By Betsy VanDenBerghe
Monday, July 02, 2018
In late June, as the United States descended into a
high-combustion immigration debate marked by a degree of rancor extraordinary
even for an era characterized by discord, an alternate universe quietly
unfolded in which cultural-political rivals of goodwill came together to
discuss an equally contentious issue: the tension between religious freedom and
LGBT rights. Resuscitating such old-school notions as common ground and
fairness for all, the fifth Religious Freedom Annual Review, hosted by the
Brigham Young University International Center for Law and Religion Studies in
Provo, Utah, gathered legal scholars, LGBT advocates, journalists, and concerned
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to grapple over court cases, questions
about higher education and journalistic fairness, and — surprise! — common
feelings of vulnerability.
“This is not a kumbaya attempt to paper over differences,
but an effort to understand what’s at stake if we give up on the messy work of
pluralism,” said William Pierce, a First Amendment advocate and senior director
of APCO Worldwide, a public-affairs and communications-strategy consultancy.
While the mostly professional and scholarly attendees gave the event the the
look of a legal convention, a few clerical collars, kippahs, rainbow stickers,
and headscarves attested to the viewpoint diversity that was most evident in
panels and breakout sessions. Participants offered an unusual witness both that
strongly held convictions — religious, cultural, political — are not going to
disappear anytime soon and that they can be reasonably debated in measured
arguments free of name-calling, shout-downs, and unfriending.
Clarion Call for Religious Identity
Diving into the pluralistic space in which deep
differences on questions of identity, belief, and sexuality are disagreed on
agreeably, Whitney Clayton, a high-ranking official of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, managed in his keynote address to wow participants
across the ideological spectrum. In a subsequent panel, Yale law professor and
LGBT-rights advocate William Eskridge called the speech the “brilliant and
central point” of the conference. Along with race and gender, Clayton said,
“faith and religious conviction are the most powerful and defining sources of
personal and family identity” for tens of millions of Americans.
“One cannot check religious identity at the church or
synagogue exit or the door of one’s home any more than one can check their race
or ethnicity,” Whitney argued, describing religion as much more than “something
to grow out of, like a childhood belief in Santa Claus.” To those who believe
that certain favored classes deserve special legal protections that do not
extend to religious adherents, he said, “I would ask you to reconsider.” For
many Americans, their religious identity “is vastly more important and profound
than race, color, ethnic origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education,
profession, or wealth.”
Messy Haggling and Common Ground
How those identities and core beliefs play out in the
public square was the subject of panels on common ground. Most participants
agreed that religious-freedom and LGBT advocates need not endorse each others’
beliefs but that the core rights of both deserve protection in a free society.
LGBT activists see their employment, housing, and other rights as tenuous in most
states and worry about teen-suicide rates. Religious-freedom advocates resent
having their deeply held beliefs dismissed as bigotry and are concerned about
their own employment vulnerabilities, which range from being fired because of a
religious affiliation to being discriminated against for attending a religious
educational institution (or, as in the recent Canadian case of the law school
at Trinity Western University, having their accreditation denied for a
Christian honor code).
Thomas Berg of the University of St. Thomas is a legal
scholar who advocates for both sides. He spoke on a panel titled “Finding
Common Ground and the Common Good on Religious Liberty and LGBTQ Rights” and
made a strong case for doing just that in good-faith negotiations. For LGBT
activists, protecting their rights is an existential issue, and religious
observers face a demographic threat to their religious freedom: Younger voters
are increasingly dedicated to a vision in which the concepts of equality and
justice do not encompass one’s ability to live by traditional religious
teachings and standards. All of us want to live out our identities in the
public square, says Berg, and religious and LGBT communities have some parallel
concerns.
Many speakers and panelists despaired over the impoverishment
of our society’s deeply polarized discourse. “Finding common ground is where
the rubber meets the road in pluralism,” insisted Boston College theology
professor Erik Owens, and being unable to disagree constructively bodes ill for
the already ill body politic. Emma Green of The
Atlantic looks to religious organizations themselves for examples of
religious communities “used to working out hard things among themselves.” As
people with Bible-based values feel more and more on the defensive, “how far
will it go?” she wondered. “Will we even be able to talk to each other?” She,
along with others, blamed the self-segregating silos of social media for some
of the problem. “Twitter is a nasty place, and I would suggest you never go
there,” she quipped.
