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The Case for “Discrimination”

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

I’m a long-time Democrat. In 1972, I organized a group called “Evangelicals for McGovern/Shriver” and helped McGovern sweep—well, the great state of Massachusetts.

As a Democrat, I have been deeply dismayed by how out of touch with the American mainstream the party has proven to be on the issue of faith-based initiatives, particularly on the issue of the so-called hiring exemption. (For a discussion of other aspects of the initiative, see Joseph Loconte, “Keeping the Faith,” FT, May.)

A vast majority of Americans believe that as a society we have lost our moral moorings and that we must reaffirm the role of religious faith in nurturing persons of integrity and fostering a just, stable society. It is in that context that we must evaluate the Democratic leadership’s opposition to allowing faith-based organizations that accept government funds to show preference in hiring to those who embrace the organization’s basic religious beliefs and practices. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed three Charitable Choice bills that explicitly included this hiring exemption. Presidential candidate Al Gore embraced Charitable Choice. But when the Bush Administration’s legislation expanding Charitable Choice moved to the Senate in mid-2001, the Democratic leadership blocked even the consideration of such legislation—largely on the charge that the hiring exemption amounted to employment discrimination.

In other words, the Democratic leadership has come to believe that religious organizations must give up their long-recognized right to hire staff who share their faith commitments in order to receive federal money that provides needed services to the public. In this, the Democrats are wrong.

To begin with, a religious organization’s decision to hire staff who share its religious beliefs and practices is not an example of intolerant discrimination, but rather a positive act of freedom. In a free society, a wide variety of organizations—environmental organizations, feminist groups, unions—are left free to select staff who share their core commitments and who agree with their agenda. This right does not disappear if governments choose to request these private organizations to perform some desired tasks. Planned Parenthood, for example, does not lose its right not to hire pro-life staff simply because it has a government contract. It is precisely the denial of this right to religious organizations that would amount to intolerant discrimination instead of the promotion of a free and open society.

To equate this positive good with the evil of discrimination on the basis of things like race or disability is pure confusion. Whether we think that religion is a medieval superstition or a true and good contributor to social well-being, all who believe in religious freedom should insist that religious organizations be permitted to hire staff who share their religious beliefs.

The obvious fact is that the ability to choose staff who share a religious organization’s core beliefs is essential if that organization wishes to retain its basic identity. As Justice William Brennan wrote in Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos (1987): “Determining that certain activities are in furtherance of an organization’s religious mission and that only those committed to that mission should conduct them is . . . a means by which a religious community defines itself.” A Jewish organization forced to hire substantial numbers of Baptist staffers, for example, will not long remain a significantly Jewish organization.

Having staff who share a religious organization’s essential religious beliefs shapes the group’s identity in a variety of ways. Shared motivation, common values, a sense of community and unity of purpose, shared experiences of prayer and worship (even if they are outside work time in the organization) all contribute to an esprit de corps and shared organizational vision. As law professor Ira C. Lupu said in testimony before a House subcommittee (June 7, 2001), “The sense of religious community and spirit on which [the] success of the group’s efforts depend” may be hampered if it is forced to hire those who do not share its beliefs.

This is important even when, for example, a faith-centered organization chooses to separate by location or time (and fund with private money) sectarian worship, instruction, and proselytization in a program in order to receive direct government grants. This is true for several reasons.

First of all, religious activities may be important to the social service program, even though they are voluntary, privately funded, and segregated from “secular” government-funded activities. In such programs, holding certain religious beliefs and practices is a legitimate qualification for a staff position, equally as valid as having the right skills and experience.

Second, enforced religious diversity can have the effect of stifling religious expression of staff within the agency, creating a climate of fear of offending other staff members with religious speech or actions. Since personal faith is very important to many who choose to work in a religious organization, such a climate can diminish staff motivation and effectiveness. Forced religious diversity can sap a program’s spiritual vitality and lead to its secularization.

