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A Season for Justice: Defending the Rights of the Christian Home, Church, and School
by David French
Broadman & Holman, 2002
215 pp.; $12.99, paper
Stories of hostility against Christians outside the United States have a way of putting problems at home in perspective. The deadly August attacks by Islamic terrorists on a Christian boarding school and a Christian hospital in Pakistan claimed the lives of ten people. David Wood, a teacher at Murree Christian School, lost a close friend in the assault. "I'll probably go home and cry," he said. Perhaps we should read every new book about anti-Christian bigotry in America with those plaintive words ringing in our ears. That might help to calm some tempers, invite reflection, provide clarity.
Certainly, readers who pick up David French's book, A Season for Justice, would benefit from such an exercise. Drawing mostly from his experience as counsel to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's Religious Freedom Crisis Team, French addresses religious discrimination in public schools, universities, and the workplace. His tone is sober, not hysterical, and there's sound advice about protecting churches and religious groups from heavy-handed government. But the book is thick with horror stories of persecution and light on principled approaches to fending them off. And it lacks what incidents like the killings in Pakistan can provide: an appreciation for the deepest sources of American-style religious liberty.
French offers Tufts University as a case study in anti-religious zealotry. A student governing committee voted to "derecognize" the InterVarsity group on campus, ruling that the organization had discriminated against a homosexual in its ranks. To their credit, the group's leaders had warmly embraced Julie Catalano, a lesbian student, but denied her request to hold a leadership post. French, who guided InterVarsity's successful appeal, sensibly describes what was at stake: an attempt to use antidiscrimination rules to destroy the independence of religious organizations. "If you banned the Tufts Christian Fellowship from applying its religious principles to religious decisions," he writes, "then you destroyed freedom for everyone." The Tufts student tribunal agreed and, with some hedging, overturned their original ruling.
This was precisely the argument that had helped defeat a recent Supreme Court challenge to the Boy Scouts. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a gay scoutmaster sued the organization after being dismissed for openly endorsing homosexuality. By a 5-4 margin, the Court upheld the Scouts' staffing decision as a First Amendment right of free association. Had the ruling gone the other way, however, it would have ensured the steady decline of civil society in America. Once government controls the leadership of private groups and institutions, society is swallowed up by the state.
Still, religious groups continue to come under fire despite the Supreme Court ruling. Over a recent period, French reports, he advised InterVarsity chapters facing similar challenges at no fewer than 10 colleges and universities. He might have mentioned the scores of state and local rules that similarly threaten religious organizations by forbidding discrimination in hiring because of sexual orientation.
Secularizing pressures in public schools and the workplace also get attention in the book, but the analysis falls short. French sees the fear of litigation as the primary culprit, but it's more a symptom than a cause. As social thinker Os Guinness points out, the most important shift in church-state debates in recent years is the strategy to divorce civil and religious liberty. Liberals and secularists see little connection between a free and independent pulpit and a free and independent press; they view religious expression almost as a secondary civil right. Says Guinness: "There is quite simply no greater seachange from the world of the American Framers to the world of contemporary American intellectuals than this one."
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