Lily on Accommodation / RLUIPA, response 2

Lily on Accommodation / RLUIPA, response 2

I've been thinking a lot about your post, Mike, over the past day or so. Some instinct in me feels a little nervous about the civic religion concept, and I've been trying to figure out exactly why -- whether there's actually a good reason that it makes me uncomfortable, or whether it is just not a concept that I'm used to. Here's one worry I am able to articulate:

The church/state wall is, in many ways, most meaningful to me not because it keeps religion out of the government, but because it keeps the government out of religion. For example, I worry about the recent Supreme Court decision affirming the use of school vouchers. This is not so much because I think that the government is embracing religion by giving parents more choices about where to send their kids to school. Rather, I don't want the government to ever be able to say to a religious school that they can't refuse to hire teachers who do not share the school's religious views. Here's how this could happen: If enough of a school's funding has its source in the voucher system (say, for example, 80-90%), then some plaintiff's lawyer is going to be able to make a pretty persuasive argument in court that that school's hiring decisions amount to "state action." The problem with that is, the Constitution and U.S. statutory law very properly do not allow the government discriminate on the basis of religion (or race, etc.) Therefore the school will be forced to make the choice between forgoing 90% of its funding (thereby almost certainly going under, at that point!) or hiring someone whose religious views and values are deeply contrary to what the school is trying to teach. In short, whenever the government starts getting its fingers into a venture, that venture is running a risk of losing autonomy.

In a worst case scenario, if this type of thing started happening all over the place, we would experience a national watering-down of our religious schools. These schools serve incredibly important purposes in American culture, instilling moral and religious values in many future leaders, and quite simply, bringing young people to God. A dilution of their mission would, in my opinion, be a national tragedy.

And this is only one example of an instance where an erosion of the church/state wall could have highly damaging repercussions to the very institutions (churches) that the government is trying to support. I am sure we can think of many others.

I would be really interested to hear others' thoughts on all these issues... Is there any way to allow the government to help fund worthy religious causes without experiencing the downside of government interference? On a slightly different note, is there any way to have a "civic religion" type of concept that is not merely a watered down, generic, over-politically-correct version of the incredibly powerful religious ideals by which many Americans live their personal lives?