January/February 2003

The linkage of security and religious freedom is really not that new. In the United States the connection was first made in the 1663 Rhode Island Colonial Charter from England. “They have ffreely declared, that it is much on their hearts . . . to hold forth a livlie experiment, that a most flourishing civill state may stand and best bee maintained . . . with a full libertie in religious concernements; and that true pietye rightly grounded upon gospell principles, will give the best and greatest security to sovereignetye, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyaltye.” v It is obvious, in the words of the American forebears that “true pietye rightly grounded” and “greatest security” were absolutely critical to a “flourishing civill state.” Religious freedom became the cornerstone of a civil society. That awareness is coming back to us today. Note the words of the International Crisis Group in their March 2001 report on Central Asia: “Treat religious freedom as a security issue, not just a human rights issue, and advocate unequivocally that regional security can only be assured if religious freedom is guaranteed and the legitimate activities of groups and individuals are not suppressed.”

In A.D. 135, at the end of the Jewish rebellion against Roman domination, the emperor Hadrian passed laws forbidding circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, and the study or teaching of the Torah. Though aimed at the Jews, these laws affected the course of the young Christian church to a greater degree than many realize.
Because Jewish Christians refused to join in the war against Rome, Bar Kochba, the self-proclaimed messiah of the Jews, persecuted them. Thus these Christians found themselves treated unmercifully by fellow Jews and at the same time rejected by the Romans because of their illicit religion. Many Christians perished during the conflict in which more than a million Jews lost their lives.

In the United States of America we often use slogans such as “truth, justice, and the American way” (last phrase in the opener for the 1950s television show ) and “with liberty and justice for all” (the closing phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance). These idealistic phrases can lull us into believing religious injustice happens primarily in developing countries—certainly not here in the “land of the free.” But the “land of the free” became the “home of the brave” for a former Pueblo, Colorado, air traffic controller when he was fired for adhering to his religious convictions and found himself defending them in federal court. It all began in 1990 when Don Reed, whose study of the Bible convinced him that the fourth commandment prohibits work from sunset on Fridays until sunset on Saturdays (Exodus 20:8-11), began setting that day aside for worship and rest. In 1995 Reed’s employers told him they could no longer accommodate his absence during Sabbath hours, as a result of what they termed “critical short staffing.”

In 1995 Don Reed was fired as an air traffic controller when his religious belief about the Saturday Sabbath came into conflict with the dictates of his employer. For several years Reed had been accommodated in his belief that the Sabbath should be kept sacred by holding a job that required work only during the workweek and then by arranging job swaps for himself with other willing workers. However, in 1995 the facility experienced an extraordinary amount of transfer activity, and staffing dipped below the number of full-time air traffic controllers required by the collective bargaining agreement at Reed’s unionized workplace. Reed worked closely with his union to propose several reasonable accommodations.

Religion squared off with consumerism in Cypress, California, last May when the Cypress City Council voted unanimously to seize, through use of the city’s power of eminent domain, 18 acres of land owned by the Cottonwood Christian Center in order to build a Costco discount store.
"The city is trying to feed its voracious appetite for property taxes,” said Patrick Korten, a vice president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, an organization helping to represent Cottonwood in the case. “If they get away with it, it would signal to other cities that they can prevent a church from expanding if they want to . . . it would essentially void the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.” The federal RLUIPA was passed in 2000 to protect churches from discriminatory zoning and land-use policies.

France has been the leader of a very restrictive policy against sects and cults for several years. One man has illustrated this better than anyone else: Alain Vivien!

Hardball litigation tactics are neither new nor particularly newsworthy—except when the aggressive litigant claims to represent God on earth. That scenario has driven the recent spate of articles commenting on the Catholic Church’s increasingly bare-knuckle legal response to those accusing priests of sexual abuse. Church lawyers have repeatedly counterclaimed against the parents of child victims. They countersued a single mother who, seeking a male role model for her boys, allowed them to spend the night at the parish sacristan’s apartment. They have moved to reveal the names of pseudonymous plaintiffs in a tactic that appears to have no other purpose than intimidation. They have asked graphic questions regarding the intimate details of sexual abuse, as well as detailed questions about victims’ intimate relations with their wives. They have even accused the plaintiffs themselves of contributing to their own victimization. This accusation seems to have become a standard tactic. One advocate for the victims of priest abuse said the church’s approach puts victims of abuse in a position in which “you have to rationalize why it’s not your fault.”

The beginning of a new Congress is somewhat like the birth of a new baby. Like a child, the new Congress is born with the burden of history sitting fairly across its shoulders, it has much of the DNA of the preceding Congress, and it operates in much the same environment as its predecessors. Yet like a child, there is always hope that a new Congress will throw off the shackles of the unfortunate aspects of its family history and transcend the difficult circumstances it is born into, and go on to achieve true greatness. To achieve this greatness, the Congress must focus on the substance of greatness; the protection and expansion of freedom of conscience.

Christian militarism surely cannot derive from the teachings of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught peace and nonviolence–and indeed, a certain disinterest in secular state matters. At His arrest His disciple Peter seized a sword and struck out at a Temple guard. It is possible to connect Peter’s act with figures of speech Jesus used even that same night to underscore the need for action.

An excerpt from an opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, rendered at the time of the Civil War.