Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
So-called “religious liberty” can cover a myriad of sins. Take the case of Southwest Airlines flight attendant Charlene Carter.
In 2017, Texas-based Southwest fired Carter over her alleged online harassment of her union president, Audrey Stone. Carter — a self-attested Christian who believes abortion snuffs out a human life — reportedly sent Stone multiple videos of aborted fetuses and fired off direct messages accusing her and the union of supporting murder.
After Southwest Airlines investigated, the company canned Carter, saying her messages amounted to unsolicited harassment that violated company policy.
The story doesn’t end there, however. In 2022, a Dallas jury awarded Carter $5.1 million, and in 2022, a U.S. District judge in the Northern District of Texas ordered the airline to reinstate her job.
Why? In both cases, the rulings were intended to uphold Carter’s religious liberty.
Whether or not our rights are gifts from the Almighty, people have the constitutional right to be a horse’s ass sometimes. You needn’t add the word “religious” to defend such liberty. And when you do bring in that hallowed adjective, trains of legal reasoning have a funny way of going off the rails.
For example, as part of the judgment reinstating Carter, the judge instructed Southwest to inform all its flight attendants that the company “may not discriminate” against anyone based on their religious beliefs. Fair enough.
When the notice went out, though, it read Southwest “does not discriminate.” Note the distinction: “may not” versus “does not”. Big diff.
The judge took exception to that.
“It’s hard to see how Southwest could have violated the notice requirement more,” he wrote this summer. “After God told Adam, ‘You must not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden,’ imagine Adam telling God, ‘I do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden’ — while an apple core rests at his feet.”
As punishment for using the present instead of future tense, the judge ordered a trio of unfortunate lawyers for Southwest to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal advocacy group the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “hate group.” ADF representatives have advocated state-sanctioned sterilization of transgender individuals and defended anti-sodomy laws that criminalize private sex acts between consenting adults, according to critics. What’s more, the organization has repeatedly decried “the homosexual agenda” as the downfall of Christian civilization.
I’m old enough to remember when religious conservatives were polite. But ever since a philanderer with a penchant for porn stars ascended to the presidency, the Christian nationalists who backed him have felt emboldened by said leader’s jackassery. Even though it’s tempting to think of Christian nationalism purely as a U.S. phenomenon, some historical context can help make sense of how the notion of religious liberty got twisted into the open violation of the rights of others, not only here but abroad.
On Aug. 29, Trinity University historian Lauren Turek helped shine light on the subject during a campus lecture titled “Christian Nationalism and Internationalism: How Religion Shapes U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy.”
Although the National Organization of Evangelicals was founded in1942, “evangelicals did not see themselves as a cohesive political group until the 1970s,” explained Turek, who studies Christian nationalism. The tumult of the 1960s compelled them to “believe their way of life was under assault,” and they mobilized in “an effort to reclaim what they saw as their rightful dominance.”
Especially in times of rapid social change and upheaval, it’s understandable why a large number of Americans would conclude that a Christian culture is the best kind of society we can ever hope for.
To many Christian missionaries, however, the most precious human right is the right to evangelize. For those with such a mindset, other important concerns become secondary — for example, whether the right-wing dictatorship in charge counts the votes correctly.
One example of that kind of blinkered thinking is the inexcusable way many U.S. evangelicals defended the genocide of tens of thousands of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala from 1960 onward. Evangelical blowhards including Pat Roberson went to bat for mass murderers as the regime sold the tortures, disappearances and summary executions to the Christian press as efforts to root out communism.
With bonafide Nazis on the march in Florida, this leaves one with a disquieting question: what level of violence would today’s evangelical Christians countenance?
Say what you will about the tenets of evangelical Christianity, but at least it’s an ethos, to misquote The Big Lebowski. U.S. evangelicals haven’t behaved like what political scientist Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists.” They don’t vote in a vacuum. Instead, they build networks of solidarity and trust, write their elected leaders (and union bosses), organize boycotts, drive voter turnout and bring coordinated power to bear on the issues they care about. That’s the kind of old-time religion the Left could learn a thing or two from.
And time may be on the side of the godless. Twenty years ago, nine out of 10 Americans believed in God. Today it’s less than 3 out of 4.
“In study after study, when Americans are asked if they are willing to grant the same rights that they enjoy to political groups they personally oppose, secular people are much more likely than religious people to say yes,” sociologist Phil Zuckerman wrote last month for the Religion New Service for the Religion News Service. “When it comes to supporting civil liberties for various stigmatized minority groups, the secular are, again, notably more tolerant than the religious.”
Given what’s at stake, let’s pray that secularization continues.
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This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.