Faith tests okayed for campus Christian group at ASU

[Newsom Michael]

I find the CLS Statement of Faith a poor substitute for the Nicene
Creed.  It is not acceptable, at least to this Catholic, and I would
never sign it, and I would urge Catholics not to sign it. 

 

I think that there is a proper legal basis, rooted in the Religion
Clauses, for distinguishing between secular groups and religious groups.
I also think that there is a proper legal basis for debarring groups who
threaten the integrity and the harmony of an institutional community.
(Recall that many of us are not comfortable with some of the claims made
by some chaplains that military community, discipline, and troop morale
are subordinate to the chaplains' sense of what their religion
requires.)  Accordingly, it is altogether possible that some religious
groups should be disbarred for breaching conduct restrictions.
Institutional life, civility, comity and harmony have to count for
something.   

  _____  

From: Gregory S. Baylor [mailto:gbaylor at clsnet.org] 
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 7:51 PM
To: 'Law & Religion issues for Law Academics'
Subject: RE: Faith tests okayed for campus Christian group at ASU

 

For what it's worth . . . 

 

Those who drafted the CLS statement of faith intended it to be
acceptable to people in the Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions.
The current executive director of CLS is a Roman Catholic, and there are
a number of Roman Catholics on the CLS board of directors.

 

Greg Baylor

	-----Original Message-----
	From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Scarberry, Mark
	Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 7:42 PM
	To: 'Law & Religion issues for Law Academics'
	Subject: RE: Faith tests okayed for campus Christian group at
ASU

	At some point I may have time to respond in detail to Michael's
long post. For now, suffice it to say that what the CLS chapters are
asking for from the state universities is the ability to form a group,
to reserve a room, and to put up posters advertising their meetings.
None of that goes beyond what other campus groups want, and none of it
is "overweening importuning." 

	 

	Members of CLS chapters may do other things that Michael does
not like, such as initiating conversations with other students in an
attempt to convince them to "come to Christ." But none of that other
activity has anything to do with whether students have the right to form
CLS groups, reserve rooms, and advertise their meetings. The state does
not have a right to be hostile to a religious group because that group
seeks to spread its faith. If the means used to spread faith are
unprotected (e.g., true threats, harassment of various sorts,
indiscriminate use of loudspeakers), then those means can be prohibited
or regulated. But the government cannot determine that a particular
religious group is not entitled to associate, to meet, and to publicize
its meetings on an equal footing with other groups. 

	 

	I can't believe Michael really believes that the state
university can allow a Catholic group to be formed and to meet, an
environmentalist group to be formed and to meet, and a feminist group to
be formed and to meet, but refuse to allow a CLS group to be formed and
to meet. (By the way, I believe Catholics are welcome along with
Protestants to participate fully in CLS groups and do indeed
participate. I don't believe there is anything in the CLS statement of
faith that a Catholic Christian would find objectionable. See
http://clsnet.org/clsPages/statement.php. I will ask about this point at
the annual CLS conference to be held this weekend in Naples, Florida,
which seems to have survived the hurricane.) 

	 

	Michael is right to be unhappy about the history of de facto
Protestant establishment in the public schools and about the resistance
of Protestants to funding of alternative Catholic schools. Wasn't
Americans United for Separation of Church and State once named
Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and
State? Anti-catholic, anti-immigrant sentiment was a key factor in our
legal history. But that does not mean that the government now may act
discriminatorily against Protestant (or more broadly Christian) groups. 

	 

	Mark S. Scarberry

	Pepperdine University School of Law

	 

	-----Original Message-----
	From: Newsom Michael [mailto:mnewsom at law.howard.edu] 
	Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 3:59 PM
	To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
	Subject: RE: Faith tests okayed for campus Christian group at
ASU

	 

	Mark, we may disagree as to the facts.  I take evangelical
Protestantism seriously enough to have faith, if that be the word, in
the desire of its adherents to proselytize all of the rest of us.  The
unique history of the English Reformation -- perhaps better described,
as I have elsewhere, as the Anglo-American Reformation -- gives
evangelical Protestantism its distinctive character.  Evangelicals have
been exasperated, for centuries now, by the fact of Anglicanism, and
their inability to turn Anglicanism into "purified" evangelical
Protestantism.  The desire to "purify" English or Anglo-American
Protestant religion lies at the core of the spirit and force of
evangelical Protestantism.

