Chelsea Langston, April 14, 2016

Shared Justice recently published Beyond the Hashtag: How to Advocate for Mental Health Reform, an article I wrote that is not about religious freedom per say, but has an essential connection to be made. Diverse faith-based social services organizations, including domestic violence, marriage, and substance abuse counseling organizations provide invaluable, faith-shaped services to those who seek help that integrates their faith paradigms into their treatment. In a plural society with an abundance of secular mental health interventions and options, it is equally important that services recipients who want to integrate their spiritual selves and, yes, even God, into their care continue to have those faith-based counseling options available to them. This is an important concern given controversies surrounding court decisions and laws that seek either to protect or to forbid counseling dealing with same-sex attraction.

In 2015, Michigan successfully passed a law that protects the freedom of faith-based child placement organizations to continue to place children according to the agencies’ faith-based convictions about the best interests of the children. The remarkable thing about this legislation was that it was passed after the Indiana RFRA backlash, and with relatively little negative press. In Indiana, the effort to adopt religious freedom protections modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act met fierce opposition that alleged that RFRA is designed to protect discrimination.

In Michigan, Governor Snyder’s language about the adoption bill focused on the importance of cooperation between different child placement institutions to bring about the state’s goal of making sure every child has a family. Snyder’s rhetoric focused less on the rhetoric of religious freedom and more on the big idea of needing “all hands on deck”to serve Michigan’s children. Governor Snyder stated: “”The state has made significant progress in finding more forever homes for Michigan kids in recent years and that wouldn’t be possible without the public-private partnerships that facilitate the adoption process. We are focused on ensuring that as many children are adopted to as many loving families as possible regardless of their makeup.”

Could such an approach, focused specifically on protecting the freedom of overtly religious organizations that provide counseling to continue to do so according to their respective faiths, be a way forward. Such an approach might better win public understanding and broad support than laws labeled as measures to strengthen the freedom of religious people and organizations?

At the time of the Michigan adoption law’s passage, the Detroit Free Press reported: “[S]upporters say it will help keep all options open for adoptive parents, while not forcing the agencies to compromise their principles for fear of legal retaliation or face closure because of a loss of state funding.”Public policy approaches that focus on protecting the ability of faith-based services organizations to continue to serve, keep “all options open”for the varied needs of those seeking services, may provoke less of a public-perception backlash than do efforts that highlight the protection of religious freedom. That’s important in an environment where, to increasingly many, religious freedom has become another name for the protection of bigotry and hatred. If done right, public policies that support religious freedom for faith-based organizations, framed to the public as protecting the diversity of providers in the marketplace and protecting the rights of services recipients to seek diverse services, may even begin to link religious freedom for religious organizations with the promotion of diversity in services and approaches to today’s most pressing social challenges.