Don’t Back Away from Religious Freedom

The failure of religious liberty measures in Arizona in March 2014, Indiana in April 2015, Georgia in March 2016, the ongoing attempt by the Obama Administration and big business to coerce North Carolina and Mississippi into giving up their religious liberty measures, and the anti-religious freedom rhetoric of the mass media may incline Christians to abandon the rhetoric of religious liberty and seek other ways to live with a regime which will not tolerate Biblical morality, but none is possible. Obedience to God means that there can be no compromise with sin, and acceptance of sin in practice, and surely eventually in belief, is what the regime of social liberalism requires.

We need to emphasize over and over again, and regardless of victories or defeats in the struggle, the good and unchangeable reasons why we cannot comply with requirements that are sinful, and back that up by taking the penalty, not eventually acquiescing or compromising or rationalizing compliance with sinful requirements. Only in this way do we glorify God by putting him first in our lives, but we also show ourselves, those indifferent, and those opposed to religious liberty that obeying God is the most important thing in our lives, and cannot be changed regardless of pressure. This is only consistent with the logic of liberty of conscience, which is that one should never take an evil action, regardless of the penalty. If one can take a required action without sinning, then one certainly should, and not raise a conscience claim in the first place. We all have to do things that we don’t want to do. Conscientious objection is not raised against baking cakes, taking wedding pictures, or paying for abortion inducing drugs because these things are distasteful, or because we would rather not do them, but because they are sinful. God is offended, and we are finally answerable to him.

While the extent of Sabbath keeping or covetousness can be debated, murder, adultery, fornication, and sodomy clearly violate moral commands of Scripture, and Jesus is further clear that to contribute to sin is sin itself (Matt. 18:7). Christians are not “imposing their views on others” when they decline to contribute to immoral activities, but are being imposed on if they are required to engage in such activities. It is quite obviously the party of which action is required that is imposed on, not the party requesting action. Freedom means nothing if it is set aside when others are offended, and this is many times over true of religious freedom, since obeying God is for believers the most important thing in life, and also doubly true of liberty of conscience, since it is obviously wrong to require an action believed to be evil.

A great problem for Christians in advocating for religious freedom is that, to a large extent, social conservatives have allowed the Left to control the dialog. What can be said in the public arena is only within a rhetorical framework that the Left allows. Thus, in the wake of Indiana Republicans caving in to pressure and gutting Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act to exclude conscientious objection to homosexuality, religious freedom is placed in scare quotes (i.e., “religious freedom”). We should reject that and boldly insist that true religious freedom does not require people to take action against their consciences, however badly anyone is pained. Religious freedom has priority because there is no greater harm than taking an action believed to be evil.

We must reject antidiscrimination rhetoric used against religious freedom; conscience should be protected, not judged. Not only is obedience to God the first consideration in life for Christians, but the priority of obeying God was clearly recognized by James Madison, author of the First Amendment, in declaring that our allegiance to God precedes our duty to civil society. This consideration, and the very words of the First Amendment, “free exercise,” clearly speak of more than a mere right to believe, but also of religious conduct. Many conscience protections have been given in American law. While the right to religious action cannot be absolute, it has been reasonably argued that conscientious objection, the right to decline action, should be absolute.

Even though religious freedom should have priority in American law, it is false to say that it could be used to support racial segregation. Segregation was a cultural preference, not a religious precept, even if occasionally justified with lame appeals to the Bible. Were it to be used, one would have to question sincerity, since people would have taken the penalty in the last 50 years for not complying with integration requirements if they had thought compliance with integration is sinful. The late 1960s and 1970s would have seen bakers, photographers, justices of the peace penalized for refusing services to interracial couples – hotels, motels and tourist homes penalized and closing for declining to serve blacks – retail outlets similarly penalized and perhaps closing for declining goods and services. The fact that this did not happen clearly shows that even people who found integration distasteful did not believe they were sinning against God by compliance with legal requirements. The only significant exception, Bob Jones University, did take the penalty for noncompliance, but should not have been penalized for the exercise of sincerely held religious belief. Its status as a religious institution should have given it freedom to function by its understanding of correct religious standards.

