First Amendment for inmates, chaplains alike

The separation of church and state gets distinctly confused in the state’s prison system.

Convicted felons retain the right to worship according to their consciences, within reasonable limits. That means the state becomes a provider of religious services – including chaplains on the state payroll. The parallel is the U.S. military, where many personnel would not enjoy free exercise of religion if the government did not provide them with government-employed ministers.

James Madison would have had nightmares trying to sort this one out.

Such is the muddled backdrop of a new Department of Corrections policy requiring the accommodation of prisoners who profess bizarre hybrids of belief systems.

The policy was forced by a lawsuit filed by an inmate who demanded to be accommodated both as a Seventh-day Adventist and a Native American practitioner. The court decided he possessed that right.

That doesn’t sit well with a Roman Catholic chaplain at McNeil Island, the Rev. Tom Suss. He doesn’t like the policy on understandable philosophic terms: How can you claim to be both Catholic and a worshipper of the old pagan Norse deities, as one inmate is reportedly doing?

Suss also doesn’t like the expectation that – as a state-employed chaplain – he endorse the policy.

On its face, the policy protects religious claims that can’t stand up to any kind of logical scrutiny. Christianity and paganism are intrinsically incompatible, for example. But who knows what’s running through an inmate’s mind when he or she claims to adhere to both?

As a general rule, the government is forbidden from making judgments about the merits or sincerity of people’s beliefs. There are limits, though. For example, prisoners who claim membership in the Church of Marijuana haven’t had much luck practicing one of its sacraments – smoking dope – behind bars.

All that applies to the inmates’ claims on the First Amendment. But a chaplain has claims, too, that a federal court might well be sympathetic to. If a Catholic chaplain were fired for refusing to provide, say, a communion or a crucifix to a self-styled pagan Catholic, he would have been punished by the state for the exercise of his own conscience.

The state would be smart not to push this policy too hard on chaplains who, like Suss, cannot accept it on principle. An explicit conscience exemption to the general rule would be in order. The best solution would be to accommodate the beliefs of inmates and chaplains alike, finessing the potential conflicts on a case-by-case basis – like finding someone else to provide the crucifix.

The First Amendment is something of a muddle in prison. So the best way to deal with it there is probably to muddle through.