Your Conscience is Pre-Political

I'm thankful for the category of "religious exemption," but is your conscience just as protected?

Photo by Norbert Kundrak on Unsplash

I happily wrote dozens of religious exemption letters during the heat of the COVID vaccine mandates a couple of years ago. Not only did people in my immediate circle seek these out, but once word got out, I and my board wrote a formal statement to support an exemption. If someone wanted a letter from me, they needed to agree to the statement, then I would be happy to provide a signed letter.

The importance of religious exemptions has not only not gone away with the end of the vaccine mandates, it has become a normal part of corporate and government life. If someone is faced with a situation they find contradicts their beliefs, they might need to go to HR and file some kind of religious exemption.

I am glad this category exists, and that people can take advantage of it. But I have a question: Why is it only a religious exemption?

Why can’t it just be an exemption? Why can’t a person simply claim that their conscience prohibits them from an action or an enforced vocabulary at work? Why can’t a person simply refuse to live by lies in the workplace, and be exempted?

A religious exemption from some behavior or mandate is a recognition that religion is pre-political. It should be disturbing that our culture increasingly no longer considers your conscious pre-political.

I recently received a newsletter from a local law office. It contains the normal set of updates and general suggestions about how to navigate different situations. One of the sections had to do with the conflict of chosen pronouns and religious exemptions. It says in part:

As we discussed in Part 1, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (as well as many similar state laws) protect transgendered employees from discrimination and harassment. Laws also protect religious employees with faith-based objections to transgenderism. Under many of these laws, the intentional reference to an employee by names and pronouns different than those they prefer can constitute harassment on the basis of sex. If co-workers are alleged to do this, the offended employee complains to management or HR, and the employer does not take corrective action, the employer could be liable for being deliberately indifferent to a hostile work environment. This risk encourages employers to have policies that give notice of zero tolerance for harassment and require investigation of harassment complaints.

But certain employees can claim a religious exemption, which creates another round of conversations and allowances:

On the other hand, if an employee requests an accommodation to a policy about preferred pronoun usage in the workplace based on sincerely-held religious beliefs, the employer must enter into a good-faith, interactive dialogue with that employee to determine a reasonable accommodation. And remember, as discussed in Part 1, an employer must provide an accommodation that resolves the employee’s religious conflict unless the accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of the employer’s particular business. If an employer denies a religious accommodation without meeting this standard of undue burden, or if the employer disparages or shows hostility towards the employee’s religious beliefs, then the employer can be liable for religious discrimination.

The newsletter admits that employers are between a rock and a hard place (they use the older image of being caught between the mythical sea monster, Scylla, and the gaping whirlpool, Charybdis).

Our question is, however, what if an employee is not particularly religious, but does not want to be coerced to use falsehoods to refer to coworkers? What if chosen pronouns, no matter their relationship to the law or HR policy, offends their conscience?

It seems we have reached a point where, at least on certain popular issues, the rising ideology of our day has decided that an individual’s conscience is post-political. (Some recent statements made by Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, confirm this suspicion.) This means that politics determines what you can say and do in public. A political position that values free speech, believes that the individual’s belief is prior to the government’s ability to coerce their speech, thus, pre-political.

One positive outcome from this situation is that religion is pre-political. It doesn’t matter what a state does to coerce speech or behavior, religion, especially true religion, is fundamentally prior to the State. My Christian faith is a higher authority than any edict from any governmental body. It is a more foundational guide for my beliefs and behavior than any political position.

This means that right now, religion is the last bulwark. With prayer, wisdom, and hard work, we might return to a place of greater sanity, but we are not there.