Speaking of the separation of Church and state . . .
The Sacramento Union has an article on the controversial judgment by the California Supreme Court that overrides the fundamental right of a church to live its religious belief.
[The plaintiffs] argued that because the church had filed for non-profit religious corporate status in the 1960s, it must adhere to the California Corporations Code.
A Fresno Superior Court judge agreed. Under state law, the judge ruled, the church is a corporation and the members who were removed have property rights in the corporation. The “corporation” did not follow its bylaws in removing the members, the judge said, and they must be reinstated.
Attorney Bob Schmalle, representing the church in its appeal, said there is a legal precedent that makes the Superior Court ruling irrelevant.
“In 1976, the United States Supreme Court ruled that decisions of church boards are not subject to court intervention,” Schmalle said. “… The Supreme Court’s ruling is clear. It even states that a church board ruling doesn’t have to be rational to be exempt from court intervention.”
This, to me, is part of the problem: for the churches to gain tax-exempt status--which, financial considerations, aside, is an important religious freedom, as not all churches can agree with all the ways the government uses its tax revenue (funding of abortion procedures, of education unions, of the arts, and so forth)--they must conform themselves to secular standards and definitions. This is the proverbial camel's nose in the tent. For if the government is allowed to define and delimit religious expression, then the churches essentially (and in reality) lose the one important freedom enshrined for them in the First Amendment.
But of course, the encroachment of government on religious freedom is hardly noticed let alone decried by secularists. And for David Limbaugh, brother of the (in)famous Rush Limbaugh, it is important to point out Secularist Double Standards in this case.
Just a few months ago, a California court flagrantly interposed itself in the private, internal affairs of a Lutheran Church in Fresno. The conflict began when certain members of the Free Evangelical Lutheran Cross Church there stopped attending church services because they didn't appreciate what the pastor was preaching.
The church elders decided they would revoke the memberships of the absent congregants but would first give them an opportunity to be heard at a formal meeting. Instead of appearing at the hearing, the members filed suit against the church, contesting its right to terminate their memberships.
The court, appallingly, ruled in favor of the members and against the church, basically saying that the church doesn't have the right to enforce its own rules of discipline.
If the secularist warriors in our culture held themselves to a consistent standard, we could expect their outrage over this decision. After all, their rallying cry is "separation of church and state." . . .
The secularists tell us with no small degree of passion that the reason we must keep church and state separate is that if the state, with its enormous power, endorses a particular religion, it will, in effect, be chilling the religious freedom of those of other religions. The state, in other words, must keep its nose out of religion.
But let's look at how they apply the principle in practice. In public schools, for example, they tell students they can't pray even on their own time and in a nondisruptive manner, such as when a kindergarten teacher prohibited two kindergarten students from praying at the snack table. Similarly, school officials have enjoined more than one high school senior from discussing his or her Christ-centered life in a valedictory speech to the student body. . . .
But while the secularists demand a strict separation in certain cases where to do so, as we see, harms the freedom it is designed to protect, in other cases they fail to invoke the principle at all.
If separating church and state were truly their goal, they would surely object more strongly to a court's direct interference in the private business of a specific church -- on a matter no less important than its membership -- than to the state’s tenuous, indirect endorsement of a religion as in the school examples.
When the California court forced the Lutheran church to reinstate its members, it violated the hallowed separation principle in the worst way and eviscerated the free exercise rights of the church. When push came to shove -- in the face of a direct assault on a church by an intermeddling court -- the fair-weather secularists turned their backs on the separation principle.
They are not driven by an allegiance to the goal of separating government and religion, but a manifest hostility toward Christian religion, the Christian church and the free exercise rights of Christians, especially in the public square.Posted by Clifton at June 1, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBack