Having followed much of the controversy surrounding what has become known as the contraceptive mandate, I was at first buoyed by the news that the Obama administration was going to offer a rule change. The original mandate was and is a gross violation of the First Amendment. The unilateral decision on the part of the administration that this only applies to individuals and so-called “religious organizations” was utterly preposterous. Its subsequent assumption of the wisdom to determine which organizations are sufficiently religious to qualify bespeaks a deep arrogance.
Jonathan Waits
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The announcement of the rule-change, then, was met with some hope, but a healthy degree of skepticism given the administration’s generally poor record on religious freedom.
For the sake of clarity, the real controversy of the mandate for evangelical groups is not the birth control requirement, but rather the portion of the mandate which demands that employers provide their female employees access to abortifacients. In this, the administration has assumed the power to dictate to private organizations which of their beliefs they can freely exercise.
More even than this, though, the argument of the administration in many of the lawsuits currently filed against it has been that non-religious organizations do not actually have religious freedom. This argument should be deeply troubling to people concerned with religious freedom. Think briefly about the proposition being implied here. If you are an individual acting on your own, you have freedom of religion. But if you are a group of individuals acting together for the purpose of earning a profit by pursuing activities that are not limited to proselytization, you do not. Phrased like this the asininity of the administration’s argument is laid bare.
This brings us back to the subject of this column: the amended rule. While the heart of the mandate remains unchanged, the definition of what counts as a religious organization has been broadened to include groups not previously exempted. I suppose we could react favorably, as the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty has done, but I’ll have to seek forgiveness for remaining skeptical. As critics of the mandate have pointed out, the essential deceit of the mandate remains entirely intact. This seems to be a clear violation of the First Amendment and I have been shocked and saddened that groups such as the BJC have not been much more vigorous in their opposition to this administration’s, frankly, alarming breach of its constitutional boundaries.
BJC executive director Brent Walker was quoted as noting that “the proposed rules laudably clarify and simplify the definition of religious organizations … and seek to provide an acceptable alternative for self-insured employees.” Still, the new rule does not actually allow the newly-exempted organizations the opportunity to fully pursue their religious convictions regarding abortifacients. Instead, the opposed drugs will simply be provided free-of-charge from the insurance companies.
Come now, who honestly believes these will be provided free-of-charge? Someone will pay. Furthermore, the proposed rule change does not do anything to bring clarity to the question of how exactly this administration is able to determine which organizations are sufficiently religious to be exempted and which are not. Why should the administration be able to wreck the business of for-profit organizations governed by a worldview which stands in opposition to the administration’s position on matters of pre-nascent life? If there is any clarity at all which stems from this rule change, it is far over-shadowed by a much greater number of issues on which confusion remains.
As a final observation worth making here, allow me to add this point to the conversation. Of all the aspects of this debate which should be troubling to Jesus followers committed to living out a Christian worldview, there is one aspect which has gotten far too little attention. The worldview on display on the part of the administration is that religious values are a private affair that should be kept out of the public square. The assumption here is that there is a broadly agreed upon non-religious (or at least pan-religious) worldview by which the public square should be governed.
This results from a fundamentally wrongheaded understanding of what religious values are. Our religious values stem from our worldviews. Our worldview governs everything we do whether those actions are public or private. They cannot be shelved in one sphere of life simply because they are not currently in vogue. In fact, they cannot be shelved at all. A commitment to be a follower of Jesus is a whole worldview commitment and affects every single part of life. If a person was capable of putting away his private religious values in the public square, I would argue that those are not really his core values. Core values cannot get put away.
When the administration argues, even implicitly, that people should keep their religious values a private matter, what it is really arguing is that their worldview is going to be the only acceptable one for public discourse and if you don’t agree with them, you will pay a price for trying to come to the table. You can either agree with their worldview, or you are not welcome. This approach to public interaction should leave clear thinking believers deeply troubled. The contraceptive mandate puts this belief of the administration clearly on display.
The new rule, far from easing this tension, only cements it. Whether or not you agree with the demand this administration has made for employers to provide controversial drugs for their employees regardless of their personal feelings, their suggestion that no worldview but their own is valid in the public square should leave all of us uneasy. If you ever wonder why the public square has seemed to grow more hostile and less charitable in the past few years, perhaps it is because the worldview which runs in part on charity (i.e., love), namely the Christian worldview, has been excluded from participation. The contraceptive mandate, even in its new form, is only another sign that this has already happened.
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.