When work and religion collide

Because religious beliefs are protected and there is a more diverse workforce, religious accommodation issues have increased.

This article was written by originally published in the July 19, 2009 Zanesville TimesRecorder and is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

By Jim Evans

This is not your father’s workplace. A snapshot of today’s workforce looks dramatically different than it did a generation ago. Our workplaces are comprised of young people, senior citizens, and every age in between. Women work effectively in jobs that were traditionally held by men. Persons with disabilities contribute in ways never dreamed of before, and people of various races work side-by-side. Not only that, our workforce encompasses vastly different religious faiths, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Islamic, Hindus, Buddhists, and a myriad of many other traditional and non-traditional religions. It’s not unusual for people of deep religious faith to work along side atheists and agnostics.

Our forefathers founded this country on the premise of freedom of religion, but it took the Civil Rights Act to make religious discrimination illegal in the workplace. Prior to 1964, many employers freely exercised their prerogative to not hire anyone whose religion vastly differed from their own. Today, things aren’t that simple. Because religious beliefs are protected and there is a more diverse workforce, religious accommodation issues have increased. In 1998, there were 1,786 religious discrimination charges filed with the EEOC. Ten years later, that number almost doubled to roughly 3,273 complaints. Although a diverse workforce is a source of strength for an organization, ironically it can simultaneously be a source of interpersonal conflict and liability.

Today’s employer has the obligation to assure that all employees are treated with respect, regardless of their religious faith. They are required to make reasonable exceptions to workplace policies and practices so employees of faith have the freedom to practice their religion at work, as long as the accommodation doesn’t cause an undue hardship. The challenge for employers is that requests for religious accommodations touch on almost every aspect of employment, and they often conflict with traditional workplace policy and practice. Whether and how to accommodate must be made on a case-by-case basis. For example, exceptions to strict dress codes may have to be made so an employee of faith can wear religious garb on the job, or display tattoos or piercings professed by the employee’s religion. However, some dress accommodations may be considered an undue hardship when the garb presents safety issues for the employee or others.

Armed with their rights, workers are sometimes vocal about their religion at work, because their religious teachings encourage followers to proselytize their beliefs to others. However, this right to proselytize to coworkers and customers must be balanced with the rights of those who ask them to refrain.

Religious accommodations sometimes focus on decorating of work spaces. If an employer allows personal items to decorate work spaces, an employee would normally have the right to decorate with religious objects. However, if that workspace is in public view, the employer may be able to rightfully deny the accommodation on the premise that the employee’s religious beliefs might be misconstrued as being representative of the company’s.

Employees often request time off for religious holidays or days of worship, or may want work breaks and separate areas to pray. Even special dietary food options for company picnics may be requested based on religious tenet. Regularly assigned job duties might also need to be considered for accommodation, as was the case when a group of pharmacists turned customers away, refusing to dispense birth control pills based on their own personal religious beliefs.

The majority of employees asking for religious accommodations are sincere in their beliefs, but some requests are made under the cloak of religion, but are based, in reality, on personal preference. Employers are expected to be able to discern the difference. Accommodations based on personal preferences are not required. According to the EEOC, religious beliefs are concerned with “ultimate ideas” about “life, purpose, and death” but does not include social, political, or economic philosophies, or personal preferences. Employers may inquire to determine if the request is based on a religious doctrine. A point of caution though. Religion covers not only traditional religions, but also religions that are new or uncommon. A religion doesn’t have to be part of a formal church or sect, and can be subscribed to by a small number of people. Beliefs may seem illogical, but it may be a religion just the same.

There are no easy cookie-cutter answers to making religious accommodations. Each request must be considered on the facts and circumstances, and in consideration of guidelines issued by the EEOC and the Courts. Links that offer guidance are found on the EEOC’s Web site at www. eeoc.gov. Although employers initially decide if it is reasonable to accommodate, it may end up that the EEOC or courts second guesses their decision.

Jim Evans is President of JK Evans & Associates LLC, a Zanesville-based human resource-consulting firm serving throughout Ohio. Jim can be reached at jime@evansandassociates.com.  You can visit Evans and Associates at http://www.evansandassociates.com

Proposal Would Deny Federal Money if Employees Must Provide Medical Care to Which They Object (WashingtonPost.com)

The Bush Administration has proposed new regulations which would deny federal money to medical facilities if they required employees to act against their religious conscience in providing certain health benefits.  This raises a number of pertinent questions:

Does this go too far, or is it just what religious employees need?  Is the proposed regulation too broad, or just right?  Should the regulation define what types of procedures should be included in religious objections, or should it be open-ended? Should it have been heard in Congress as a bill, or is the regulatory method of submitting it into law sufficient?

