WASHINGTON (ABP) — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ Feb. 20 announcement to Southern Baptist Convention leaders about a new Justice Department focus on religious freedom garnered some praise — and significant criticism — from other Christian leaders.
Gonzales announced the launch of the department’s “First Freedom Project” in a speech during a regularly scheduled SBC Executive Committee meeting.
“Religious freedom is a fundamental part of our nation’s history and one of its core principles,” Gonzales said. The effort will include educational efforts to inform government officials, employers and everyday Americans about their religious-liberty rights under law.
The department simultaneously released a 43-page report touting its record, under President Bush, in defending religious freedom. Gonzales and the report implied that the Bush Justice Department’s record on prosecuting religious-discrimination cases was significantly stronger than that under former President Bill Clinton.
But several in the religious-liberty community said Bush’s record on the issue has been mixed, at best.
Brent Walker, executive director of the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said he appreciates the administration focusing on the First Amendment — but that the amendment covers two aspects of religious freedom that are inextricably linked to each other.
“The First Amendment has two protections for religious freedom — prohibition on religious establishments and protection for free exercise of religion,” Walker said in a statement provided to Associated Baptist Press. “The administration has often ignored the importance of the no-establishment principle by supporting attempts of governments to endorse a religious message, using tax dollars to fund pervasively religious organizations, allowing religious discrimination in hiring for federally funded projects, and going to the Supreme Court to cut back on the rights of citizens to challenge such practices.”
Walker also noted that Bush’s record on free-exercise protections is “not perfect.” He pointed to a Supreme Court case last year in which the administration attempted to limit a small religious sect’s ability to use hallucinogenic tea for sacramental purposes. A unanimous Supreme Court rejected the administration’s position.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State went further, releasing a statement Feb. 22 saying Gonzales’ announcement “reeks of hypocrisy.” It called attention to actions detailed in the report that the Justice Department touts as religious-freedom successes — but that are actually quite controversial in the religious-liberty community.
For instance, the report features cases in which the department argued for employees who had been discriminated against on the basis of religion. But, in a different section, the report also touted the Justice Department’s advocacy on behalf of the Salvation Army, which was sued for using government social-service funds but continuing to take religion into account in its hiring decisions.
“Thanks to the Justice Department, the Salvation Army could literally place newspaper ads reading, ‘Help Wanted for Government-Funded Jobs: No Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Liberal Christians, Atheists Or Gays Need Apply’ and this would be perfectly acceptable to Gonzales,” said Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United. “This is a perverse way of supposedly defending our religious-freedom rights.”
On the other side of the coin, a conservative Christian group praised Gonzales’ announcement.
“We applaud Attorney General Gonzales for recognizing the ongoing threat to religious freedom and for taking firm steps to defend our ‘first freedom,'” wrote Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, in his Feb. 21 e-mail newsletter.
<And the head of the SBC’s public-affairs agency praised the actions of the Bush Justice Department.
p>”The attorney general’s desire to address a major meeting of SBC leaders to announce this initiative shows both the importance of the issue and the commitment of the Justice Department at the highest levels to defend every individual American’s religious freedom rights, particularly their free-exercise rights, which are too often infringed,” Baptist Press quoted Richard Land, president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, as saying. “This initiative is needed and should make a real difference.”
But others questioned Gonzales’ choice of settings for the announcement. He said he sought out SBC leaders for the opportunity because of their historic support of religious liberty.
The head of the National Council of Churches said he wished the attorney general had chosen a more representative body to hear his announcement. SBC leaders have been among Bush’s strongest and most consistent supporters.
NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar, in a statement prepared in response to an ABP reporter’s request for comment, said his organization thinks it is “unsettling that only a single denomination, representing a fraction of the rich diversity of religious life of America, was selected to receive the attorney general’s personal presentation. It would seem more appropriate had he made such an appearance before an ecumenical or interfaith gathering, symbolically underlining the vision of a nation in which the law plays no favorites but sees all faiths as equal before the Constitution.”
After his speech, in response to a question, Gonzales told reporters he chose an audience of Southern Baptists to announce the government’s new effort because “this is a group very interested in the protection of religious freedom.” He noted the “timing worked out where this was a good venue to speak to a receptive audience.”
Baptists in America were early champions of religious liberty and influenced the development of the Constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees religious liberty and other freedoms.
Gonzales also granted an interview on the topic to The 700 Club, the television program hosted by Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.
The NCC’s statement said Edgar had invited Gonzales to appear at the NCC Committee on Religious Liberty meeting, slated for March 12 in Washington, to “extend to this very diverse group of interfaith advocates for religious freedom the same courtesy of a face-to-face visit that he has already extended to the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The NCC also encouraged Gonzales to make similar appearances before leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals and “Jewish and Muslim faith groups who together make up the complex tapestry of religious life in our nation.”
One religious-liberty expert faulted Gonzales’ implicit swipes at the Justice Department under Clinton. Wake Forest Divinity School professor James Dunn said that, while the Clinton administration may have pursued fewer legal cases against alleged religious discrimination than Bush, the former president and his appointees defended religious freedom in other significant ways.
Dunn, who was executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee during the Clinton years, noted that the former president pushed strongly to improve religious freedom. Besides pushing legislation like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the bill that established the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Clinton officials also produced a document that has had a concrete impact on religion in public schools, Dunn said.
“Perhaps … the most extensive and statistically significant action for religious freedom in recent history was [Clinton’s] aggressive promotion for the guidelines for religion in public education and making clear that the public school was not a religion-free zone,” Dunn said.
“Not only did the White House give leadership in that regard, but the Justice Department … and the Education Department developed guidelines that literally transformed the attitudes of public educators about the free expression of religion in public schools and the necessity for maintaining the separation of church and state at the same time,” he continued.
Officials from the Justice Department did not immediately return an ABP reporter’s request for comment for this story Feb. 22.
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