Melissa Rogers "Religious Freedom for All"
Melissa Rogers, visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School, notes in “Religious Freedom for All” some of the distortions promulgated at the Family Research Council’s “Justice” Sunday III event. The event’s flyer read “From our founding forward, Americans have celebrated liberty and honored God in ways both public and private. Now activist judges seek to end all mention of God in the public square,” and Rogers observes that:
If the goal of this effort is to cause religious people to feel fear, alienation and anger, it succeeds brilliantly. If the goal is to tell them the truth, it’s a miserable failure.
Faux persecution was indeed the event’s goal, and factual distortions were the means toward that end. Rogers debunks several of these distortions throughout her article (e.g., FRC President Tony Perkins’ claim that “our children don’t have a right to pray” and FRC’s allegation that the judiciary shows “hostility toward the church and Christianity in particular").
Rogers concludes this way:
The rhetoric and advocacy positions of the Family Research Council and its partners reveal that … they want to reintroduce school-sponsored prayer in a variety of settings and ensure that the government has wide latitude to erect religious monuments and otherwise endorse religion. They express a broad desire to use the machinery of the state to promote their faith.Understandably, many non-Christians are alarmed by this agenda. As a Baptist Christian, I am alarmed as well. […] While its rulings on these issues have not been perfect, the Supreme Court deserves great credit for striking the right balance. It’s a balance Christians should seek to preserve rather than undo.