Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

First, he recalled his own community service in Chicago, noting that it had been church supported.

Then he reminded listeners that it was President Bill Clinton who signed landmark legislation widening the role religion-based groups could play in government-financed programs, and Al Gore who in 1999 first proposed a full-scale religion-based initiative.

While Mr. Obama acknowledged President Bush’s promise to “rally the armies of compassion” through such an initiative, he maintained that the promise had gone unfulfilled because of too little financing and too much partisanship — and that he, Barack Obama, would not only carry out but also expand what Mr. Bush had pledged.

He was two-thirds of the way through his remarks when he inserted the six words with the potential to put his whole effort at risk. Speaking “as someone who used to teach constitutional law,” he spelled out “a few basic principles” to reassure listeners that such partnerships between religious groups and the government would not endanger the separation of church and state.

“First,” he said, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.”

That little phrase between the dashes — “or against the people you hire” — ignited a political explosion. “Fraud,” declared Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. “What Obama wants,” Mr. Donohue said, is “to secularize the religious workplace.” In its newsletter, the conservative Family Research Council called Mr. Obama’s position “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.” No less heated reactions came from the other end of the political spectrum, where the Obama proposal was denounced not for that short phrase but for what liberals saw as an abandonment of their principles and part of a suspicious move toward the center.

The intense reaction on both sides was pretty predictable, but some people offered more analytic reactions. They welcomed Mr. Obama’s stance, yet made it clear that those six words pointed to deeper questions about religious freedom that could very well seal the fate not only of any new and potentially improved partnerships between government and religious groups but also even those partnerships that, in reality, had been operating for decades.

Religious groups that know the law have long agreed that federal money cannot be used for proselytizing or discriminating against beneficiaries. But they have never agreed that taking religious considerations into account in hiring personnel — certainly for top positions if not for all staffing — should be considered discrimination. And they point to the religious exemption in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislative and Supreme Court decisions to back this assertion.

The law, in fact, has its ambiguities and inconsistencies, as one might expect. But when the Bush administration’s religion-based initiative was debated in 2001, Jeffrey Rosen, who teaches law at George Washington University and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and other publications, pointed out the logic in an article in The New Republic.

“It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all.”

Mr. Rosen also noted that “without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds.” If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Of course, eight years of polarization over Bush administration policies in general, plus specific accusations by former administration officials that its religion-based initiative was cynically bent to political purposes, have inflamed discussion of such questions. Add in the old conflicts over abortion and new ones over same-sex relationships, and today even longstanding government interactions with venerable religious charities, educational institutions and medical providers can no longer be taken for granted.

Beneath these immediate conflicts, generally pitting liberals against traditional faiths, is a more basic tension between two understandings of religious freedom. One is an individualistic understanding that emphasizes protecting the personal conscience, especially the dissenting conscience, from coercion. From Jefferson to Emerson to most of today’s intellectuals, this strand is typically suspicious of religious institutions, which it sees as more likely to be antagonistic than favorable to true religion.

The other is a more communitarian understanding that emphasizes the role of religious communities in nourishing conscience and providing a framework for living out its commitments. This strand has typically worried about protecting minority faiths from the pressures of the religious majority but has become increasingly sensitive to protecting any distinctive faith from being pressed to conform to a common-denominator culture.

Mr. Obama’s six little words on hiring by religious groups are not apt to be his last comment on the subject. “As someone who used to teach constitutional law,” he is surely aware that the law on religious hiring is much more complicated than a condensed reference to discrimination might suggest. And his personal combination of liberal politics and religious experience probably makes him better placed than most American politicians to realize fully what, beyond electoral gambits, is at stake