As fellow blogger Ben Munson points out, this week the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in favor of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in perhaps the most significant case involving religious liberty and the separation of church and state in decades.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a called and ordained minister in the same denomination as Hosanna-Tabor, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS).
The decision upholds the freedom of religious organizations to both define who constitutes a "minister" or leader within their community, and upon what grounds such "ministers" may be hired or fired. I place the word "minister" in quotes, because the term itself had become a point of contention, both for the Supreme Court and for the courts of public opinion surrounding the case. The Court's decision affirms that only religious organizations themselves can fully articulate who counts as a "minister" in their midst.
Upfront, I am undoubtedly grateful for the decision the Supreme Court made. It sends a clear message to uphold the First Amendment, religious liberty, and the disestablishment of religion, all of which are values at the core of the American version of democracy.
But it also got me thinking about other issues peripheral to the central issues of the case. At the heart of these issues is how religious organizations treat their own leaders and workers.
Suffice it to say, workers in the church place a high degree of trust in the church when it becomes their employer. Of course, needless to say, churches place a similar trust in their workers.
Implied in this trust is the sometimes nebulous assumption that the church's workers will be treated with fairness, decency, and respect.
In short, they trust that they will be treated with the kind of values that nondiscrimination laws seek to protect. Especially when these workers know full well that other ways that the government protects workers—such as unemployment insurance—are protections that are not available to them.
Which really just means that religious organizations, like all places where two or more human beings gather together, bear a fine-lined tension between freedom and responsibility. It's only that the US Constitution understandably heightens that tension when religion enters the picture.
Because, as history has borne out time and again, religious organizations are all too human. As are its workers. And human trust is too easily betrayed.
None of which necessarily bears directly on the Hosanna-Tabor case. But it does bear directly in the lives of thousands upon thousands of people who place their livelihoods in the hands of thousands upon thousands of religious organizations throughout the country.
As for me personally, I deeply, deeply cherish the "call" that the church has given me to serve God and work for the good of the world. And I deeply, deeply cherish that I am "ordained" into this calling as a "minister of Word and sacrament" (a common phrase for a Lutheran understanding of ministry).
Part of my prayer as I work in this calling is that religious organizations would likewise cherish the service of their workers. And hold us accountable to this work through meaningful shared standards. And treat us with a dignity and respect that would even go above and beyond what any government might minimally require of its workplaces.
Speaking as a Christian, I am quite certain that this is not too high a calling for those who work together to profess God's saving grace, freely, to all.
