Hello again. The writer and speaker Ravi Zacharias once said something I found very interesting: “A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling.” In the wake of the 09/11 attacks, we went through a period of nearly hysterical anti-Islam. In World War II we were rabidly anti-Japanese, even going so far as to intern many Japanese-Americans in ghettos and camps in the continental U.S. A further example: there was a time in this country when you could not easily find employment if you were an atheist and open about it. See the case of Bertrand Russell, dismissed in 1940 from the City College of New York for his atheistic and anti-religious views. All of these are examples of what we might call ‘mood.’ A mood may or may not reflect the legal situation at a given place and time. It may even be that laws themselves often come out of the mood, you could say out of the zeitgeist, of a place at a particular time. A mood can be a dangerous thing. It can suppress rational thought and even pervert the course of justice e.g. my previous examples. I begin to wonder whether I’m detecting a different sort of mood in this second decade of the 21st century.
I was at church this morning when a fellow from U. of I. asked me if I’d seen a new report that allegedly demonstrates that there’s been a consistent rise in hostility towards Christians in America. As it happens, I had not seen this report. I didn’t even know it existed, and I was skeptical. After all, no one knows better than a researcher how the presentation of statistics and case precedents can shade, color or distort what is actually going on. If you emphasize certain facts, suppress others, shade your language so that you make this or that point, you can influence your readers to think as you want them to. Our media does it every hour of every day, quite successfully, I might add. So, though I am a Christian, I was immediately suspicious of a report that purported to make that claim.
I came home with Nicole and Delaney and looked up the report. It runs for 140 pages, and most of that is a listing of over 600 incidents involving attacks upon the expression of Christian faith. Each incident is well cited, so I could look it up if I wanted to. That’s just good research practice on the authors’ part. This blog post isn’t going to be a rehashing of that report. Though I will post a link to it for those who, like me, don’t want to take someone else’s word and want to examine the document for themselves. I’ll present one or two cases, but I’m going to supplement my discussion of the report with my own experience. After twelve years of study at three large state universities, I can say I’ve had plenty of opportunity to examine this mood for myself. My conclusions will be free of paranoia and well-reasoned even if some disagree.
The Report
“Survey of Religious Hostility in America”
By the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Counsel
Introductions by Pres. Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Counsel
Here are two sites where you can, as of this writing, download a full copy of the report as a PDF:
Case No. 1:
Barton v. Balch Springs (2004).
Senior citizens at a senior citizens center in Balch Springs Texas were told that they could no longer pray before meals or listen to inspirational music or sing gospel songs during mealtime. The city had recently passed new legislation forbidding religion in public buildings. The seniors sued and were allegedly told that if they won their suit, their meals would be taken away in that place because, the city argued, praying over government-funded meals demonstrated a constitutional conflict. The Department of Justice opened a probe into the matter as well, and the case was resolved in favor of the seniors. The final ruling held that private religious expression like theirs wasn’t the sort of government-sponsored religious talk that the constitution was designed to prevent.
Case No. 2:
Cenzon-DeCarlo v. Mount Sinai Hospital (2010).
Catherina Cenzon-Decarlo started work as an operating room nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2004. During the hiring process, she had the opportunity to sign a form as a conscientious objector to certain medical procedures, and in her form Miss Cenzon-Decarlo indicated that she would not perform abortions because of her religious objections to it. Well enough. Abortions, it seemed, were procedures you could be exempted from having to assist with. In May of 2009, she was ordered by the hospital to assist in a late-term abortion and threatened with termination and loss of her license if she did not comply. She lost in both district court and in the 2nd circuit court. I looked up the circuit court’s ruling, and the court ruled that the laws that gave protection on the grounds of religious objection didn’t make any allowance for private actions. In other words, Catherina was indeed protected from this sort of discrimination under the law, but, and here’s the trick, she had no right to sue under this particular law as a private citizen. On that basis her whole case was dismissed.
Case No. 3:
& Richland Counties (2012).
For a number of years now, Irmo High in Lexington County South Carolina has allowed its senior class to vote on whether the seniors will have a prayer at their graduation. The class votes, and a volunteer delivers the prayer if the class voted in favor of it. This isn’t something the school makes them do; it’s the students’ decision, and I suppose sometimes no prayer happens. Well, Matthew Nielson felt that his fellow classmates’ tradition was a violation of his constitutional liberties, and he tried to have the school put a stop to it. The school argues that it’s not officially endorsing the event, that it’s a student-initiated thing and so they’re not obligated to quash it. The case is still pending. Nielson is working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to press his suit. Whether he will succeed or not is uncertain.
