The High Court’s "S" Word: Racial Slurs and Gender Jokes Are out, but Prejudicial Language for Religion Enjoys Continuing Favor

RICHARD A. BAER, JR.Richard A. Baer, Jr., is professor of environmental ethics at Cornell University and a fellow of the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C. He contributed the chapter “The Myth of Neutrality” to The Blackboard Fumble: Finding a Place for Values in Public Education, recently copublished by Victor Books and Christianity Today.

Unless you are willing to risk job land reputation, there are certain terms—wop, hymie, nigger, Chink, to name but a few—that you simply do not use in public. (Just ask Jimmy the Greek or Jesse Jackson.) Attitudes toward racist and sexist language have changed enormously over the past three decades, and America is a better place because of it.

Given these circumstances, it is noteworthy that one unusually prejudicial term continues to go virtually unchallenged. It can be found on the lips of university presidents, politicians, and church leaders; in proclamations of the American Civil Liberties Union; and, most notably, in a number of Supreme Court decisions.

The term is sectarian.

That sectarian is hardly a flattering term is evident from even a cursory look at any standard dictionary. Among its more common synonyms are “bigoted,” “narrow-minded,” “heretical,” “parochial,” and “dogmatic.”

Given this range of meanings with their consistently pejorative connotations, it is disturbing to note that the mass media regularly use the term to describe and label individual Americans and groups of Americans. Even more disturbing, however, is its use by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since roughly the end of World War II, the highest tribunal of our land has used the term in a wide variety of cases as a synonym for the word religious.

Not only does the Court call religious schools and colleges “sectarian”; it also describes the motivating beliefs and ideas that inform the basic world view of these institutions as “sectarian.” It even pins the label on schoolchildren, employees, teachers, and administrators of religious organizations.

The equation religious = sectarian enjoys wide acceptance today, so much so that its occurrence seems quite unremarkable to most Americans. Recently, I heard several church leaders at a conference on educational choice refer to their own religious organizations as “sectarian.” I reacted with a combination of sadness and anger. I thought of how blacks in an earlier day sometimes referred to each other or even themselves as “niggers.” When a form of discrimination becomes deeply enough ingrained in a culture, the oppressed may themselves overlook how damaging and unjust it is.

What I am calling for is simple and unambiguous: No agent of government—executive, legislative, or judicial—at whatever level of government—federal, state, or local—should be permitted to label the religious beliefs, or the lack of religious beliefs, of any individual American or American institution “sectarian.” And we should protest vigorously whenever the media condescend to insult fellow Americans with this epithet.

Inherently Prejudicial

Sectarian is caste language, a phrase that has been used throughout American history to keep the religious “untouchables” in their proper place. Just as ruling elites have used racial and sexual epithets to put down blacks and women, so they have used sectarian to exclude and marginalize those individuals and groups whose religious beliefs and practices did not correspond to their own vision of what was appropriate in the cultural marketplace.

It is hardly conceivable that our society could deal justly with blacks and other minorities if we had not decisively rejected terms like sambo, pickaninny, or Polack. Would not the same logic demand that we renounce sectarian as a synonym for religious?

Sectarian always implies a contrasting mainstream, a right way of thinking, an acceptable position. But if the First Amendment means anything at all, it means that government is acting illegitimately when it proclaims that the mainstream in our society is “secular” rather than “religious,” “nonsectarian” rather than “sectarian.”

Some parents feel compelled by their consciences to seek a religious education for their children. Quite apart from the difficult question of whether government should pay for such education, can any fair-minded person argue that the state has a right to demean such citizens, their children, and the people who serve them by implying that they are bigoted, narrow-minded, and unorthodox? The state is totally incompetent to make such pronouncements.

I am not proposing a national debate on this question. Rather, as an American citizen I am calling on our courts and the media forthwith to stop using the term sectarian altogether. It should not appear one more time in any court decision, except when its usage is unavoidable—for instance, when quoting earlier cases or when referring to statements or judgments of parties before the courts. The use of such language by the media and by agents of government fundamentally violates the spirit of the First Amendment and the genius of the American political experiment.

It will not do to argue that sectarian has become a technical legal and constitutional term with its own restricted meaning and that the Court means no harm. Both points are true, but irrelevant. What is important is that the term is a bad actor with such dubious parentage that there simply is no way the Court can use it, whatever its intentions, without prejudicial effect.

Righting An Old Bias

How do we account for current usage of sectarian, and why have religious people not protested this discrimination earlier?

Actually, the Founding Father whom many of us most clearly associate with freedom of religion and conscience—Thomas Jefferson—must share part of the blame. Particularly in his private correspondence, Jefferson typically referred to orthodox, Trinitarian Christians—those who believed in the deity of Christ and the classical doctrines of salvation—as “sects” or “sectarians.” He held that their beliefs were based on dogma, superstition, and revelation.

By contrast, Jefferson considered his own Unitarian and Enlightenment convictions about morality and religion to be universal and “nonsectarian.” They were grounded, he believed, in reason and common sense, were compatible with science, and deserved to become the basis of public morality and politics.

But neither Jefferson nor the Christians of his day considered sectarian to be a synonym for religious or thought that nonsectarian meant nonreligious. Rather, Jefferson used sectarian to refer to the wrong kind of religion.

What has happened over the past 40 years is, in effect, that Jefferson’s bias against certain religious people and beliefs, mainly traditional Christians, has been extended to religious people in general. Jefferson might be excused for his use of the term, for he honestly—even if mistakenly—believed that his own Unitarian religious convictions were of a different and more rational order from those of the orthodox Christians of his day. But for Americans to continue such discrimination today has little moral or political justification.

Curiously, and ironically, the equation religious = sectarian is not even empirically accurate. All the best polls show that Americans are incurably religious—not just a few Americans on the fringes of society, but a majority. Close to 90 percent claim to believe in God, and roughly 40 percent attend religious services nearly every week.

Just as white Protestant males have had to realize that they have no legal right to define moral and religious standards for all Americans, so the modern secular heirs of the Enlightenment will have to abandon their indefensible conviction that they alone are the “nonsectarians” to whom control of the public square belongs.

Our courts and the mass media can either aid or hinder this move toward nondiscrimination and public justice. By decisively rejecting the term sectarian as a synonym for religious, the Supreme Court could make clear to all Americans its commitment to fairness and could move us one step closer to freedom and justice for all.

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