'Chilling effect': Faith groups slam GOP investigation as 'invasion of religious liberty'
U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) speaks alongside House Republican impeachment managers and other Senate Republicans during a press conference on the impeachment of U.S. Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 16, 2024. REUTERS/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/File Photo
Religious organizations are slamming a Republican House probe, calling it a violation of their liberty, reports Religion News Service.
“It’s an invasion of religious liberty,” said Bishop Dwayne Royster, a United Church of Christ pastor who heads Faith in Action. Royster argues his group reserves the right to practice a form of faith “which says that there’s no strangers amongst us, that we’re all siblings.”
But Royster said Reps. Mark E. Green (R-Tenn.) and Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) were anything but friends when they announced plans to probe more than 200 nongovernmental organizations earlier this month. The congressmen are accusing their targets of being “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.”
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Royster told Religion News the probe was “designed to have a chilling effect” on organizations like Faith in Action. He added: “I will be damned if they’re going to stop us from doing what we feel mandated and called to do by God: To care for other human beings to the best of our ability.”
The chairmen are requesting each non-governmental organization complete a survey of questions about government grants, contracts, and disbursements they received, lawsuits they are petitioning and amicus briefs they have filed in any lawsuit brought against the federal government. The survey also demands organizations reveal any legal service, translation service, transportation, housing, sheltering, or any other form of assistance they’ve provided to non-citizen residents or unaccompanied non-citizen children since January 2021.
Green and Breechen, who chair the House Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability, expressly targeted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Global Refuge for the probe. But a list provided to Religion News Service indicates more than 30 religious groups have received the lawmakers' letter.
Royster said the questionnaire wasn’t relevant to Faith in Action’s work, and said he had no intention of responding to it.
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Unitarian Universalist Association general counsel Adrienne K. Walker denied her denomination receiving any grants, contracts or disbursements from the Biden administration, and she criticized the probe as appearing “to target the UUA and its members’ fundamental rights to exercise their religious practices protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said USCCB plans to respond to the survey but argues that the USCCB has a 45-year agreement with the federal government to serve groups of people authorized by that same government to receive assistance.
Read the full Religion News Service report at this link.
