Good For the Gander

A famously Christian state failing to accommodate a non-Christian inmate is disappointing but predictable; the same state flatly refusing to accommodate a Christian inmate suggests a more pervasive problem.
Elizabeth Bruenig “The State of Texas v. Jesus Christ”

This article is subtitled: “Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to pray while holding a dying man’s hand is an offense to basic Christian values.” And this highlights something that I have come to believe that many American Christians have forgotten, namely: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [...]” And it’s been established that the states, even “famously Christian” ones, may not do this either. Even if Patrick Murphy’s request for a Buddhist spiritual guide to be present at his execution in 2019 was being made in bad faith (yes, yes, I know), that doesn’t change the fact that the Texas prison system’s rule that only its own chaplains (who were either Moslems or Christians) could be present would be considered a violation of the Establishment Clause, and there appears to be plenty of jurisprudence to back this up. But the article never mentions the Constitution. Its sole focus is on why the state of Texas should accede to a putative Christian’s desire for a specific ritual on the occasion of their execution. But the whole point of the Establishment Clause is that a state may not find the failure to accommodate a non-Christian inmate as “disappointing but predictable” yet point to “a more pervasive problem” when it comes to a Christian convicted of a capital offense and thus offer them a fix. This is why no accommodation for Christians was being made; the state could not offer accommodations to some faiths that it was not ready, willing or able to offer to all. And in the Patrick Murphy case, Texas was not prepared to offer accommodation to someone asking for a Buddhist, sincerely or not.

It is true that the Establishment Clause doesn’t apply to private actors. Ms. Bruenig, and The Atlantic more broadly, are free to advocate that states give Christians privileges, while merely wringing their hands piously when they are denied to others. But a state is not free to act in line with that advocacy. This is why the recent Texas law designed to make most abortions into civil torts has created the response that it has. It is recognized, and rightly so, I suspect, as an attempt to code a specifically Judeo-Christian-Islamic value into secular law, at the expense of forcing people who do not believe in this particular doctrine to pay lip service to it or face civil sanction.

To the degree that a number of secular laws can be said to mirror religious values, it’s understood that knowing where to draw the line can be tricky. But in the case of abortion, there is a general lack of secular organizations that argue for the “life begins at conception” standard that many anti-abortion advocates advance. This is, of course, not to say that there are none; the world is a big place, and I am not familiar with it in its entirety. But I suspect that people are correct when they understand the abortion debate in the United States as being driven mainly by a tension between a Christian ideal of sex as being only justifiable when it has procreation as a goal and a broader social view of sex as intimacy and/or release.

The First Amendment to the Constitution has been broadly interpreted to say that government actors, whether at the Federal, state or local level, may not conclude that they owe followers of one faith something that they do not owe to followers of all faiths (and that can extend to followers of no faith). If being treated in the same fashion as other belief systems is “an offense to basic Christian values” so be it. This is what living in a pluralistic society with freedom of (and from) religion entails. Christianity writ large, and it’s many and varied denominations in particular, claims a monopoly on truth; the Vatican once held that “error has no rights,” and the state should grant the right to practice incorrect religion. But government authority in the United States must be secular, or at least religiously neutral; it cannot make life better for followers of one religion as opposed to another as a matter of policy. An argument can be made that, because of the importance of touch and prayer to Christianity, the state is better served by finding a way to offer this to everyone, rather than issuing a blanket ban in an effort to remain compliant with the Constitution, but no such argument is put forth.

To be sure, most of the respect paid to freedom of religion in the United States is lip service; many Americans would be perfectly content for their own faith to have official sanction not granted to others, and many of the devout would be pleased to have the nation return to a time when their understanding of Christian values, basic or not, were more openly encoded into the laws of the land. So why not simply make the argument that the Constitution is in error, and that Christianity is entitled to special treatment? Pretending that there is no legal framework that the states are beholden to is somewhere between disingenuous and specious, and it serves no-one well.