Barry's remarks begin at 5:40 into the video.
Video courtesy of The Roosevelt institute

“Freedom of Worship”: Roosevelt Institute’s “Four Freedoms” Award Speech

Barry W. Lynn

I am deeply honored to receive this award. The freedom of religion accorded by the separation of church and state is always a fragile commodity, even more so at a time when at least three candidates from one major political party each believe God has chosen them to be the next President.

The founder of Americans United was Glenn Archer, a law school dean from Kansas who gave up his promising political career there to spend the rest of his life in the cause of real religious freedom, concerned about religious influences in public schools, efforts to subsidize religious schools with tax dollars, and censorship based on theological critiques. He became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who had written in her newspaper column and in the Ladies Home Journal that public schools should not teach religion, and that when she sent her children to private schools she “never thought about asking the government to pay their tuition.” Presciently, Mrs. Roosevelt once told Archer “the battle for church-state separation may have to be fought all over again.” Indeed, it has, in each generation.

Meanwhile, President Roosevelt articulated as early as 1937 a pro-active interpretation of tolerance—not viewing it as the gift of the powerful to the powerless, but as a core attribute of all men and women. He said, “The lesson of religious toleration —a toleration which recognizes complete liberty of human thought, liberty of conscience – is one which by precept and example, must be inculcated in the hearts and minds of all Americans if the institutions of our democracy are to be nurtured and perpetuated.”

The Roosevelts would, I suspect, be gravely disappointed today. The political process itself is being tainted by the corrosive effect some forms of religion are having on our greatest institutions of democracy. The schools, the judiciary, the social service net: all polluted by a kind of religion which claims to know all things and whose only complaint is that it does not run all things. We are entering a campaign season where candidates routinely go to gatherings in Iowa where preachers quiz them on personal piety as well as political philosophy, violating the core spirit of the Constitution’s abhorrence of “religious tests for public office.” Every issue, from reproductive choice to the national debt, has advocates drawing from Scriptural tradition instead of critical thinking, sound analysis of data, and the commonly shared values of our Constitution. Judges are being removed from office for making unpopular decisions; the Tea Party has discovered a new bill of rights in their sock drawers that preserves corporate power and displaces the consciences of the very individuals who are America.

Our public schools face a double assault of efforts to force religious indoctrination into textbooks of science and history and treat those institutions as “mission fields” for outside groups to subject a captive audience to proselytization and evangelical outreach. If they are not transformed in that way, advocates seek tuition tax credits, school vouchers and other experimental mechanisms to end up forcing taxpayers to subsidize religious doctrine in private schools which rarely even match their own academic claims.

In the social service arena, President Roosevelt, in June of 1941, signed the first executive order barring discrimination in employment by government contractors and grantees based on race, creed, color or national origin. Regrettably, the Bush administration altered that policy to permit religious charities that are recipients of government funding for purportedly secular social services to discriminate in hiring, giving preference to fellow believers and barring jobs to persons of other viewpoints. This scandalous practice continues in the current administration. Groups justify their hiring bias in the most peculiar ways: “We feel more comfortable working with people like us,” they say, or, in the case of the group World Vision—recipient of $300 million in tax dollars last year— proclaiming that if you tell applicants of your bias in advance, it’s “not discrimination.” (“Ms. Parks, we told you about where you could sit on the bus before you bought the ticket, so don’t complain.”) We have heard all of these excuses before.

I want to be free of the fear that some politician claiming to hear the voice of God will seek to impose her or his will on all, depriving the rest of Americans from exercising their own conscience. But for that freedom to be viable, all of us need to work to preserve it. I’ve had the honor of participating in this effort for most of my adult life. It is not a freedom built solely by judicial decisions or acts of Congress. It is ultimately kept alive when, in the words of Judge Learned Hand, it “lies in the hearts of men and women.” If it dies there, it is gone forever.

Again, thank you for this great honor.