Honoring Christian sanctuary, humanity and immigration

It was within the law to require Jose Juan Hernandez to leave church one Sunday in Texas to be arrested on suspicion of illegal re-entry after deportation. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was performing his sworn duty.

Yet such an arrest, unless to safeguard public safety, unnecessarily disregards the socially constructive tradition of churches as a place of both real and spiritual sanctuary.

Seven denominations have signed a Church World Service (CWS) letter [.pdf] of concern about the arrest to President Obama.

The letter makes three, reasonable requests:

First, make public the current “informal” ICE guidelines that have allowed agents to make arrests at churches under specific circumstances. These guidelines have been kept secret and thus have created fear among immigrants and the faith communities that serve them.

Second, revise these guidelines to prohibit the arrests of undocumented persons in churches and schools unless there is a direct and clear threat to community safety.

And third, work with Congress to pass immigration reform that unites families, provides a pathway for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status and eventual citizenship, and respects the God-given dignity of all persons.

While honoring and enforcing the law, let us not forget that we are fundamentally a nation of immigrants.

Despite the complex balances required by immigration law, do we not believe and wish to honor the promise inscribed on that iconic statue:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Is it not the door that has made us strong?

Stimulus act anti-Religious in its impact on institutions of higher education?

Red meat for the religious right, that claim came recently from former Arkansas Gov. and Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee.

Tobin Grant of Southern Illinois University — Carbondale, writes:

In the final version of the stimulus bill, funds for higher education are included as part of the block grants to states. Not only does the bill state that these funds may be used to renovate facilities at private institutions, it also states that governors may not consider "the type or mission" of a college or university. The states must consider religious institutions along with public and other private colleges and universities.

The funds may not be used for facilities where admission is charged and the buildings must be religiously neutral in purpose. Thus neither football stadia nor chapels my be renovated using stimulus funds. No one should plan to renovate a department of divinity with them. Yet college and university student religious life is unaffected, as it has been in the half century that current law, as included in the stimulus bill, has been applied.

The restriction is on individual facilities, however. Funds may go to support religiously neutral structures at religiously affiliated colleges and universities.

Grant, who is coauthor of Expression vs. Equality: The Politics of Campaign Finance Reform and dozens of academic articles on politics and religion, explains in Christianity Today:

In the nearly four decades since [the 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decision] Tilton v. Richardson, the constitutionality of federal funding for projects and programs at religious institutions has been upheld in the courts and supported by Congress. In the last Supreme Court case to consider public funds and religion at colleges, Rosenberger v. University of Virginia in 1995, the court found that as long as the purpose of a facility is religiously neutral, students have the right to use that facility for religious purposes, even at public universities. If a college allows students to use a conference room for any social function, it must allow them to use it even as a place to pray and study the Bible together.

Thus inclusion in the stimulus bill of the language over which Huckabee and others made such a fuss, ensured that there is no adverse impact on religion.

The entire uproar over that language was a canard.

How should the law respond when religious faith leads to the reckless homicide of a child?

Kara Neumann, age 11, died last March of treatable juvenile diabetes after her Wausau, Wisconsin, parents chose to pray for her recovery rather than take her to a doctor. Her parents face criminal charges. Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb, addressing how the law might react, writes:

. . . There is no justification for child abuse and neglect, no matter how sincere the parent's religious motivation. To take an example from the Bible, Abraham should not have prepared to kill his son Isaac, no matter what he believed the divine will to be. Though he may have "passed" the test of his faith, in other words, he would plainly fail the test of parenthood and of membership in any civilized modern community.

Beginning there, we have three courses of action the law may follow:

• First, attack the legitimacy of religious exemptions in laws that prohibit child abuse or neglect. That would expose parents like the Neumanns to the full force of the law.
• Second, excuse or partially excuse (perhaps reducing the severity of the charge) the parent who fails to seek out medical care for his child because of a faith in prayer or other divine agency. That does not to justify a parent's action, but it does temper justice with mercy.
• Third, agree that when people believe in good faith that they are carrying out the mandates of heaven, they should not be punished, thus opening children to all manner of abuse in the real or imagined name of faith.

Writing for FindLaw, Colb says:

If our focus is on the future, it might seem most prudent to prosecute the Neumanns to the full extent of the law and send the message that parents must care for their children. The very existence of the Wisconsin prayer exception to the child abuse or neglect statute arguably invites what most of us would view as intolerable misconduct.

More merciful and more likely, as she suggests, is an outcome which takes into consideration the parents' obvious religious faith. Whether the other children of that union are left in their parents' potentially deadly care may yet be the principal question the court answers.

To fully appreciate the complexity of the issues raised in this heart-rending case, please read the entire piece.