I recall going to a church business meeting last year at Sunrise Baptist here in Midland where they were debating a clause in the church bylaws forbidding members from taking the church to court, requiring their favored Christian mediation serves as a replacement for such disputes. One one level, there is good scriptural standing for such an attitude; 1 Corinthians 6 calls for keeping disputes within the church.
However, some of the rationale for such rules stems from the deep pockets many big churches have. When Sunrise was renting a small church building in the older section of town at the turn of the millennium and not having the money to pay a full-time pastor, there would be little for a litigious member to sue for. Fast forward a decade, and they have a nice newer building bought off the Midland E-Free near-megachurch when they outgrew the 600-or-so seat building and built even bigger digs; now, they are more likely to feel the need to have such suit-stopping rules, since they have more assets to cover.
A similar issue is at the Supreme Court, where such an arbitration mandate is in play. A teacher at a Lutheran school in metro Detroit got let go after coming down with narcoleptic symptoms; she felt the need to press an disability-discrimination lawsuit, but her contract stated that any such issue needed to go to arbitration instead. The church wants the suit thrown out and the Obama team is backing the sleepy teacher in her right to sue, saying that any pastoral exemption shouldn't extend to school-teachers, even if such teachers do a lot of religious teaching as part of their job.
This is a toughy. On one hand, that Biblical mandate makes taking a church to court problematic. However, if the arbitration process is stacked against someone who was wronged by a church, there seems to be a miscarriage of justice that needs a judicial remedy. I don't know the winning percentage of churches in such settings, but there is often an assumption that the church elders are right and the plaintiff is wrong.
We're quick to want to keep Muslim internal law from getting into our courts, especially if the deck is stacked against women and children and for men; one of the more troubling parts of Herman Cain's rhetoric is his excessive fear of such sharia rules getting respected in US courts. However, if we want to go after Islamic legal infrastructure as unfair, would we also be on constitutional grounds to go after Christian legal infrastructure that may be unfair to some parties?
That's what the Supremes have to deal with. I have the feeling that there will be a lot of concurring opinions. Having to be nice to a gal with nap attacks wouldn't be a huge breech of Christian values; if anything, the school looks more like Pharisees at this point. Somehow, I don't see this one being 5-4 with Kennedy being the swing vote either way, since I could see this going anything from 7-2 for the teacher to 6-3 for the church.
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