But what's more interesting than the scripted volleys between conservative Muslims and America's home-grown nationalists, is the timing of the debate: coinciding within days of March's House re-introduction of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act (WRFA): a bill that has been on offer every year since 1997, and has been marked by its unusually broad base of support: from far-right Christians to moderate Jewish groups, with a wealth representatives from Sikh, Muslim and smaller Christian denominations thrown in.

Minnesota Public Radio sums up some of the issues at hand in WRFA:

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, an employer doesn't have to accommodate a person's religious practice if doing so would cause undue hardship on the business.

A coalition of religious organizations says the courts have watered down the hardship standard so that employees have little chance to express their religion at work. Nathan Diament, Public Policy Director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, says the coalition wants Congress to pass the so-called Workplace Religious Freedom Act because it would require more from employers.

"Now the state of federal law is that if an employer would have even a minimal inconvenience in accommodating an employee's religious needs, the employer does not have to accommodate those religious needs. So the Workplace Religious Freedom Act or WRFA is designed to reinstate the original congressional strength of that provision of the Civil Rights Act," says Diament.

Under the act, an employer could avoid accommodating a person's religious practice if doing so would be significantly difficult or expensive. The new standard largely gauges an employer's hardship financially; the cost of lost productivity, retraining or hiring of additional employees, and of accommodating someone's religion in relation to the employer's revenues.

Diament, one of WRFA's most stalwart defenders, and a standard talking-head in all coverage of the issue, has pled this objection for nearly as long as WRFA has been on the table. (And just as long, centrist Democrats have been advocating its adoption as a show of good faith for Democratic politicians trying to appeal to conservatives.) For constituencies such as his Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, whose interest in WFRA is generally about the accommodation of Jewish holidays and observance of the Sabbath, the cost of accommodation may not be great.

But as WRFA's critics point out, the overly broad and vague language of the bill would protect not just unobtrusive displays of faith such as Sabbath-observance, or religious hairstyles, but also a wide-ranging list of duties and services that religious employees find objectionable, such as pharmacists filling prescriptions, cops guarding abortion clinics, social service workers counseling gays, or prison and rehabilitation workers treating patients and prisoners without proselytizing their faith: all court cases that the ACLU has noted in its advocacy against WRFA.

he American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce oppose the bill because they say it's too broad. Christopher Anders, the ACLU's legislative counsel, says the legislation could cause more harm than it intends to remedy; for example protecting workers who refuse to provide healthcare services.

"If someone wants to refuse to provide a health care service, whether it's refusing to fill a prescription for an emergency contraceptive or take someone to a hospital for an emergency termination of a pregnancy, it would be much easier for the employee to claim that he or she has a religious objection to doing those things," Anders says.

The breadth of the legislation is a concern even for some religious believers who want to carry their religions into the workplace. That's according to Richard Garnett who's a visiting law professor at the University of Chicago and a former law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Garnett says there's another concern. He says the bill defines a business' hardship largely in financial costs when workplace culture can also be a loss.

It will be interesting to see how the lines are drawn this year when WRFA is debated in Congress. In years past, it has garnered the support of politicians ranging from John Kerry to Rick Santorum. How will Santorum's fellow conservative Christians treat the bill now that its principles are being put to the test by a very different sort of believer than the one they imagined they were protecting?