Conscience protections in law are not special protection for certain people, but ensure that people can legally follow their consciences, as they always should. People are free to follow their consciences when making decisions in business and the public world generally unless there is a conflict with the law, and then conscience protections are needed. But any free choice is also a discrimination between alternatives, and thus antidiscrimination requirements, which present themselves as an extension of freedom, are nevertheless also always a denial of freedom. By pressing for antidiscrimination protection in a wide array of areas, such as genetic disability, handicapped status, pregnancy, and even left-handedness, the cultural left is using “equal protection” to craft the society it wants, and deny individual freedom. We must not allow “discrimination” to be a magic word that stops reasoning.

Racial equality not only is not contrary to the religions common in America, but sufficiently in accord with the truth to be a legal dogma. Race is superficial, a mere variety of the human species, but sex is profound, found throughout nature, always the same difference of male and female throughout the human species, the animal kingdom, and even with some plants. University professors may claim that sex is socially constructed, but people know that it is based on nature, with such features as male aggression and protection, and female nurture being common sexual characteristics, so that in any sexual matter, there is a very reasonable basis for discrimination. To argue for “equality” in law here is to establish an irrational legal dogma.

But if sexual nature is a reasonable basis for discrimination (i.e., free choice), then behavior, sexual or not, is even more so. We must discriminate on the basis of behavior, or the vilest crimes would have to be legal. To allow behavior based antidiscrimination rules violates Martin Luther King’s maxim of judging people by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. But character can only be judged by behavior. To tell the great mass of society that its adverse judgment against personal behavior is “impermissible animus,” is simply to arrogate the sensibility of some to binding law for everyone. It makes it possible to say that adverse judgement (i.e., discrimination) against homosexual behavior is discrimination against people. Thus, Tennessee’s recently passed law protecting the conscience of counselors against having to support homosexual behavior in their counseling was trumpeted by the news media as allowing therapists “to reject gay clients.” It was of course no such thing, but simply allows discrimination against homosexual behavior.

We must be sure that the general public understands clearly what they are rejecting when they reject religious freedom. They are requiring believers to take action which believers understand to be immoral and sinful. No one should have to pay for other people’s choices in contraceptives, abortifacients, or other goods and services that they believe to be sinful. They are not denying people access to contraceptives or abortifacients, but declining action they believe to be sinful. No one is discriminating against homosexual persons today, but against homosexual behavior. If behaviors are safeguarded by the “liberty” and “equal protection” of the Fourteenth Amendment, then as noted, any behavior could be taken as a “right,” since any behavior could be taken as part of personal identity. There is no objective criterion of “harm” if each person may define his or her own reality, as the Supreme Court infamously declared in the Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992) case. It is only by its own moral intuition and that of like-minded people that the Supreme Court can discern what to give immunity from adverse judgment (antidiscrimination protection) by using the unworkable principle of behavior based antidiscrimination doctrine.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims may or may not be accommodated in law against antidiscrimination requirements. Society must see that Christians will not, under pressure, compromise with sin, and will accept personal disaster and institutional closure rather than do so. The wider society must also be educated about the fact that it is behavior based antidiscrimination policy, and the arbitrary self-definition over reality that behavior based protections depend on, which is unworkable and problem causing, not conscientious objection from actions believed sinful or evil. This education can only happen if Christians and other social conservatives stop being afraid of the word “discrimination,” and insist that people must discriminate on the basis of conscience and reality. “Duty to God precedes duty to society,” “religious freedom is first in the Constitution,” “conscience should be protected,” “moral autonomy is anarchy,” “all freedom is discrimination,” “we must discriminate on the basis of conscience,” “we must discriminate on the basis of reality,” this is the kind of language that American society should hear today. It may or may not be successful, but if we are serious about living under God’s lordship, we must always obey him rather than any other authority, and always testify to the truth. And in our society, that means that we must always testify to the supreme civic virtue of religious freedom.