The Economist
ACROSS the Western world, religious organisations have fought a hard and mostly successful battle to retain the right to “discriminate” when choosing their own priests, rabbis and imams. And that seems reasonable enough. Something peculiar would be going on if say, a Christian church were obliged, under equality legislation, to admit to the priesthood a person who professed either atheism or some other religion.
But the number of jobs over which religious bodies have some influence goes far beyond the ranks of clerics or prayer leaders. There are church-based charities and foundations. There are jobs like hospital chaplaincies where the employer is secular but appointments are subject to church vetting. There are university faculties, indeed entire universities, which are religious foundations. And across western Europe, churches have an influence over the education of children which is far out of proportion to the number of people who actually attend services. In Germany, more than 1m jobs are in the gift of the Protestant or Catholic churches, as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) noted when considering a religious employment case.
On the face of things, the further you get from narrowly defined clerical institutions and posts, the harder it would seem to justify “discrimination” and the scrutiny of employees’ beliefs and private lives—something which would not be tolerated in any other walk of life. At any rate, that’s what secularists would strongly argue.
But the most recent high-profile court cases on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to vindicate religious groups. In 2012 the American Supreme Court rejected a complaint of unfair dismissal lodged by a teacher at a Lutheran school, on grounds that she was technically a “minister” and therefore serving at the church’s pleasure. Two landmark German cases considered by the ECHR were about employees of religious institutions who were laid off because of extra-marital affairs. The court upheld the complaint of an organist at a famous cathedral, but rejected that of a public-relations officer for the Mormons. In yet another case, the ECHR (in a split vote) rejected the complaint of a Spanish retired teacher and ex-priest who was fired because he married and joined a campaign against compulsory celibacy for priests.
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