“Two Christian girls. Two sets of distraught parents. And two state courts smack in the middle of it.” That’s how William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal coverage of two cases that could not be more dissimilar. And if we cannot make the proper distinction between the two, we are all in trouble.
It may be due to aggressively activist courts prepared to strip parents of their rights to shape their kids’ religious upbringing, or because of overly timid courts who hide behind that very right to avoid protecting children from parents prepared to kill them over their religious choices. Either way, if the wrong decisions are upheld in either of these cases, we should all be worried.
In the case of Amanda Kurowski, New Hampshire judge Lucinda V. Sadler ordered that the 10-year-old child be forced to attend public school because the little girl’s “Christian faith could use some shaking up”. Huh? What’s next, removing my children from their Jewish day school because “it’s too Jewish”? Or perhaps we should have court-enforced attendance at the “right” houses of worship? In a word, this is nuts!
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that there are real down-sides to educating kids, including my own, in even the most open-minded religious private schools. And I know that too often those challenges are exacerbated by the home schooling given to kids like Amanda. But she was, by all educational and psychological measures, a well-adjusted child making appropriate academic progress. So the only reason for the judge’s ruling is, as stated, that Justice Sadler felt like playing Theologian-in-Chief. That’s so wrong, it’s not even wrong!
Ironically, this is precisely the kind of spiritual arrogance about which I am sure Justice Sadler is concerned. And I think before she starts addressing that problem in others, she needs to take a hard look at herself and her own behavior. At the very least she should recall the old saying about the road to Hell and good intentions.
In the case of Rifqa Bary, it is her parents’ intentions which are at issue because they may not be so good.

The 17-year-old left her Ohio home for Florida because, she says, she feared for her life. Having converted from Islam to Christianity, Ms. Bary claimed that her father threatened to kill her. Now the court must decide whether to forcibly return the teenager to her parents’ home.
While the courts will need to evaluate whether or not her parents pose a genuine threat to the new Christian, her fears are not entirely baseless. Conversion to another faith is a capital offense in most, if not all, Islamic states. And, Muslim parents have killed their children, especially daughters, over far smaller infractions time and again, even in the United States.
According to McGurn, “In Texas last year, an Egyptian-born father (still sought by authorities) is thought to have murdered his two daughters because they dated non-Muslim men. A few months later in Georgia, a Pakistani man admitted to police that he strangled his daughter because she did not want to go through with an arranged marriage.”
There is no specific evidence that the Barys are those kinds of parents, but at the very least, the court needs to address the potential hazard that arises given the larger cultural context to which they might return Rifqa. While her parents cannot prove what they won’t do (nobody can), they can address how they will assure their daughter’s religious freedom.
Perhaps they should pledge to drive her to church on a regular basis, or to meet regularly with one of her pastors. Of course, the pastor would need to keep from evangelizing them, so it would be an interesting experiment in honoring each other’s choices for both sides.
But whatever decision is reached in the Bary case, let’s not confuse the issue. While both do involve potential limits on parental rights the cases are not analogous, unless the analogy is between Judge Sadler and the worst possible version of who the Barys might be. The common denominator in that case would be people who don’t appreciate that the free exercise of one’s faith does not include the right to limit another’s.
We should aim to maximize the freedom of all people’s religious expression and the limitation on that freedom must not be when it becomes culturally or theologically problematic for someone in power – be they parents or officers of the court. In fact, when that happens is when the real test of our religious freedom begins. Let’s hope that the courts in both New Hampshire and Florida remember that, for all of our sakes.