Faith-Based Hiring Rights and Government Funding

Last month a group of civil-rights and religious organizations urged President Obama to rescind the Bush administration policies that had affirmed that faith-based organizations contracting with the government may consider individuals' religious commitments in hiring employees.  Now comes an answer from a different coalition of organizations of varying faiths, providing varying educational and social services, who have written the President on why it is legitimate, not individious, for faith-based organizations to hire those with the same religious commitment, and why organizations should retain that right when receiving government funds to help them serve others.  Here's a key passage:

Religious hiring by religious organizations is not a deviation from the great civil rights legacy of the United States but rather a distinctive and vital feature of it—vital because it protects the religious freedom of religious organizations.  And religious organizations are a vital means by which religious individuals exercise their religious faith.  To deny religious organizations the ability to be distinctively religious is to deny millions of Americans their unique religious voice.  Religious diversity is enhanced when religious groups speak in distinctive religious voices rather than in a coerced monotone.

The signers include representatives from the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Jewish organizations, and evangelical agencies, and they range politically from the American Center for Law & Justice to the left-of-center group Sojourners.   (HT: Stanley Carlson-Thies, whose Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance provides good leadership on this issue.)

My own defense of the right of funded religious organizations' to faith-based hiring is here (see pp. 37-42, 45-48, 53-56, 65-66), part of a general argument why such organizations should retain important rights of religious autonomy.