Third, staff often play multiple roles in small organizations. For example, an agency might seek someone to work part-time as a youth minister and part-time as a social worker for its youth mentoring program. Implementing a policy in which religion could be considered as a factor in hiring for some job duties but not others would lead to unnecessarily complicated and impermissibly entangling regulations.

But even leaving aside the effects of such regulation on religious organizations themselves, the rationale behind it makes little sense. The fact that a religious organization accepts some federal funds does not mean that it ceases to be an independent, autonomous entity and becomes an arm or agent of the state. Law, precedent, and common sense all argue that a private organization that accepts some government funds still retains its separate identity. This is clearly the case with colleges and universities that receive government funding, scholars engaged in federally subsidized research, and artists and artistic organizations funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. All of these receive government funding, and all maintain their autonomy from the government. Similarly, a religious organization that receives government funds to provide a public service that serves a public good would maintain its autonomy and not be co-opted by government.

Moreover, not only does allowing hiring preferences based on religious belief within religious organizations pose no social danger, it is the only way to avoid discrimination and governmental preference of one religious view over another. Using the typology of different types of faith-based organizations recently published by the Working Group on Human Needs and Faith-Based and Community Initiatives chaired by former Democratic Senator Harris Wofford helps explain this point.

“Faith-saturated” and “faith-centered” programs both include substantial religious content in their programs and hire (primarily or exclusively) employees who share their beliefs—precisely because their religious beliefs tell them that persons are spiritual as well as material beings and therefore the best results follow when spiritual and material transformation are combined. “Faith-related,” “faith-background,” and “secular” providers do not include significant religious content in their program or consider religious belief in their staffing because their worldview tells them that all that is needed to correct dysfunctional social behavior and social problems is socio-economic, material transformation. All these providers, not just the first two, are grounded in an explicit or implicit religious perspective. Secular providers work at least implicitly within a naturalistic worldview (nothing exists except the natural world) that functions in effect as a religious perspective. Functionally, faith-related and faith-background providers operate with deistic religious beliefs (God exists but never intervenes in the natural world of cause and effect). Naturalism and deism, however, are just as much particular religious worldviews as the historic theism that undergirds most faith-saturated and faith-centered programs.

Obviously, if government only funds some private providers of services (i.e., the naturalistic and deistic ones that do not explicitly use religious criteria for staff), government clearly discriminates among religions.

Thus far, I have argued that as a matter of principle religious freedom is such a fundamental right that it ought to prevail even if on occasion embracing that overriding principle has the secondary effect of, for example, reducing the number of job opportunities for a particular group. For example, the Catholic Church must, as a matter of principle, be free to live out its religious belief (which I do not share) that only men should be priests, even if the practice has the effect of reducing the number of job possibilities for women.

My last point offers an argument, not about principle, but about practical effect. The recent suggestion that extending the hiring exemption to faith-based organizations (FBOs) would in practice mean that African-Americans or gay Americans would suffer a loss of job opportunities is simply wrong.

There is a certain tension between two treasured values: on the one hand, protecting the religious freedom and identity of FBOs as they expand their effective services to the most needy; on the other, our society’s conviction that except in the case of a narrow range of specific situations, employers should not discriminate on the basis of religion.

But do such hiring preferences really result in job deprivation? Hardly at all.

First, we are talking about a small percentage of the total jobs in the society. Second, many FBOs pay almost no attention to the religious beliefs of staff. Third, in the case of those evangelical Christian, Orthodox Jewish, and Muslim FBOs that do, virtually all the different religious groups have their own FBOs offering a hiring preference to people who share their own beliefs.

For very understandable historical reasons, African-Americans have been concerned that racial discrimination might find cover under the hiring exemption based on religious belief. This is extremely unlikely to happen. FBOs working in minority communities are run either by people of the same racial group or by whites who have been at the forefront of fighting racial prejudice.

What about sexual orientation? Few FBOs ask about or select staff on the basis of sexual orientation. It is true that a number of FBOs do say that staff should not be sexually active outside marriage. But is that really so terrible—especially for FBOs working to overcome poverty in a society where a child growing up in a single-parent household is eleven times more likely to be persistently poor than a child growing up in a two-parent family?

