"Separation of church and state" or "Subjection of church to state"?

From the Wall Street Journal, news that The Supreme Court may soon be ruling whether or not the federal government's Justice Department can decide which church employees are clergy and which aren't:

But who counts as a minister? Cheryl Perich's duties included leading students in prayer and worship, but she also taught secular subjects, using ordinary secular textbooks. The sole disagreement in the lower courts was whether her job was sufficiently religious to be considered ministerial. The Supreme Court will consider, for the first time, how to make that determination.

But the Obama Justice Department has now asked the court to disavow the ministerial exception altogether. This would mean that, in every future case, a court—and not the church—would decide whether the church's reasons for firing or not hiring a minister were good enough.

But the government, including the judiciary, is not entitled under the First Amendment to decide what qualifications a minister should have, or to weigh religious considerations against others. Is a secular court to decide, for example, whether confining Catholic priests or Orthodox rabbis to males is a correct interpretation of scripture, or merely a vestige of outmoded and stereotypical bias?

James Madison famously declared that the civil magistrate is not a "competent Judge of Religious truth." Yet every discrimination claim about the hiring of a minister necessarily comes down to the question of whether the church had a bona fide religious reason for its decision. That places the courts squarely in the business of adjudicating the validity of a church's claims about its own religious practice.

Read the entire piece, "Washington Wants a Say Over Your Minister" (WSJ, Oct. 5, 2011), by Michael W. McConnell.