EXCERPT:

Workers’ Religious Freedom vs. Patients’ Rights
Proposal Would Deny Federal Money if Employees Must Provide Care to Which They Object
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; A01

EXCERPT:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073003238_pf.html

A Bush administration proposal aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion, has escalated a bitter debate over the balance between religious freedom and patients’ rights.

The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.

Conservative groups, abortion opponents and some members of Congress are welcoming the initiative as necessary to safeguard doctors, nurses and other health workers who, they say, are increasingly facing discrimination because of their beliefs or are being coerced into delivering services they find repugnant.

But the draft proposal has sparked intense criticism by family planning advocates, women’s health activists, and members of Congress who say the regulation would create overwhelming obstacles for women seeking abortions and birth control.

There is also deep concern that the rule could have far-reaching, but less obvious, implications. Because of its wide scope and because it would — apparently for the first time — define abortion in a federal regulation as anything that affects a fertilized egg, the regulation could raise questions about a broad spectrum of scientific research and care, critics say.

Read the full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073003238_pf.html

Government, Religion, and a Mythical Past

By Karen Scott, Walt Pontynen, and Leigh Johnson

In this  article, originally published in Spectrum in 2002, the authors discuss the intent of the founders of the United States and how historical revisionism obscures our national heritage. (Re-posted with Permission.)

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”1 Unfortunately, from the highest offices (both elected and appointed) to the lowliest voter, the reaction of Americans to the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision in the Pledge of Allegiance case indicates that Americans are condemned to repeat the horrors of the Dark Ages.

Many, in attacking the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision, rest their case on the myth that separation of church and state in the United States is the product of modern secularists. They attack a string of decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court since the 1960s. They misuse and misinterpret the Founding Fathers2 who supposedly saw government promotion of Judeo-Christian values as necessary for the survival of the Republic.

However, the record is clear: despite their own personal piety, those who successfully argued for ratification of the First Amendment did not see government as the appropriate avenue for promoting those religious beliefs. They recognized that coercion, the essence of civil government, in matters of conscience is repugnant.

The Founding Fathers were clearly against the formation of the United States being founded on any religion, Christian or otherwise. For example, in 1796 the administration of George Washington negotiated a treaty with Tripoli that the US Senate ratified – unanimously – the following year at the request of President John Adams. The treaty denied that the U.S. government was founded on Christianity, reading in part:

As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion: as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen [Moslems]; and as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.3

Washington, Adams, and members of the U.S. Senate were not alone. The United States Constitution itself verifies that the United States is not “founded on the Christian Religion.” One searches in vain through the U.S. Constitution, which encapsulates the thinking of the Founders and provides the framework for national government, for wording that the United States is based on Christianity. Indeed, it makes no mention of God at all. In an era when European monarchs routinely claimed a divine right to rule, the point was obvious. In the United States, authority derives not from any church or religious creed, or from God, but from “the people” – as the preamble to the Constitution plainly states.

So sensitive were the Founders to the danger of pressuring consciences that out of deference to Quaker beliefs they included a provision in the Constitution for Quaker officeholders to “affirm” rather than “swear” their oaths of office. In addition, they forbade any test of religion for holders of federal office. The U.S. Constitution is blind to the religion of its civil servants—whether Catholic, Buddhist, Latter-day Saint, Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Methodist, or atheist.

However, the American tradition of strict separation between church and state goes back much further in time than the framers and the Constitution. Its parent was not a liberal, secularist, U.S. Supreme Court, nor an anti-Catholic bigot,4 as some have recently suggested. The tradition even predates Thomas Jefferson, who customarily gets credit for coining the term “wall of separation.”

Its originator was Roger Williams, a devout Christian who lived in the seventeenth century. So devoted was Williams to God that his contemporaries described him as “God-intoxicated.” Williams was a Puritan clergyman who emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. He spoke his piece, which disagreed with religious authorities in the colony, went on trial for unorthodox views, and was forced to flee for his life in the dead of winter.

The colony that Williams established in 1636, Rhode Island, is the stuff of legend. Unlike Massachusetts, whose religious establishment had a reputation for whipping, banishing, and hanging religious dissenters, including Quakers and Baptists, Rhode Island extended full religious freedom to everyone, including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The colony had no religious taxes, no church establishment, and no religious tests for office holding. It even exempted nonbelievers from swearing the oath “so help me God,” which, in Williams’ view, would have been meaningless to them and contrary to God’s ways.

Williams believed that God communicates with humans by working on people’s hearts through the Holy Spirit. Thus, even the slightest coercion that interfered with that process displeased God. “Rape of the soul” was the term Williams used to describe forcing people who did not believe in God to observe and participate in religious rituals.5

To Williams, “a wall or hedge of separation” was needed to guard between “the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world.”6 As a result, Rhode Island’s charter guaranteed “full liberty in religious concernments,” and the colony thrived from a diversity of religions. Later, nearly identical wording cropped up in the colonial charters of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Carolina.

