After the filing of a lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the University of Minnesota has dropped plans to sponsor a faith/health program. This program would have trained students how to integrate religious faith and medical practice in a manner that would have violated the separation of church and state.

The Minnesota Daily reports:

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said the organization is “very pleased” with the outcome. “This has national significance,” she said. “These courses were meant to create a national model. There was going to be a conference at the end to spread the program across the country.”

A course dealing with religious faith and health care would not necessarily be a problem. Such a course could justifiably discuss how people’s religious faith influences how they perceive illness, how it affects treatments, and of course how health care professionals can appropriately deal with religious issues while fulfilling their duties. A lecture series from a wide variety of religious leaders on how they deal with the intersection of faith and health might be appropriate here as well.

Training people on how to integrate religious faith and healthcare is another matter entirely, though. Any such training would have to single out some particular form of religious faith to exclusion of all others — not simply Christianity over Buddhism, for example, but some type of Christianity over other types. What would be the justification for picking evangelical Protestantism over Christian Science or Pentecostalism? And which religious leader’s authority would be used for explaining how faith should be integrated into medical practice?

State officials really shouldn’t be making decisions like that. It’s good that the Freedom From Religion Foundation stepped in to deal with this.

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Secularism 101