In 2015, a government inspector at a Michigan meatpacking factory found some offensive material in the lunch room: a “tract” – we don’t know if it was a book or a leaflet – in defence of the traditional definition of marriage. It had been put there by the factory owner, Donald Vander Boon.
The inspector did his duty: he reported it to his superiors, who threatened to shut down the factory unless the tract was removed. Mr Vander Boon made an official complaint. The dispute is ongoing.
This is the kind of thing that happens fairly frequently in modern Western democracies. But it was not supposed to happen under a Donald Trump presidency. “The first priority of my administration,” Trump promised in 2015, “will be to preserve and protect our religious liberty.”
Those words are now being quoted against Trump – by religious commentators and organisations which say his new executive order is worthless. The order, issued last week at the White House, promised three things: to “honour and enforce” protections on religious liberty; to allow churches to get involved in partisan politics; and to offer “regulatory relief” to religious healthcare providers.
One of those healthcare providers, the Little Sisters of the Poor, had to fight the colossus of the Obama administration, which tried to shut down their care homes unless they provided contraception. The Little Sisters were at the White House for last Thursday’s photo opportunity, along with Cardinal Donald Wuerl and a host of religious leaders. Visually, it looked encouraging.
But as soon as Christians began to scrutinise Trump’s order, many felt cheated. Princeton professor Robert George, a longstanding campaigner for religious liberty, tweeted: “The religious liberty executive order is meaningless. No substantive protections for conscience. A betrayal. Ivanka [Trump] and Jared [Kushner] won. We lost.” The journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty said: “This is table scraps. We’re done for.”
The order, according to its critics, reveals that the Trump administration is much more interested in talking about religious freedom than in actually defending it. Its first paragraph, which says the administration will “protect and vigorously promote religious liberty”, offers no suggestions about how to do this.
Part two pledges not to enforce laws which stop pastors from endorsing political candidates. But the writer and lawyer David French of National Review pointed out that this doesn’t go far enough to make churches safe: they could just be prosecuted under the next non-Trump administration. And in any case, when Christians worry about religious freedom, they don’t mean the freedom to endorse political candidates.
The next part of the order did address a major concern for Catholics in particular – about the healthcare mandate which commanded employers (including the Little Sisters of the Poor) to offer contraception. But its wording, like other formulations in the document, only gestures towards reform. There is nothing to overturn the regulations which potentially threaten the Little Sisters and others. Donald Vander Boon may still have to worry about the closure of his factory.
As French pointed out, Trump could begin the process of passing actual statutes to protect religious freedom – in the face of “the comprehensive assault on religious organisations on federally funded campuses, the threats to the religious freedom of Christian educational institutions, and the attack on the rights of conscience of dissenters from the new orthodoxies on marriage, the family, and even the definition of male and female.”
Nevertheless, some campaigners looked on the bright side. The Becket Fund, which campaigns for religious freedom in the courts as well as the public square, said the order confirmed “that all federal agencies and lawyers must obey the law and respect religious liberty”.
In particular, it said, the order vindicated the Little Sisters, who had argued all along that they had no legal duty to obey the Obama administration’s wishes over providing birth control.
The Becket Fund senior counsel Mark Rienzi said: “Now the agencies and government lawyers need to follow through to finally give up this futile crusade.” This acknowledges that religious freedom is too big a problem for any one president to solve all by himself – whether he wants to or not.
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