During the American Revolution, Williams’ view of separation between church and state was revitalized and expanded by Baptist Ministers Isaac Backus and John Leland, spokesmen for the fastest growing denomination in the United States at that time, whose activism played no small part in ratification of the First Amendment. Government and religion, Backus warned in 1773, “Are distinct in their nature and ought never to be confounded together.”7

Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French traveler who visited the United States in the 1830s. He wrote in the introduction to his book Democracy in America, “One cannot establish the reign of liberty without that of mores, and mores cannot be firmly founded without beliefs.” This statement is often quoted today by those who tout that the separation of church and state is a myth. What is not quoted from the same book is de Tocqueville’s statement that religion “realizes its sway is all the better established because it relies only on its own powers and rules men’s hearts without external support.”8

Those who have either forgotten why our Founding Fathers erected a wall of separation of church and state or who refuse to acknowledge our history also fail to quote de Tocqueville’s observation that on questioning the “faithful of all communions,” including clergymen, especially Roman Catholic priests, de Tocqueville found that:

“They all agreed with each other except about details; all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.”9

The high wall of separation between church and state is not the creation of a twentieth-century, liberal, anti-Catholic, secularist U.S. Supreme Court. Rather, it is the creation of a devout and godly seventeenth-century Christian and is an American tradition since the founding of the Republic. History has proven Roger Williams right: religion retains its sanctity best and remains most vital, vibrant, and dynamic when strictly separated from government.

Unfortunately, now with the removal of each brick in the wall of separation, our freedoms are that much less secure and the foundation of our nation less firm. The loss of understanding in the reason for the wall of separation between church and state can only condemn us to repeat the bloody history of past religious persecution.

______________________________________________________________________________

A shorter version of this article can be found under the title “God, Caesar and Historical Revisionism” at:http://old.spectrummagazine.org/library/columns2002/020902scott.html.

1 Allison Jones, ed., Chambers: Dictionary of Quotations (New York, 1997), p. 842, No. 84.

2 See Pontynen and Scott article Founding Fathers: Cannon Fodder in a Cultural War, 2000.

3 “Treaty with Tripoli, 1796, Article XI,” quoted in William Addison Blakely, ed., American State Papers and Related Documents on Freedom in Religion (Washington, D.C., 1947), 311, 312. See also, Robert Boston, “Joel Barlow and the Treaty with Tripoli,” Church and State Magazine, June 1997, 11 – 14.

4 See, most recently, Philip Hamburger Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

5 Our main source for Williams’ life is Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991).

6 Ibid. 43.

7 Ibid. 203 – 204. The quote comes from An Appeal to the Public (Boston, 1773). See also, Leigh Johnsen, ed., Isaac Backus Papers, 1630 – 1806 (Ann Arbor: UMI, forthcoming).

8 Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayers, trans. George Lawrence (New York, 2000), 17, 47.

9 Ibid. 295.

The New Blue Laws – Slate.com

Slate contributor and labor union attorney, Paul L. Edenfield, asks the questions as to workers have the right to have Sundays off. This may be the forerunner of additional trends in this area:

The New Blue Laws
They’re about giving workers a break, not forcing church attendance.
By Paul L. Edenfield
Updated Monday, April 7, 2008, at 7:39 AM ET

Do workers have a right to Sundays off?
In a recent night-shift ad, Hillary Clinton promised that she would work hard to help workers who toil after hours. Barack Obama, for his part, has issued a call for relief for people “juggling work and parenting.” The candidates’ concern about the demands of employment comes at a time when businesses increasingly try to stay open for most of the hours of the day, seven days a week. While keeping our shopping malls abuzz, these frenetic routines also make it harder for workers to get the weekend off to relax or spend time with their families. The ramped-up pace is due in part to the success businesses have had in attacking laws that improve workers’ lives—like mandatory-closing laws, which require many stores to close on Sundays or holidays.

Mandatory-closing laws sound, yes, like another name for “blue laws,” the Colonial-era restrictions in the name of morality that also closed stores on Sunday (and even banned frivolous dress). Their original purpose was to encourage church attendance. Because of this history, these laws are often still thought of as paternalistic intrusions that impose one Christian version of morality. It doesn’t help that they had a brief resurgence during the teetotaling era of Prohibition, courtesy of the temperance movement. But mandatory-closing laws have since shed their old cloak and taken on a new purpose: protecting the interests of workers who otherwise could not rely on a regular, guaranteed day off.

Read more at http://www.slate.com/id/2188240/