Fight Against COVID

boston — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 13:17:48 +0000

Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandates Undermine The Fight Against COVID boston Mon Aug 09, 2021 - 09:17

Authored by

Rob Boston

Image

Last week, joined by six religious and interfaith organizations, Americans United filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a federal court urging that a Connecticut law that phases out religious exemptions for school vaccination requirements be upheld.

While this lawsuit doesn’t have a direct connection to vaccine mandates to fight the COVID-19 pandemic – the vaccines required for Connecticut schoolchildren do not currently include a COVID-19 vaccine – the decision that results from it is bound to affect that question as well.

As the Delta variant continues to ravage the country, some public officials are considering taking stronger steps to ensure that people are vaccinated. President Joe Biden has already mandated that federal employees get vaccinated or face regular testing, and The Washington Post reported on Friday that Biden is considering a more aggressive approach designed to spur vaccinations across the board. One option is withholding federal funds to public universities, nursing homes, medical facilities and other entities unless they require employees to be vaccinated.

The Post reported, “If the Biden administration goes forward with the plans, it would amount to a dramatic escalation in the effort to vaccinate the roughly 90 million Americans who are eligible for shots but who have refused or have been unable to get them.”

On the other side, a conglomeration of Christian nationalist organizations, anti-science forces and extreme libertarians have vowed to resist any mandates. Driven by hyper-partisanship or in some cases simple detachment from reality, some of them persist in downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic even as infections, hospitalizations and deaths shoot upward.

In a recent column, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called Biden the “scare-monger in chief” and charged that Biden “has decided that when it comes to COVID, the facts, the law, and the science don’t matter. You will be vaccinated, this Democratic leadership says – and surrender every constitutional right to privacy, employment, personal safety, and free speech until you do.”

These comments are typical of Perkins, who would apparently rather see Americans suffer as long as he can “own the libs.” But the problem is, Perkins and his gang have a fairly powerful weapon on their side in their ongoing war against keeping people healthy: Religious exemptions, such as the one that previously existed in Connecticut, are common in the states. And because it can be difficult for government bodies to distinguish objections based on legitimate religious beliefs from ones that aren’t truly based on faith, many people may be able to get away with falsely claiming religious objections when their views are actually grounded in nonreligious perspectives.

In Connecticut, so many parents claimed religious exemption from mandatory childhood vaccinations during the 2019-20 school year that 120 schools failed to reach vaccination levels needed for herd immunity against measles.

Some irresponsible officials are urging vaccine-hesitant residents to claim religious exemptions. In Louisiana, where COVID infections are spiraling, Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) prepared a memo advising residents how they can use religious exemptions to avoid an existing indoor mask mandate and potential vaccine mandates.

Remarking on the Connecticut case, Alex J. Luchenitser, AU’s associate vice president and associate legal director, stated, “Connecticut health officials should be commended for the action they’ve taken to protect children after recognizing that the state had a growing problem of too few schoolchildren being vaccinated to reach herd immunity from preventable, potentially serious illnesses. We hope that more states follow in Connecticut’s footsteps and end harmful religious exemptions from vaccination requirements.”

The same holds true for COVID. Sweeping religious exemptions from vaccine mandates can only make it more difficult to combat the pandemic and return our lives to normal. They present a glaring loophole that, if left unaddressed, can only exacerbate completely preventable illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID.

Issues

Religious Freedom

Tags

Protecting Religious Freedom During the Coronavirus Pandemic

How White Christian Nationalism Contributes To The Marginalization Of The Asian American Community

boston — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 12:40:13 +0000

How White Christian Nationalism Contributes To The Marginalization Of The Asian American Community boston Fri Aug 06, 2021 - 08:40

Image

By PY Liu

On March 16, 2021, eight people including six Asian women – Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Song Chung Park, Suncha Kim and Yong Ae Yue – were murdered by Robert Aaron Long, who described his life as “pizza, guns, family, and God.”

These women were immigrants, small business owners and mothers. Long’s violence was motivated by his religious beliefs, an attempt to supposedly “eliminate sexual temptation” and it came as a shock to his Crabapple First Baptist Church community.

But this violence was neither a surprising nor solitary event. It was an alarming manifestation of the growing white Christian nationalist movement and part of a long history of marginalization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in the United States, including the continued fetishization of Asian women and surge of anti-Asian hate related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This blog has documented the many ways through violence and policymaking that white Christian nationalists have been trying to impose their desired version of America, one that is white without impurity, exclusively Christian and patriarchal, with no place for minorities, and with “biblical values” ingrained in its Constitution.

Today’s white Chrisitan nationalist ideals correspond with America’s shameful history of excluding immigrants of color, Asian immigrants in particular. The AAPI community is painted as perpetual foreigners in American society by past legislation and popular sentiment. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a law that limited Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S., was not repealed until 1943. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, provided an immigrant quota for each geographical region but completely banned any immigration from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” The banning of any immigrant of Asian descent contrasted with the absolute favoring of their European, white and Christian counterparts and reveals the hypocrisy and anti-Asian xenophobia of policymakers at the time.

Even after gaining legal citizenship, Asian Americans and immigrants have not been fully afforded safety and belonging in this country. Out of mere suspicion that Japanese Americans might be disloyal, the U.S government created Japanese-American internment camps during World War II that incarcerated approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans.

The U.S government continues to direct xenophobic sentiment at its own Asian citizens, as President Donald Trump, who embraced Christian nationalism, and members of his administration repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “Kung flu” throughout the ongoing pandemic. As AU's Rob Boston wrote last year, “White supremacists, racists and other extremists are exploiting the uncertainty and fear stoked by coronavirus to spread hate.”

These xenophobic attitudes have contributed to hate crimes as well. Stop AAPI Hate received 6,603 reports of hate crimes from March 2020-March 2021, including verbal harassment, physical assaults and civil rights violations. A recent paper published in the Ethnic and Racial Studies found that Christian nationalism was the strongest indicator of COVID-related anti-Asian racism and xenophobic rhetoric. White Christian nationalists have fueled an unprecedented wave of anti-Asian sentiment that will take years if not generations to dismantle.

In addition to historical exclusion and present-day discrimination, members of the AAPI community have faced racially and religiously motivated physical violence. The Asian American and Pacific Islander community is among one of the most religiously diverse populations in America, with large numbers of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindu people. In 2012, a white supremacist gunman killed six Sikh Punjabi men and fatally wounded three at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, an incident that devastated South Asian Americans and the larger AAPI community. The gunman, Wade Michael Page, was obsessed with the concept of “racial holy war” and lashed out at the local Sikh community. The defamation of Islam as a regressive and violent religion is supported by white supremacist beliefs and groups. According to the FBI’s 2019 hate incident record, Muslims are the second-largest target of religious hate incidents in the United States, an inevitable consequence of extensive Islamophobia.

Combating white Christian nationalism is essential to the safety and well-being of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. No one deserves to be a target of extreme violence because of what they look like, where they’re from or what religion they practice. I am grateful to be interning for Americans United for Separation of Church and State this summer to support its work to educate the public about religious freedom and safeguard the religious rights of all people, including members of the AAPI community in this country.

Religion can be a positive force in our society, but Christian nationalism harms the AAPI community along with other communities of color and of religious minorities. AAPI identities, cultures, and history should be not only included but celebrated when we call for true religious freedom.

To help us protect AAPI lives and advance AAPI freedom, check out the following organizations and initiatives: Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Stop AAPI Hate, Asian American Advocacy Fund and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.

PY Liu is an organizing intern at Americans United and is supported by Civil Liberties & Public Policy.

Issues

Religious Freedom

Religious Minorities' Rights

Tags