American society seems to be crossing some sort of watershed in dealing with the issue of religion in public life. It seems that we may be moving from freedom of religion to freedom from religion. While many of the first colonists who settled in North America were seeking freedom from the control of the Church of England, once they had found a foothold they were unwilling to allow any diversity of religious expression or practice in their new communities. There is no question that various forms and flavors of Christianity have historically occupied a dominant position in American life. Non-denominational Christianity was as far as most people thought it was necessary to go down the road toward diversity.
While a majority of Americans still nominally profess some form of Christian affiliation, since WW II there has been a steady decline in active and regular participation. For many Americans Sunday morning observance most often takes place on the golf course or at the shopping mall. One of the most visible conflicts in this transition is the tension between conservative religious groups and the movement toward full equality for gays and lesbians. This is raising issues about the role of such religious groups in public life.
Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy
For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.
After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.
In a collision between religious freedom and anti-discrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.
Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.
What is at issue here is not the right of these groups to meet together on campus and conduct religious observances, but their status as official campus student organizations. Other aspects of this conflict are coming up in such issues as public accommodation law and the desire of some religious individuals to refuse to provide goods and services to gays and lesbians. The fundamental question is how far private religious views and practice can be extended into public life.
When I was growing up in the deep south in the 1950s school days always began with some form of devotional reading. No one would have thought about questioning the practice, just as no one would have dared questioning the system of racial segregation in which we lived. Things have changed a lot since then.
For many evangelical groups the gradual erosion of their priviledged status is seen as a threat to their rights. Some of their more flamboyant leaders are making analogies to the holocaust. The NYT article notes that on college campuses, most other faith groups have been willing to ascribe to the non-discrimination policies. This is not really a war against religious people and their rights to practice their religions. It is a war against bigotry.