On a more hopeful note for common-ground initiatives,
LGBT-rights advocates and religious-freedom advocates offered heartfelt praise
for the Utah Compromise of 2015, bipartisan legislation hammered out by
religious and state leaders alongside Equality Utah, an LGBT-rights advocacy
group. The Utah Compromise offers core protections to religious and LGBT
communities alike — a remarkable give-and-take that has not been repeated on
either the local or the national level since its successful implementation
three years ago. “It’s not happening in other states even though the LGBT side
would be wise to get help with employment and housing discrimination,” said
Tyler Deaton, a conservative gay-rights advocate who described meeting his
husband on a Wheaton College Republican get-out-the-vote tour. Eskridge, the
gay-rights advocate from Yale Law School, explained that national LGBT-rights
groups don’t seem interested in building on what he regards as Utah’s “deeply
principled statute.” However, Pierce, who specializes in finding-areas-of-agreement
consulting, sees healthy conversations finally taking place in several states
and thinks that they could lead to dialogue at the national level.
Getting the Religious Story Right in the
Media
In workshops and in the second keynote address, by The Atlantic’s Green, the conference
emphasized the importance of educating journalists about legal issues and the
complexities and nuances involved in covering religion. But aside from National Review, in this piece you’re
reading now, the only outlets covering the conference were religious wire
services and a local paper noted for excellence in religious-news analysis.
Green and fellow journalists blamed the demise of religious-news coverage
partly on falling ad revenues and editorial tendencies to prioritize sports and
other departments over religion, despite religion’s being central to many news
stories and crucial in many people’s lives. As pointed out by Bobby Ross Jr.,
chief correspondent of the Christian
Chronicle, “the Dallas Morning News
has multiple sports reporters and shallow religion coverage in an area where
religion is tremendously important.”
Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist and senior fellow
in media and religion at King’s College in New York, is “the godfather of all
religion reporting and religion news,” as Green described him at one point. In
a brilliant workshop titled “The Seven Deadly Sins of the Religion Beat,”
Mattingly enumerated them:
• Use simplistic
labels as often as possible (especially “fundamentalist,” as a soft putdown).
• Assume that
religion is always about politics (instead of about bakers’ and florists’ inner
convictions).
• Treat
religious doctrine and tradition as mere opinions (that can be easily
discarded).
• Be lazy (and
settle for quotes from the same activist over and over).
• Focus on the
most lurid examples of religious communities (as if they were exotic tribes).
• Always report
on big national issues (while ignoring overlooked and local trends that drive
them).
• Ignore the
role that religion plays in hot topics (e.g., Kevin Durant’s being won over not
by expensive gifts proffered by multiple NBA teams but by a visit from four
Golden State Warrior players who hold Bible study together).
Mattingly’s first point, about editorial tendencies to
use simplistic labels in referring to religious communities, found traction in
multiple sessions, including “Religious Freedom Issues Facing American
Muslims,” which featured panelists including multigenerational Arab Americans
and others with connections to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and
Asia. “Just try putting together an Arab Student Association as I did and
you’ll see we’re not a homogeneous group!” joked Sahar Aziz, a Rutgers law
professor. Aziz, Haroon Azar of UCLA’s Burkle Center for International
Relations, and Ossama Bahloul of the Islamic Center of Nashville all voiced
concern over a range of religious-freedom issues: headscarf bans, zoning laws
affecting construction of mosques, and some of the harsher rhetoric surrounding
the travel ban. Muslim loyalties and affiliation remain multi-dimensional.
Progressives often advocate for Muslims, recently voicing religious-freedom
concerns over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the travel ban, but
Bahloul spoke for many of his co-religionists when he remarked, “I’m socially
conservative. We contribute to morality and religious liberty, and our young
people, raised in America, without accents, should not receive questions like
‘Do you have a bomb under your scarf?’”
Mattingly and Green pointed out the complexities of most
faith communities, which media often label right or left. That “is not a
helpful door to walk through,” Green observed. “Churches are much more complex,
and holding these frames too tightly can trip us up.” For example, “the 80
percent Evangelical Trump vote is much more nuanced than that,” Mattingly
explained. “Doctrinal and historical motivations are ignored, and also the
reality that the current political system doesn’t give people a lot of options
. . . which is why I voted for neither presidential candidate” in 2016. At a
workshop on religious freedom and higher education, Beck A. Taylor, the
president of Whitworth University, explained that “as a religious institution,
we appreciate some things the current administration is doing and are worried
about others. We are pro-life but stand with our DACA students.” Aziz insisted
that “it’s especially important to avoid huge generalizations about very
diverse Muslim communities. People coming from Christian communities understand
there’s always bad apples in any group, but they don’t apply [that
understanding] to the less familiar Muslim community.”