	 

	I cannot accept, therefore, without ignoring almost 500 years of
history, the notion that CLS is not interested in doing what
Anglo-American evangelical Protestants have wanted to do for 500 years -
covert everybody to their religion, "purify" Protestantism, Anglicanism
in particular, but, while we are at it, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and
various and sundry non-Christian religions.  This constant, steady and
unyielding desire to "purify" is precisely the "overweening importuning"
to which I referred.   It doesn't end with the posters, to which you
referred.  It merely begins with them.  Furthermore, I cannot believe
that something that has been deeply engrained in a religion for half a
millennium has somehow dissipated, or, as the Bard might have put it,
thawed, melted and resolved itself into a dew.

	 

	CLS is not just like a chess club or a drama club or the Young
Republicans or Young Democrats.  One has to overlook history to argue
that CLS is somehow analogous to these other groups.

	 

	Resistance does connote hostility.  But you draw a conclusion
that finds no warrant in American history or experience. 

	 

	Those of us who are satisfied with our non-evangelical
Protestant religion (or lack thereof) and have no interest in being
"purified" are, I think, entitled to be hostile to persistent efforts to
convert us to a religion that we do not want.  If evangelicals would
leave us alone the level of hostility should decrease substantially.
But it is not, I am afraid, in the nature of evangelical Protestantism
to leave non-members alone.  And, to make sure that we keep this within
the parameters of this listserv, it is not in the nature of evangelical
Protestantism to eschew the use of the law, legal institutions and
public institutions in its endeavor to "purify" the rest of us.  Put
affirmatively, evangelical Protestants have pressed and pressed -
persistently -- to gain as much room as the law will allow in their
efforts to "purify."  The doctrines that some on this listserv defend
are doctrines that give evangelical Protestants more room than they had
as a result of the discrete historical developments that started no
later than with the Scopes Trial and the collapse of National
Prohibition.  Don't you think that this persistence would, in the
natural order of things, engender resistance and hostility? 

	 

	Consider the following.  If you were a Catholic parent who
objected to your children, enrolled in public school, being compelled to
participate in what are essentially evangelical Protestant prayer
services or reading of the KJV of the Bible, wouldn't you have been
somewhat hostile to the persistent effort to subject your child to this
"overweening importuning?"  And, perhaps, might you not have brought a
lawsuit to try to stop these religious practices.  And note, the
Catholic parent has not said that public school children should be
subjected to Catholic religious services.  The whole thrust of the
litigation, Mark, is that the resisters merely wanted to be left alone,
left to their own devices in tending to the spiritual formation of their
children.

	 

	The truth is, for better or worse, evangelical Protestants
engender a lot of hostility.  They believe, as their religion teaches
them, that they have to run that risk because they believe that they are
called upon to evangelize, to proselytize, to "purify."  That's fine as
far as it goes.  But it only goes so far, and the result is, as I have
demonstrated elsewhere, a continuing pattern of persistence and
resistance.  Their persistence, in a word, generates conflict.

	 

	Some of us are tired, and have been tired for well over a
century now, of evangelical Protestants trying to convert us to their
religion.  Whether we are hostile or not, we want to be left alone.
Evangelicals might view our desire to be left alone as an imposition on
their religion, and I am sure that some do.  But if it is an imposition,
our religious freedom requires it.  Evangelical Protestants have no
special privileges - or maybe they believe that they do because they
believe in the continuing reality, hope, and promise of the Protestant
Empire.

	 

	In real world terms, the privileges that evangelical Protestants
seek are unique and special because no other religion seeks them.
(Mormons are the only possible exception to this.)  In real world terms,
given the theology of evangelical Protestantism, it has no choice but to
seek special privileges.  It can point to the reality of the Protestant
Empire as some kind of warrant for those privileges.  Those of us who
want to be left alone, resist those privileges.  And if we are serious
about our resistance, we also object to the Protestant Empire.

	 

	You might say, not entirely without reason, that we want
something more than to be left alone.  The problem is, however, that if
we want to be left alone, how else can be obtain that objective than to
"impose" on evangelical Protestantism, and restrain its "overweening
importuning?"  

	 

	If evangelical Protestants cannot, at some level, respect our
right to be left alone, then what are we to do?

	 

	Review the cases that have been brought over the last 150 years.
Which ones came out more or less right, and why?  What is your grand
understanding of the law as it has developed both before and after
Incorporation?  Should the Catholic parents have won?  Did the strict
separation cases, like Engel and Schempp, come out wrong?

	 

	How should the law deal with this continuing pattern of
persistence and resistance?  

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