The American Mood:
That report contains hundreds of cases. Some were resolved in a way that I agreed with and found legally sound. Others were resolved in a way that I personally didn’t agree with, but that I find legally sound. Still others seem to be neither legally sound nor right. On the plus side, one thing that came up for me as I read is that our judicial system can rule in favor of Christians, even if some radical right-wingers want you to think it never does. Sometimes, as my cases above showed, the Christians won, and that was wonderful for them. Sometimes they lost, and some of those losses, I regard as terribly unjust. My concern isn’t with the law. I’m not a lawyer and will never be one. Nor do I think that a long listing of legal case precedents, no matter whose side they favor, can adequately demonstrate the full extent of a mood.
My question is this: is there really a mood of intolerance towards Christians in America today? I think there is. I’ve met students who, when stating opinions in my classes, worded their opinions in the most secular, non-sectarian way possible. Then in my office, it would come out that they really felt otherwise or that they didn’t express their whole opinion on the subject. I’ve discovered a number of practicing, professing Christian students during office hour conversations like that. One thing that came up again and again during my years as a graduate teaching assistant is that many Christian students are afraid to make statements about their faith or to bring their faith into opinions on political or moral issues in the classroom. Why? Aren’t our universities built on a free exchange of ideas? If they are, then atheists, agnostics and peoples of every faith should be free to share their opinions. Yet, I’ve observed that Christians in particular feel that they cannot do so.
For my own part, for a long time I had a bible verse in my university email signature. Mostly, no one commented on it. It was in German, and that may have shielded me from attack. One professor in my doctoral program, however, took me aside one afternoon and warned me in the friendliest way imaginable that as I’m going on the academic job market, I might want to take that verse out of my email. She explained that some people might view it as a form of religious proselytizing. As I think about it, I recall that I’ve seen many an email with a signature at the bottom. Often times the signature is a literary or political quote. If I included a verse from the Qur’an or a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, no one would have said a word. But because it was a bible verse, and one from the New Testament, I have to worry about being sued for religious harassment or infringing somebody’s constitutional rights.
I wonder. I could include a quote from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion about how harmful religion is and how it ought to be quashed in some email or statement or other, and nobody would bat an eye. I could write a pro-Islamic statement about peace and Islam in light of our terrorism troubles and describe how the Qur’an is being misused by terrorists, quoting chapter and verse from it and from the hadiths, and I wouldn’t hear a word. I’d probably be lauded as multicultural, inclusive and an agent for intercultural dialogue. I could probably start up a student interest group that explores the ideas and tenets of Jainism, and I’d have no trouble doing so.
Suppose, on the other hand, that I wrote a statement opposing some university initiative, and in doing so, I based my stance on it explicitly on my Christian faith? Supposing I was teaching an applied ethics course and I argued from a Judeo-Christian perspective that there are absolute truths and there are fixed standards of right and wrong? What if a student came to my office and saw me with a braille bible on my desk? They wouldn’t recognize what the braille book is, so they’d ask me, and I’d tell them that it’s part of the bible. In the climate of today, I could then be sued for it. I’d likely win, but the lawsuit would still get filed, I’m sure.
The first amendment can cut both ways. Today, it’s popular to employ it every time you want to suppress a religious display, practice, speech or anything else in the public arena. Yet I argue that it works the other way. Shouldn’t I be free to express my opinions too? You don’t hear about atheists being sued in this country today because they say something non-sectarian. You just don’t see that. But let a student mention God or Jesus Christ in a valedictory speech, let a professor offer a Christian-like opinion, let a person refuse to participate in some work-related function because of religious convictions, and all hell breaks loose. That, in general terms, is the mood of our country in this second decade of the twenty-first century.
It is a mood that succeeds in large part because of postmodern ideals. In the postmodern age, nothing is really true, nothing is really right or really wrong, and all the rest is relative. What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me, so the attitude goes. I think one of the reasons Christianity is attacked so vigorously in this climate is that it asserts that there are truths and there is right and there is wrong. It’s not the only faith that does so. Islam also holds truths to be absolute. Judaism definitely asserts the rightness or wrongness of many things. But it is politically dangerous to challenge those faiths for a number of reasons. In contrast, attacking Christianity is, to put it simply, safe.
Ravi Zacharias once summed up this mood as follows:
Philosophically, you can believe anything so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything so long as you do not claim that it is a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is Eastern, it is granted critical immunity. If western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same of ceremonies from the Eastern fold.
Conclusion:
I’m not going to say that what’s happening in America amounts to religious persecution. Not today, at least. That’s a word that many on the right like to throw about far too frequently. To me, using that word in this country would be a disservice to the Christians of present-day Sudan, to the Christians of ancient Rome and to the Jews who died in the Shoah. Yet, Liberal America isn’t nearly so tolerant as it wants to think itself to be. Christianity is tolerated less and less, and people who believe in the truth of the bible are seen as oddities at best, and as narrow-minded self-righteous bigots at worst. The bible challenges our notions of universalism, of relative truths and self-determined value systems. That makes it, and those who believe in it, unpopular. I wonder uneasily what will happen in America over the course of the rest of my life. I wonder very uneasily indeed.
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