Although faulting newsrooms for assigning inexperienced
writers to cover complex religion stories and in general for failing to take
the religion beat seriously enough, panelists praised the media’s coverage of
the legal aspects of religion stories. Holly Hollman, general counsel for the
Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said that “Masterpiece Cakeshop coverage in general has been particularly
good, capturing both sides of the issue.” Berg led a workshop that began with
what he called a “half-hour whistle-stop tour of the story of American
religious freedom.” He focused on how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of
1993, which “ensures that interests in religious freedom are protected,” went
from enjoying near-universal political and cultural support to losing that
consensus in the 21st century.
Panelists pointed out that churches need to do their part
in communicating with the media. Mattingly considers the “But they hate us”
response from religious communities to be immensely unhelpful. “Conservatives
pay a price for hating the press,” he said. “So get a church media committee
together with an articulate spokesman, and don’t be afraid to record an
interview.” Ross of the Christian
Chronicle recalled an incident that threw a 1,500-member black church “with
a long history of community service into a scandal over two tweets.” For this
and other reasons, Hollman urged, “it’s important for reporters to talk to
church people, and religious leaders must be willing to get out there and tell
their stories.”
Journalists who cover higher education expressed their
willingness to cover religious issues fairly. On a panel dealing with a range
of issues — the rights of religious student groups, concerns over grant
funding, concerns that religious schools have over the possibility of losing
accreditation — Taylor noted that students at religious institutions can “bring
their whole selves into their university experience.” “We don’t always include
religious colleges in our stories, so it’s incumbent on us to improve,” Katie
Mangan of the Chronicle of Higher
Education admitted, adding that she’s “learned a lot the last couple of
days and can go into a story with more sensitivity now.” When an attendee
during the Q&A described pushback from a large university at which he was
trying to organize a religious-freedom conference, Soctt Jaschik, the editor of
Inside Higher Ed, urged him to “go
public.” “Give me a call and I can ask
the university for their reasoning behind the decision.”
Pluralism in Practice
Those who worry that the mutual respect in evidence at
this conference might require the watering down of core convictions need only
have attended the final day’s general session. The Reverend Eugene F. Rivers
III and his wife, Jacqueline C. Rivers, were living embodiments of Clayton’s
rousing keynote address on religion as a core identity. Rivers’s faith began,
he said, when he was a twelve-year-old “surrounded outside by dudes who wanted
to kill me.” Hovering inside his home, he listened to a sermon by Billy Graham
(“even though he wasn’t exactly my demographic”), accepted Jesus, and went on
to major in philosophy of science at Harvard, “to add intellectual depth to my
testimony.” After graduation, he and Jacqueline and their infant son moved to
the worst section of Boston, where “our high liberal friends didn’t follow us.”
Their house was shot at 29 times on their first night. “But my well-educated
wife’s religious convictions compelled her to stay,” explained Rivers. “She
told the police, ‘How can we leave when others can’t?’”
From there, the Riverses began transforming their community
through the Boston TenPoint Coalition, which emphasizes partnership between
faith communities and law enforcement. It is a model for anti-violence programs
being implemented in several U.S. cities. Black churches “are usually the
smallest and neediest and serve the poorest and least educated, “Jacqueline
Rivers said. “Faith-based organizations have also come together to turn around
enormous crime waves.” The aim is to share food and other resources, she
explained, but also “the most precious thing we have: our faith.”
Reverend Rivers addressed the question of what religious
freedom means for black Americans in light of the history of slavery.
Deliverance from slavery gives religious African Americans “the basis of our
identity — our faith, and knowledge that God delivered us like the Israelites.
White people can compartmentalize the religion alongside their money and
resources, but God is the center of our lives, and Pew surveys back this up.”
He went on to quote Genesis 1:27 on the nature of male–female complementarity,
noting that “we don’t need fluidity and confusion among the poor.” He asked the
audience for their prayers for his and his wife’s work in some of the most
violent neighborhoods in our country’s cities.
Elizabeth Clark, the conference organizer and the
associate director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at
BYU Law School, related that a speaker told her after the forum had ended,
“This is so valuable — no one else is in this space. They should be.” For Clark,
the conference represents more than religious-freedom issues. “These
discussions illustrate what pluralism looks like in practice,” she says. “It’s
hard and messy, and no one may end up perfectly satisfied, but it’s a crucial
part of the American project.”
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