Religious Liberty Victories and the Strange Fruit of Sour Grapes

Yesterday, many orthodox Christians rejoiced with  the US Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Hobby Lobby and other closely-held companies that oppose mandatory funding for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients as required by Health and Human Services (HHS). There are numerous implications for the reasonings, language, dissenting opinions, and so forth. This indicates that apologists for religious liberty have a long row to hoe before the work against intrusive secularism is done. It must be re-iterated that this case dealt with for-profit corporations, not non-profit organizations, which are also suffering under the HHS mandates. In a more troubling turn, it seems that all of individual American citizens will now have to pay for contraceptive access through tax-payer funding at the federal level. Similarly bothersome for some is the fact that the case pivots on the idea that corporations are people. Nevertheless, lovers of liberty are able to breathe a sigh of thanksgiving for this decision that protects certain businesses.

However, not everyone who claims the title “Christian” is happy even with this juridical victory. The Mainline Protestant lobbying arms made allegiance against their fellow Christians at Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties. Like the NARAL and Planned Parenthood, voices from the aging Mainlines as well as the Evangelical Left shrilly condemned what they considered a mortal blow to women’s rights and healthcare. How 2012 marks the inception of women’s rights may be beyond most historians, but apparently the summit of human progress was secured with the current executive’s interpretation and enforcement of the Affordable Care Act. While this is a strange idea that seems to be floating around the liberal activist crowd, a far stranger thought has entered the minds of liberal Christians: religious leaders should be the most ardent secularists in today’s society.

Perverse though it may seem at first blush, there is a logic to the madness. Such can be found in this Huffington Post editorial by the liberal evangelical Rich Cizik. “When anyone can use religion to claim an exemption on anything, religion loses meaning,” he explains, “Rather than a personal belief embedded in our souls, faith would become a set of arbitrary rules any corporation could choose from to skirt the law.” Do not miss the dialectic of William James here: religion is really personal and individualistic. Everyone is free to make religion into whatever they “feel.” All is negotiable otherwise; there is no concept of religious authority having an independent claim on  a person’s life. Only the state has the power to arbitrate between individuals’ religious feelings and beliefs so that they do not get in the way of one another.

According to Cizik, businesses cannot have feelings and subjective-ness. Thus, corporations cannot really really believe things (Cizik conveniently sidesteps the fact that business-owners are in fact people and have feelings). Instead, corporations—being, as the Left believes, completely heartless and immoral—will somehow magically exploit a religious loophole to make more profit and cheapen the true meaning of religion, which is completely subjective and really really authentic. A company cannot have a religious experience, and thus it should not have a religious shelter under the law.

My friend Jon Askonas best declared the irony of this whole situation, noting,

It’s really funny that the left is so opposed to a ruling that has at its heart the idea the corporations should seek to do more than make a profit, that they should actually as a matter of organizational principle seek to better their communities and employees. It’s like they want corporations to be simply profit-seeking parasitic octopi.

Indeed, that is the rub. In an age where companies and their owners are fussed at and harassed to do the ethical thing or else be yet another tired-out Hollywood antagonist, companies and their owners are eviscerated and condemned when they try to do the moral thing in the face of intrusive regulations. Whereas the troubling connection between contraceptive medical companies and pharmaceutical lobbying goes unnoticed, companies with religious owners are put on the media hotseat.

Sadly, Cizik and others appear to actually want persecution to come down upon the American church to separate the wheat from the chaff, starting first with Christians in the corporate world. The logic of abetting attacks on Christian brethren is a troubling one. Though there may be limits on the virtue of loyalty, one wonders how far the Christian Left’s detached logic of secularism would take them.