Even if the hiring exemption in Charitable Choice were expanded to a lot more government funding streams, sexually (and openly) active gay Americans would face extremely little job deprivation. The number in that group is very small and the number of jobs affected is a minuscule fraction of the total number of jobs. Gay FBOs exist and others can be formed that give a hiring preference to those who share that ethical/religious belief. Surely the well-educated gay community does not want to block an enormously promising way to overcome poverty and social decay for millions of desperate Americans to avoid what in practice would at worst mean only the loss of a handful of possible jobs.

Constitutionally, Charitable Choice strikes the right balance between the no-establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. Morally, it offers promise for major progress in overcoming some of our most intractable social problems. Politically, Charitable Choice and the broader Faith-Based Initiatives have rightly become identified with the widespread sense that we have lost our way morally as a society. By remaining steadfastly opposed to allowing religious organizations to contribute to solving social problems, the Democrats harm our country as well as their future electoral prospects. Only at great peril dare Democrats be on the wrong side of today’s widespread embrace of religious faith’s crucial contribution to social wholeness. If that happens, they will deserve a repetition of 1972.

Ronald J. Sider is President of Evangelicals for Social Action and Professor of Theology and Culture at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Development as Freedom

Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Development as Freedom is a brilliant book by the world“famous economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, longtime professor of economics at Harvard and now Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. For decades, Professor Sen has been an influential voice on global poverty and matters concerning the poor. This book offers his comprehensive vision on the nature of development.

One of the major themes of the book is the nature of political and economic freedom. Sen argues that freedom is at once the goal of development and the means of development. Underdevelopment is “unfreedom” and development is the process of removing the various forms of unfreedom and expanding the capabilities of people “to lead the kinds of lives they value.” “The analysis of development presented in this book treats the freedom of individuals as the basic building blocks.”

Understanding and measuring development only in economic terms (e.g., growing GNP or rising per capita income) is fundamentally inadequate because it overlooks both the fact that freedom is an inherent good and also that there are complex connections between economic growth and various kinds of freedom. A very rich person, for example, who is deprived of freedom of speech is missing something of inherent worth, but which economic analysis overlooks. Ignoring freedom can also lead to faulty predictions because of the many ways that freedom or its absence is tightly linked to economic well“being. To take a striking example, no famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy, regardless of economic conditions.

Sen emphasizes five types of freedom: political freedoms include civil rights, an uncensored press and free democratic elections; economic facilities include both free markets and access to the resources necessary to participate in a market economy; social opportunities refer to the arrangements society makes for education, health care, etc., which greatly affect a person’s ability to improve his situation; transparency guarantees , which require that people deal openly with each other under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity, help to prevent corruption and financial irresponsibility; protective security refers to the social safety net (e.g., unemployment benefits, income supplements for the poor) that prevents abject poverty. All these freedoms are essential and closely interrelated in Sen’s comprehensive understanding of development, which he labels a “capability approach.”

Sen’s discussion of market econ omies and democracy illustrates how his approach offers a balance that is often missing in writings on development. He welcomes the global embrace of free markets that has taken place in the last few decades, yet he warns that we cannot depend on markets alone. Citing Adam Smith, Sen argues both that free markets are both inherently good and highly effective in increasing wealth, and also (again citing Smith) that non“market institutions are “badly needed to supplement what the markets can do.” Supplement, but not replace”he insists that we cannot resurrect what he delicately terms “yesterday’s follies.”

The success of the East Asian economies”first Japan and more recently the other East Asian market economies”shows that there is a crucial governmental role in providing services such as widespread education and health care, which it is quite possible for governments to do successfully at a fairly low level of per capita income. Sen cites recent statistical analyses by Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion which show that the correlation between increasing per capita GNP and growing life ex pectancy works mainly through growing income for the poor and increased government expenditure on health care. Brazil and South Korea, for instance, have both experienced high GNP growth in the past four decades, but South Korea has had a much greater improvement in life expectancy than Brazil. Anand and Ravallion show that the difference lies in South Korea’s greater public expenditures on health care and its smaller income gap between the poor and the rich. In fact, significant government expenditures on health care and education for everyone can dramatically improve life expectancy even at a very low general level of societal wealth. For example, Kerala and Sri Lanka have a per capita GNP of less than $500 but life expectancy at birth is seventy“three years, whereas Brazil has a per capita GNP of more than $2,500 but life expectancy is only sixty“five. The difference is in the public expenditures, which can create what Sen calls the freedom of social opportunity.

