The Good Fight

Dispatches from opposite sides of the debate about religion in the workplace.

At the beginning of our first phone conversation, Mikey Weinstein asks me if I'm Jewish. At the end of our first e-mail exchange, Angie Tracey tells me to have a blessed evening. Weinstein has spent the past four years fighting what he calls a war against Christian proselytizing through the chain of command in the military; Tracey founded the first officially recognized Christian federal employee association in the nation.

Though they are separated by 1,900 miles, religious traditions, and civil and military backgrounds, Weinstein and Tracey personify the poles in a debate about the role religious faith plays when a person picks up a weapon or sits down at a computer in service of the U.S. government.

It's been 10 years since President Bill Clinton declared that "Religious freedom is at the heart of what it means to be an American, and at the heart of our journey to become truly one America."

He issued guidelines granting greater freedom of religious expression to civilian federal employees, which, among other things, allowed them to become part of workplace ministries.

Clinton's guidelines set up balancing tests that sought to ensure that as federal workplaces opened up to religion and employees were allowed to shape their work lives around their religious obligations, no agency would fall into endorsing any faith tradition and no one's right to be free from religion would be abrogated.

But the movement of faith into the federal workplace raises questions no regulations can answer. Does faith inspire a selflessness that makes people harder workers, more considerate colleagues and more determined soldiers or public servants? And if it does, should government employees leave faith at the office door, replacing religious symbols with the flag and religious texts with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

The Evangelist

The Activist