Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

July-August 2012 – There are lots of things to dislike about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – popularly called Obamacare – but this year a new controversy erupted over the issue of religious freedom.

In January Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, announced regulations for employers regarding insurance plans. The rules mandate that, with few exceptions, all employers would be forced to provide coverage to their workers for contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients (drugs that cause an abortion).

The exemptions were narrow. Churches were exempted but religiously associated employers – such as hospitals, schools, adoption agencies, orphanages and ministries like AFA – were not. These employers could be forced to provide coverage that directly contradicts their religious beliefs.

Christians were outraged at the government overreach. Specifically, the Catholic Church was at the forefront of the battle over the new mandate because the church operates numerous colleges and ministries under its denominational banner that would not be exempt from the HHS requirement.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement criticizing the HHS regulations in March, calling it part of “the various threats to religious freedom in our day.”

The threat from Obamacare is grave because it conjures up an entirely new paradigm regarding the relationship between religion and state. Over the nation’s history, religious organizations and the government have operated as co-equal institutions, each with its constitutionally protected spheres of activity.

In a blog flogging the mandate, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said in 1808: “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”

The new HHS regulations, however, dangerously elevate the government into a position of superiority, making it the sole arbiter of what is religious. It essentially trims the definition of religion so closely that only houses of worship and institutions that expressly teach religious doctrine are exempt from government oversight.

The USCCB said the mandate “thus creates and enforces a new distinction … between our houses of worship and our great ministries of service to our neighbors, namely the poor, the homeless, the sick, the students in our schools and universities, and others in need, of any faith community or none. … Government has no place defining religion and religious ministry.”

The bishops were determined to take a stand. In a letter that was read in church services on January 25, they said, “We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens.”

There is no indication that President Obama intends to back down on the HHS mandate. If the regulations are allowed to stand, religious institutions that object to them have few options. They can disregard their religious beliefs and comply, or they can ignore the regulations and face stiff fines.

There is a third option, of course. They can shut down the ministries that fall under the government’s newly constructed realm of religious authority. Some Catholics believe that would make many secularists extremely happy.

“You don’t think there’d be somersaults up and down the corridors” if that happened? Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, told Wall Street Journal editor James Taranto.

Dolan related a story about the Catholic archdiocese in Washington, D.C., when the city council was considering mandating that all adoption agencies be willing to place children with homosexual couples. A representative from the diocese complained that the mandate would put Catholic agencies out of business.

“Good,” one of the city council members told the archdiocese. “We’ve been trying to get you out of it forever. … So get out!”

Thus, in the short term, the Obamacare power grab threatens numerous religious organizations with forced secularization or even extinction.

In the long term, however, the mandate threatens religious liberty itself. When a government exalts itself to a place of supremacy like the Obama administration is attempting to do, religious freedom is in name only.

It’s not a freedom if someone else can define your religion for you and tell you when, where and how you can practice it.