In his chapter on democracy, Sen argues that a democratic polity is important first because freedom is an inherent good, second because it contributes to economic well“being, and third because societies need free political debate to choose what economic “needs” to value. Sen says there are no systematic empirical studies that support the thesis that authoritarian governments are better able to promote economic growth. And there is positive evidence that political freedom prevents some harmful economic development. Famines have occurred in ancient and modern authoritarian societies, in colonial empires and modern technocratic dictatorships. But wherever regular elections and a free press force rulers to listen to their people, governments have always performed the relatively easy task of preventing widespread famine.

All this and much more in this fine book I find convincing. Problems, however, emerge.

First, although it is very important to see that development includes more than merely reducing economic scarcity, it seems unhelpful to define poverty as “deprivation of basic capabilities””i.e., the absence of freedom. It is certainly true that a rich and well“fed person in a totalitarian society suffers great loss. But does it clarify anything to call that deprivation “poverty”? The label “unfree” rather than “poor” is far more helpful in defining what needs to change. Poverty is only one”albeit very serious”problem that many human beings face. If we label all human deprivation “poverty,” then we run the danger of minimizing the terrible reality of gross deficiency of food, clothing, and housing. Only if we must define development as merely overcoming poverty rather than overcoming all human deprivation is there any reason to broaden the definition of poverty as Sen does.

Second, and far more serious, is Sen’s argument that a highly individualistic notion of freedom is the goal of development. He is very clear. Freedom means the capability of individuals to “lead the kinds of lives they value.” This is an astonishing embrace of Western individualism, especially for a scholar from Asia. What if all living individuals choose to value consumption in a way that destroys the environment for their grandchildren? What if all the world’s people choose to value fighting each other in a catastrophic global conflict? What if all individuals value their own personal gratification at the expense of the common good?

Third, Sen offers no defense of the inviolability of every human life, a central premise on which depends his admirable insistence that freedom has its own inherent value. After a century in which our science and politics have rejected any belief in the unique value of each person, surely such a sweeping claim demands substantial supporting argument. Glenn Tinder may be right when, in Political Thinking , he wonders whether a conviction of the innate dignity of every human being can be sustained without the ancillary claim that persons (and therefore their freedom) are valuable because every human being is created in the image of God. As a nontheist, Sen cannot take that route. But surely he owes us some argument supporting the central premise of his whole project.

Equally problematic is Sen’s argument that human reason will be adequate to overcome the problem of human selfishness. He knows that a system which defines freedom as what each individual values fails hopelessly unless somehow individuals transcend self“centeredness and choose to value the well“being of their neighbors, future generations, and the environment. But Sen’s only hope for this essential self“transcendence is his belief in human reason”plus the “evolutionary selection of behavioral modes.” He seems to hope that even though there may be no ultimate reason for unselfish conern for justice and ethics, nonetheless such behavior may somehow be useful for economic success and therefore “unselfish” individuals will survive better than their evolutionary rivals. With all due respect, I must say that the experience of the last violent century, with its widespread faith in human reason and evolutionary progress, hardly warrants optimism about transcending selfishness on those grounds. I would rather gamble on God.

Development as Freedom is a brilliant book. But it needs a theistic framework, both to tell us why human freedom matters so much (even though it is not the ultimate goal but rather an essential means to the good of wholeness in all relationships) and also to remind us that persons will seldom transcend selfishness without a belief in a God who commands and enables us to love.

Ronald J. Sider is Professor of Theology and Culture at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, President of Evangelicals for Social Action, and author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

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