Opinion ID: 2040077
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Owens' Religious Belief and Practice in a Secular Society

Text: This case is unique, as the hearing examiner (hereafter examiner) observed, because a statute designed to protect the religious from discrimination has been invoked by the nonreligious or merely nominally religious against Owens, a man of strong religious belief and commitment. The important issues in this case cannot be fully understood without understanding Owens himself. Owens is, by his personal confession, a Christian. A Christian, of course, is one who professes belief in the religion of Christianity. The centuries-old Apostles' Creed, a statement of the main Christian beliefs in use as early as A.D. 150 and still in use throughout Christendom by both Roman Catholics and Protestants, recites: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell: the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen. The Nicene Creed, similar in its Christology and adopted in A.D. 325, is used by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. [2] Justice William Brennan has taken judicial notice of the characteristically Christian belief that a Divine Saviour was brought into the world and that the purpose of His miraculous birth was to illuminate a path toward salvation and redemption, an exclusive, precious and holy [path]. [3] If these are basic beliefs of Christians, they are obviously fundamental. Owens described his basic Christian belief in more particularized terms: born again, evangelical, and fundamentalist. They are terms that, for many, have created a stereotype to which negative reactions range from amusement or bemusement to outright hostility [4]  a climate in which the fundamental issues in this case were not, and are not likely to be, given appropriate consideration. The words born again came from the lips of Jesus Christ to Nicodemus as reported in the Gospel according to John. [5] Then, as now, those words signified a conversion  a conscious change in belief or, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) (hereafter Webster's Dictionary ), a spiritual regeneration. The words born again and the possibly more comfortable word renaissance derive from the same French word, renaitre, id., and both are substantially synonymous with an entire nation under God [having] a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln spoke the words at Gettysburg. The most dramatic and radical born-again experience recorded in the New Testament is probably that of St. Paul who, en route to Damascus to persecute early Christians, had a Divine encounter and was converted into the greatest of Christian missionaries. Acts 9:1-30; 22:3-16. No less radical, if less dramatic, was the earlier experience of Peter (together with Andrew, James, and John), who abandoned his fishing nets to follow the Stranger who said, Come with me and I will teach you to catch men. Matthew 4:18-22. Norman Vincent Peale, in an October 3, 1984, dialogue on CBS television, said that he had been born again in a traditional way but that not everyone does or must experience it in the same way as he had. Owens, who testified concerning his own born-again experience in 1957, described what it meant to him: It means that really the experience with Jesus Christ which is a personal relationship with a risen Lord, controls my life, my attitude, the way I operate in my home, the way I operate in interpersonal relationships and the way I operate in business. Owens is an evangelical Christian. Evangel, according to Webster's Dictionary, refers to glad tidings or the Christian gospel. The verb, evangelize, is defined as to instruct in the Gospel; to    convert to Christianity. A final command of Jesus to his eleven disciples was [g]o, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples. Matthew 28:19. They did, and changed the world; Owens did, and changed his business. Owens, finally, is a fundamentalist Christian. The words of the Founder of Christianity can be nothing less than fundamental. But to Owens and other fundamentalists, to be a fundamentalist Christian encompasses a belief that both the Old and the New Testaments, in their original texts, are verbally inspired of God (citing Matthew 5:17-18, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, and 2 Peter 1:21 and 3:16) and accordingly are inerrant and the complete and supreme authority in faith and life. It is not for an administrative agency or this court to assess the legitimacy of Owens' belief or undertake an exegesis of the Scripture passages upon which it is based. It is enough to acknowledge that it is Owens' belief and one shared by hundreds of thousands of similar believers. [6] Our duty is to recognize that belief and at least respect his right to it. The freedom of belief in matters religious, whether or not the belief is shared by others, is constitutional fundamentalism; however, acknowledging the freedom to believe but denying a concomitant freedom to communicate and put beliefs into practice is essentially oxymoronic.