Photo Credit: www.christourlife.ca
Victory in the Hobby Lobby case was crucial to religious liberty in America, since it prevented a clear attempt by the government to require Christians to violate their faith. But the hysterical reaction of the cultural and religious Left signals a propaganda war against religious liberty. This could turn the tide against liberty of conscience, and result in a society (which to some considerable extent already exists) in which faithful Christians are legally required to sin. We therefore need to understand the nature of the severe problem we are in.
Essentially, our problem is that we must obey a transcendent God in a society which is being structured to be self-sufficient without God. Christians may be weary of the ongoing struggle over Christian faith and morality that has raged in our society since the mid-twentieth century, especially as legal threats grow to the conduct of our lives, both individually in public, and corporately in specifically Christian organizations. In addition to battle fatigue and the continued advance of the secularist, feminist, and homosexualist agendas, the changing realities and sensibilities on the ground means that some earlier forms of argument lose their force. As an example, references to marital sexual relations now have a different meaning in many jurisdictions, and this causes people everywhere to think differently.
We need to remind ourselves why we remain faithful to Biblical revelation, and why it is important to continue regardless of any positive outcome that we may ever see. We contend because we have an absolute commitment to obey God, and to advance His kingdom. How this is arrived at of course differs, some are persuaded by argument, some by their personal experience, some by trust in their Christian education at home and/or church, but all truly believing do so by the grace of God, making their commitment absolute. It is with this commitment that we come into the contemporary, highly secularized, western world, in which we must be faithful to God, as in any other world.
The real environment that we face, however, is not just non-Christian, in which we might reasonably claim accommodation for ourselves and commend our beliefs to everyone as the truth, but post-Christian, in which our own commitment of obedience was once acknowledged as the correct basis for life, and now is rejected as being part of false or dubious religious doctrines, which are pernicious in practice. The secular vision proposes instead a society in which gratification is the point of life, to be made convenient and available to everyone by the government. This vision, of course, can be expected to have problems if there is substantial dissent from it. And in the classical revolutionary ideal, there is a perfect society at the end of history, which cannot be perfect if people disagree with it.
The secularist vision especially has problems if there are people struggling to be obedient to the transcendent God of Christianity. His commands come literally from out of this world, with complete authority. No amount of new experience or evidence can change them, and believers are tied to God by a heart commitment. We know why we are obedient; it is because of faith in and love for God. How do we present this to the wider world in a way that glorifies God and will command respect? We can only present it in a way that should command respect, as the duty that everyone owes to God, the perfect king of creation. This should be sufficient in itself, since everyone has an innate knowledge of God, but of course it is not sufficient with unbelievers. One can back up divine commands with arguments or evidence, but this cannot be expected to persuade people who are hostile to God, or who believe Him unreal (because they are hostile to God, as we know as Christians).
While we do have a duty to obey God regardless of the penalty, this can only be justified to a state and society that does not acknowledge God by appeal to the primary importance of living in accordance with what one apprehends to be ultimately true. This primary importance and the state’s agnosticism about ultimate questions lead naturally to the accommodation of religious belief through liberty of conscience, which was upheld by the Supreme Court. When we speak of liberty of conscience, we are not simply speaking of mere personal preference, or even of ardent desire, but of binding moral commitments. That secularists have no religious commitments and tend to see the meaning of life as being gratification or a general desire to see this world made better does not mean the secularist understanding of life’s meaning should be the basis of law and public policy, although this does seem to be the claim secularists and sexual liberationists are making against the Hobby Lobby decision. A practical naturalism is at work in their claims, holding that the law should not respect supernatural views of life’s meaning (as they also hold that science should be naturalistic in its explanations). But belief in naturalism is as great an act of faith as any specific religious doctrine. Contrary to secularists’ passionate rhetoric, it is they who are imposing their views on religious believers.
Is there a general rule that would allow the state to determine when liberty of conscience may be applied? Christopher Tollefsen, writing in Public Discourse in 2009 (and noted in an earlier article by this writer) proposed that:
“under extremely serious circumstances, the state can forbid what is otherwise taken to be obligatory. But the state should never command that an agent do something that an agent takes himself to be forbidden from doing by an exceptionless moral norm, and, it seems, the state should make a considerable effort to protect its citizens from demands by others that they violate their conscience in this way.”
The HHS mandate was such a state demand, and was inadmissible because it required religious businesses to take action they believed immoral. No action against conscience was required of anyone else as a result of this right of refusal, and the government could pay itself for abortion inducing drugs if it truly believes there is a compelling state interest. Similarly, in the current firestorm over religious merchants being required to provide goods and services that facilitate homosexual behavior (which is the real reason the cultural Left is enraged over the Hobby Lobby decision), the state should make provision in law protecting merchants’ liberty of conscience from lawsuits. This is a case of “demands by others that they [here religious merchants] violate their conscience” by taking what the merchants believe is immoral action. No action is required of customers. They suffer only hurt feelings, which should not be sufficient to constitute a “right.” Thus, there is no question of “religious rights versus the rights of others,” as the enemies of liberty of conscience constantly formulate it, because there should be no right to require other people to take action they believe immoral.
In contemporary America, defense of liberty for religious conscience has two (rhetorical but potent) objections to face: the racial analogy and the newly contrived anti-theocracy polemic. On the first, the Left is wrong to draw an analogy between racial differences and sexual differences. Racial differences are superficial, a mere matter of genetic variety in the human species. One can well argue that different treatment of races is unjustified by biological reality and an invitation to injustice (as it did occasion enormous injustice). Sex on the other hand is a profound difference in nature, found throughout nature and throughout the human species. Distinctions (i.e., discrimination, which wasn’t always a bad word) in public and private treatment based on sexual differences therefore has a rational basis, whereas distinctions in the treatment of races do not. Racial discrimination was a cultural practice, not a religious one (even if sometimes supported from the Bible). Crossing racial lines was thought undesirable or uncomfortable, not sinful.
The anti-theocracy polemic is ridiculous. Liberty of conscience precludes theocracy, which practically is the rule of religious leaders by religious law. There can be no single religious system imposed on all society under the pluralism of liberty of conscience. But there must be a theocracy in the lives of believers, and it is this reign of God in our lives, and its effect on society, which the cultural Left is condemning as theocracy; in effect, religious freedom is being condemned as theocracy. The true and good theocracy will prevail at Christ’s return, until then we can commend God’s precepts to an unbelieving world through the bridge of natural law and liberty of conscience.
What threatens our society today is a monolithic secularism that excludes liberty of conscience and opens all of life to state inspection for oppressive ideas. The proposed European Equal Treatment Directive, discussed by the present writer in an article late last year, is an example of the secularist dystopia at the end of the antidiscrimination road. On a broad reading, it does open all of life, public and private, to state inspection for oppressive ideas (which seems to be anything that causes “an offensive or humiliating environment”). Human rights commissions in Canada and parts of the United States, that monitor employment and public accommodations according antidiscrimination law and policy (which embodies the liberationist ideologies of the contemporary left) would move to the same thing in terms of their own logic.
A self-sufficient society with no suffering and focused on gratification may be a captivating vision for secularists and sexual liberationists, but this does not give them a right to impose it on all of society. Christians know by heart conviction that there is a transcendent God whose commands we must obey, and we believe that natural reason points in this direction as well. No society can be just that requires the violation of the “exceptionless moral norms” of the religious conscience.
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