How do you think the Religious Right would react to a scenario in which several Christian teachers and employees were fired from a school for not holding the proper views? Most likely, they’d scream “discrimination.”
Now how do you think the Religious Right would react to a scenario in which several teachers were fired from a Christian school for not holding the proper views? Most likely, they’d say the school has the right to set its own religious requirements and to determine who it hires and fires accordingly.
So I am genuinely curious about how they will respond to this story in about a Christian school firing a bunch of Catholic employees for not being “born again”:
Four teachers and seven other workers at a Southern California religious school have been fired because of differences in biblical interpretation and incompatible beliefs.
Most of the dismissed workers were Roman Catholics whose beliefs conflicted with those of Corona’s conservative evangelical Crossroads Christian Schools, which last year lost its autonomy and came under the umbrella of the 8,000-member Crossroads Christian Church next door.
“To me, it feels like religious cleansing,” said the Rev. John Saville of St. John’s Episcopal Church, where fired elementary teacher Marylou Goodman is a parishioner.
The fired employees had been told a year ago of the school’s closer relationship with the church and a requirement that they attend a “Bible-believing church,” meaning born-again.
The employees had reportedly signed a “statement of faith” which summarized Crossroads’ beliefs and saw nothing with which they disagreed, but authorities at the school believed that these employees “weren’t living out” the statement, in part because they have not received the proper baptism:
Crossroads is not anti-Catholic, said the Rev. Chuck Booher, senior pastor of the church. But some fundamental Catholic beliefs and practices — such as praying to saints and the belief that the wine and wafer in communion become Christ’s blood and body — are not in line with Crossroads’ teachings, he said.
In addition, Crossroads views only full-body-immersion baptism as valid, based upon interpretations of Biblical verses. Most of the 11 dismissed employees had not undergone baptism by immersion, Frobisher said.
Booher said some dismissed employees did not know why the church required immersive baptism.
“The fact we had teachers who didn’t understand that shows we (the church and school) weren’t in alignment,” Booher said. “We want teachers in our school with a strong enough understanding that we wouldn’t have to explain that to them.”
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One teacher who had been raised Lutheran was rehired for the new school year after she underwent a full-immersion baptism, Long said. She now attends Crossroads.
