OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web, which I generally much like, contained the following item today:
Who’s Intolerant?
“The Air Force Academy’s longtime football coach has agreed to remove a Christian banner from the team’s locker room after school administrators announced they would do more to fight religious intolerance,” the Associated Press reports.
If they’re removing Christian banners, shouldn’t that read “to fight for religious intolerance”?
This argument, it seems to me, fails to distinguish speech by individual students from speech by a coach — in this case, a government employee. Here’s how the story describes the situation:
Coach Fisher DeBerry agreed Friday to remove the banner, which displayed the “Competitor’s Creed,” including the lines “I am a Christian first and last . . . I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.”
DeBerry put the banner up Wednesday to encourage the team, which has experienced one of its worst seasons in recent years, academy spokesman Lt. Col. Laurent Fox said.
A day earlier, academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa announced the school would do more religious tolerance training after some nonreligious cadets reported on a survey that they felt ostracized. Others reported hearing religious slurs or jokes.
Unless there are some facts missing here, this doesn’t seem to me to be good coaching or good manners. Some team members presumably aren’t Christians, first, last, or at all. They would understandably feel more alienated from the team by this banner than encouraged by it. And even though most of the students are likely Christian, I suspect that any morale benefits for them are likely to be quite modest.
Now tolerance is a complex matter here. People should also tolerate others’ religious practices, even when they may create some sense of exclusion. Seeing a coach wearing a cross necklace might make some players feel alienated, by reminding them that they’re in a religious minority; but the players should deal with this. Coaches’ pre-game prayers with students are a somewhat closer case, because even though they can reasonably make non-Christian players feel excluded, prohibiting such prayers would interfere with the coach’s ability to engage in a communal religious practice that may be pretty important to him. Again, this may counsel in favor of other players’ (and supervisors’) tolerating this, even if it might in some measure undermine team spirit as well as increasing it; though, as I mentioned, this is a close case.
But the banner, it seems to me, is not just a personal religious observance by a coach, or even a communal religious observance that the coach is engaging in with his students. Rather, it’s something that seems unnecessary to the coach’s individual religious conscience, and that seems to pretty strongly suggest that to be on this team, players should also be on Team Jesus Christ. I think the coach’s supervisors made the right call in having their employee take down this poster.
On the other hand, I was troubled by this item later in the story:
Some cadets were admonished in March for using academy e-mail accounts to encourage other people to see “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson’s movie about the crucifixion.
While the e-mail system is the academy’s property, I suspect that cadets are generally free to use it to express a pretty wide range of views (rather than, for instance, being limited just to school-related purposes). If that’s so, then it seems to me that cadets ought to be similarly free to urge their classmates to see The Passion of the Christ; and if they were indeed admonished simply for this, then that would be a form of religious intolerance.
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