The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today by James Tonkowich

Author:James Tonkowich [Tonkowich, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781618906434
Publisher: Saint Benedict Press
Published: 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Government and the Management Religion

The threat government poses to religious liberty in the United States is hardly new. While the examples in this section are from the Obama Administration, the desire to scuttle religious liberty and replace it with state directed “freedom of worship” or “religious toleration” was with us during the Clinton administration as well.

John Shattuck served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under President Clinton. In that post, he was charged with promoting and protecting human rights including religious liberty throughout the world.

But speaking at a 2002 human rights conference at Harvard University, Shattuck said “Freedom of religion is predicated upon the existence of more than one religion. But a multiplicity of religions has always meant conflict, and religious conflict often led to war and human devastation. This was the state of reality for centuries and millennia, and it is hardly a ringing endorsement of religious freedom.”1

Rather than religious freedom, Shattuck suggested we substitute religious toleration, which, as we have already seen, is a creation of the state rather than an inalienable human right. As William Saunders of Americans United for Life noted, Shattuck “and the philosophical liberalism he represents, sees religion, unlike other human rights, as a problem, as a source of conflict, as something to be managed.”2

It is precisely this desire to manage religion, religious ideas, religious organizations, and religious believers that we have seen since President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.

Even as a candidate Barack Obama eschewed the phrase “religious freedom,” but with his speech about the November 5, 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began freely substituting the phrase “freedom of worship” for “freedom of religion.” Freedom of worship is usually understood as the right to private belief and practice of faith at home and in designated places of worship. It excludes the rights associated with freedom of religion such as evangelism, conversion, raising children in the faith, training and appointing spiritual leaders, and advocating in the public square public morality and policies that are consistent with faith.

Despite the administration’s protestations that they are using “freedom of religion” and “freedom of worship” interchangeably in order to be sensitive to Muslims, President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies show a marked tilt away from freedom of religion to the watered-down freedom of worship.

What else could explain the administration’s arguments in the Supreme Court case Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC)?

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