(FORTUNE Magazine) – It seems that the ideal of religious tolerance is now enforced by a federal agency that writes sentences like the following, taken from a recent ''fact sheet'' issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: ''An employee has redress if s/he is subjected to repeated epithets or insults hostile to his/her religion.'' Only a question of time is the emergence of ''h/is/er'' as the agency's possessive pronoun of choice. The EEOC, now in the process of extending the laws against sex-based harassment so as to also cover race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability, has been taking flak in Congress on the religious front. On the sex-in-business front, it is of course firmly established that harassment covers not only demands for sexual favors but also the existence of a ''hostile environment'' for women (or, conceivably, men). The question now on the table is: Exactly what behavior will be verboten when the EEOC finalizes its proposed ban on hostile environments in the religious context? The agency's guidelines speak vaguely of situations in which the corporate environment is somehow radiating ''hostility or aversion'' toward employees because of their religious beliefs. The fact sheet, created in an effort to help Congressmen answer constituent mail, mentions an example that only an EEOC apparatchik could view as plausible: the ''secular humanist'' boss who goes around ridiculing the beliefs of his Christian employees. Ah, but the mail flowing into Congress makes it clear that the secular humanist threat is not what's worrying religiously oriented business people. Eyeing the ineradicable ambiguity of the new proposals, combined with the tendency of EEOC regulations to expand into far more territory than initially contemplated, it is natural to wonder: If a pat on the (upper) back can now trigger a sexual-harassment suit, what happens to a boss who says God bless you? Or to a company whose policy manual prescribes adherence to biblical principles? As we write, 45 members of the House are asking the EEOC to delete the religious requirement. Conceivably, it will do so, although the fact sheet defensively argues the great importance of making it clear that ''workplace harassment ((is)) prohibited on any and all of the bases covered by the laws the Commission enforces.'' / Religious bigotry is not nonexistent (i.e., it exists), but nobody seems willing to step forward and argue that religious harassment in the workplace is any kind of serious social problem here and now. The EEOC itself has not made any such contention, and Bob Peck of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office has been quoted as saying he was hard-pressed to think of any cases in this area. To be sure, the absence of any real problem is no guarantee against a federal solution.