When Attorney General John Ashcroft began conducting daily prayer sessions withJustice Department employees, he confirmed the hopes of religious conservativesand the fears of secularists: The new Republican regime would make governmentmore godly.
Ashcroft has loudly lamented the separation of church and state and hasadvocated government funding for religious groups, as well as the reintroductionof official prayer into public schools. Now he's organizing prayer in the publicworkplace. According to a May 14 report in The Washington Post, Ashcroft and a group of employees meet at 8:00 a.m. in his personal office or a conference room to pray and study scripture.
Ashcroft's daily devotionals are said to be ecumenical, despite periodic references to Jesus, and they are open to all employees. (His supporters boastthat one regular attendee is an Orthodox Jew.) No one is required to attend; butaccording to the Post, some Justice Department employees are uneasy about the prayer meetings and concerned that participation or nonparticipation in them could affect their career prospects. Some are offended by the use of a government workplace for sectarian religious activities.
Of course, Ashcroft has his own First Amendment right to pray at work thatdemands respect. Advocates of public religiosity correctly point out thatreligious beliefs are not neatly compartmentalized; people naturally take theirreligions with them into the workplace (or voting booth). Federal law rightlyrequires employers to make "reasonable accommodations" for religious expressionby employees. But "reasonableness" is a rather elastic concept that generates alot of litigation.
Questions about religion in the workplace are not new to employment lawyers,regulatory agencies, or courts. The religious revivalism of the 1990s gave publicexpressions of religious belief renewed respectability; it's not surprising thatthe past decade saw an increase in discrimination claims involving employers'alleged failures to accommodate their employees' religious practices.Religious-discrimination claims before the federal Equal Employment OpportunityCommission increased 43 percent between 1991 and 1997.
It is no small irony that these cases sometimes reflected efforts by employersto regulate the religious expressions of some employees in deference to thebeliefs of others. Increased sensitivity to harassment was both a blessing and acurse to employees anxious to practice their religion at work. Lule Said, a Muslim man in Massachusetts who was targeted by fellow employees for praying atwork, recently won a harassment claim against his employer. But in a 1995Nebraska case, Wilson v. U.S. West, a federal appeals court ruled against an employee, Christine Wilson, who claimed a religious right to wear an anti-abortion button featuring a color photo of a fetus that upset her co-workers, including some who shared her opposition to abortion rights. Offended co-workers complained that the button constituted harassment, and Wilson conceded that it caused serious disruption at work. The federal court upheld U.S. West's efforts to accommodate Wilson's religious beliefs by giving her the option of wearing an anti-abortion button with no pictures or wearing the pictorial button in her own little cubicle and covering it at other times. In another 1995 case, Brown v. Polk County, however, the same court upheld the right of a devout Christian employee, Isaiah Brown, to conduct prayer sessions in a government workplace. His employer, Polk County, Iowa, claimed that the prayers could cause resentment and religious divisiveness but presented no evidence that they had actually done so.
As these cases make clear, the line between the right to express religiousbeliefs at work and the power to impose those beliefs on others is often indispute, especially in a culture suspicious of First Amendment rights--a culturethat sometimes values inoffensiveness as much as self-expression. The rights ofemployees to wear or display religious paraphernalia or pray at work shouldgenerally prevail over the sensibilities of colleagues. Employers' concerns aboutthe divisiveness of sectarian rituals are not unfounded, but people ought totolerate the religious practices of their co-workers.
They should, however, be spared the religious enthusiasms of theirsupervisors, which are apt to be inherently coercive. Indeed, federal guidelineson religion in the federal workplace stress that supervisors need to expresstheir own religious beliefs with great care in order to avoid even misperceptionsof coercion. The attorney general is violating the spirit if not the letter ofthese guidelines, his critics claim. He may have a legal right to conductmorning prayer sessions, but it should be exercised with regard for hisauthority over some 135,000 Justice Department employees, not to mention hispower to set policy for the nation. As conservatives often point out, you loseyour moral claim to exercise a right when you exercise it irresponsibly.
In any case, Ashcroft has limited credibility as a champion of religiousfreedom. He aggressively supports the right of publicly funded religious groupsto limit the religious practices of their employees and even to hire and fire onthe basis of belief. Under the 1996 charitable-choice bill introduced bythen-Senator Ashcroft (and incorporated into the welfare reform law), religiousgroups that receive federal funds to deliver social services are exempt fromfederal law prohibiting religious discrimination in employment. In other words,the attorney general supports the right of Christian employers who receive publicfunds to hire only Christians or to prohibit Muslim employees from praying atwork or merely wearing head scarves. Ashcroft may read scripture every morning,but he doesn't seem to know the Golden Rule.
