Voices: Reject the use of public funds to proselytize children

My career as a chaplain led me to many unexpected places. In the mid-1980s, I ministered to hospitalized gay men with AIDS, walking with them as they endured emotional punishment and spiritual abuse directly from members of their own families. I also ministered to straight members of the community who contracted AIDS through transfusions, who also endured persecution.

I watched volunteers from Dallas’ AIDS ARMS Inc. provide a stabilizing presence for all kinds of people suffering from the ravages of the disease, but I also witnessed too many Christians attack anyone with AIDS while they were at their most vulnerable. There was a lack of Christian love.

I found myself recalling Tertullian, the early Christian theologian. He famously observed his Roman acquaintances were prone to exclaim about Christians, “See how they love one another!” He was also the first Christian to use the phrase “religious freedom.”

Religious freedom in Texas is threatened by a new law that allows the state’s many school districts to hire government-sponsored chaplains or accept people who want to be chaplains as volunteers.

My experiences in chaplaincy and the profound personal convictions they shaped in me compelled me to sign a letter from more than 100 Texas chaplains opposing this idea. I do so as a Baptist who cares about religious freedom, as well as my spiritual obligation to love my neighbors.

Christ’s command to love

Christ’s commandment to love our neighbors was not just about loving those who think like us, but it also is to love anyone we might consider to be an enemy.

If we believe it is wrong to coerce Christian families and their youngest, most vulnerable members to abandon their faith and accept the hegemony of politically powerful faiths in other countries, how can we condone the use of government resources to bolster a politically powerful Christianity in our own backyard?

And it’s a Christianity, I might add, that does not obey the simplest and most often repeated ethical commandments of its Savior.

We must advocate for religious freedom at home as much as we advocate for it around the world. No government should come between families and their right to decide religious matters.

As a Christian, I am commanded to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30-31).

A chaplain’s rigorous training

As a hospital chaplain and a certified educator of chaplains, I believed a commitment to receive training to deal with a wide variety of mental, physical, emotional, relational and spiritual challenges was part of my calling from God.

That is why I pursued six years of clinical training after completing my Master of Divinity degree at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary here in Texas.

The current Texas option makes no such demands upon the individuals who eventually would be commissioned to function as chaplains in a school setting, even though they’d be in close contact with the most vulnerable individuals in our population.

I am firmly against using public funds to proselytize children. I believe the institutional separation of church and state protects Texas children from the government deciding what and how to believe. I also favor requiring chaplains to possess professional training and certification to minister to people of all faiths and those who are not religious.

Committed to religious freedom

This new Texas law fails to uphold religious freedom, and public school districts must reject the option to create public school chaplain programs.

Tertullian wrote that “every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions. For one person’s religion neither harms nor hurts another.”

That quote is remarkable, coming as it does from a Christian thinker who lived during a time with a very real threat of persecution looming over his life.

As I’ve thought about this new law, I keep returning to my experience as a chaplain ministering to Texans with AIDS. It was those AIDS ARMS volunteers I witnessed walking into the maw of suffering and heartache over and over again to bring comfort and support to hurting people.

It was also the beginning of my own deep disaffection with forms of so-called Christianity that turn the gospel on its head by viewing a Christian witness as a winner-take-all game. This game makes suffering acceptable—even mandated—for those who do not belong to that club.

Instead, Christians are called to love. It is my hope Christians may love well and that the government may stay out of promoting or denigrating our faith—or any faith—in any way.

R. Mark Grace is a retired chaplain, pastoral educator and chief mission and ministry officer at Baylor Scott and White Health, and pastor emeritus at Iglesia Bill Harrod in West Dallas. The views expressed are those of the auhor.