This writer’s previous article focused on how Christians in America arrived at the present dire situation, in which there is an accelerating loss of religious freedom in more and more areas of American life. It is becoming difficult to legally live as a Christian in business or the professions, maintain Christian organizations of any kind other than churches, and indeed church and family life are threatened by requirements to compromise with sin. This article will try to address how we should respond.
What cannot be given up for any penalty, including penalties our government cannot impose, is the core of Christian faith and morals. This is the faith proclaimed in the Bible, faith in a supreme personal being, incarnate in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection to deliver from sin and its consequences, and repentance from every known sin as identified from the commandments of Christ and the apostles, and those moral precepts of the Old Testament reiterated in the New Testament. While there may not be absolute agreement among individual believers on the precise extent of moral precepts (e.g., how and when should Christians keep the Sabbath, whether there are and what are Biblical reasons for divorce and remarriage), such central precepts as the worship of only the Biblical God, respectful use of His name, restriction of sexual relations to the divinely ordained marriage of man and woman, maintenance of personal prayer, and meeting and fellowship with other Christians are so clear that the lack of them means that one must be presumed not to be a follower of Christ.
Included in the forgoing are separation from sin, which mandates lives and organizations that do not compromise with sin. This commitment is held unconditionally. We obey God no matter how painful it is, or how badly anyone else is pained. These are absolute requirements, and how far we can freely live with them remains to be seen, but faithful Christians must resolve never to compromise. A particularly bad choice of words Christians use with respect to the sinful requirements of the antidiscrimination regime is “force.” To say that a Christian individual or organization will be “forced” to do or say this, that, or the other thing which violates Christian faith, and is thus sinful, is simply wrong. Catholic adoption agencies were not “forced” to provide children for homosexual couples, they closed instead. Kim Davis, the Kentucky marriage official, was not “forced” to issue marriage licenses for homosexual couples, but instead was jailed. To say we will be forced to sin by antidiscrimination requirements is simply wrong, and implies that if required to take sinful actions, we will comply. But we cannot comply because we must obey God rather than men, and without this commitment we are not Christians. The state can only require sinful actions, and penalize violators of its requirements, it cannot force anyone to do anything. And regardless of how we analyze our society’s commitment to freedom and equality to permit obedience to God, our overriding concern has to be obedience to God, regardless of the state’s requirements.
Yet we do have to live in a post-Christian, and increasingly, anti-Christian society, and so we should analyze the defense we have available, which is religious liberty. Opponents of religious liberty hold that it is impractical for a religiously neutral state; contemporary society is too religiously diverse to allow religious exemptions. But it has worked in the past, in the more than 2,000 exemptions given in American law by the 1990s. It is true that there can be no absolute right of religious action, but as noted by Christopher Tollefsen in the previous article of this title, there can and should be an absolute right to conscientious objection from the “perceived exceptionless and negative moral absolute[s]” given by religion and morality; to require compliance in these cases is to require action a person believes to be sinful or evil, and such a requirement is obviously evil.
An absolute right to conscientious objection could easily work today if the state was not developing an adversary morality with respect to sexual behavior. As stated above, Christian sexual morality restricts sexual behavior to the marriage of one man and one woman. The state, in the court decisions and laws of the past 50 years, has accepted the claim of the sexual revolution, and homosexual liberation in particular, that this is dogmatic and cruel. But the adversary morality it advances, the right to self-determination in “intimate” and “personal” matters, is finally just as dogmatic. People cannot make the world to be as they wish it to be by an act of self-will, nor can they make themselves be what they are not. They can only insist that they ought to have sexual choices and reality that they want, and that these choices should be immune from adverse judgment (i.e., discrimination). But this is just another worldview. Our secular state has no transcendent basis from which to make moral judgments; its judgment that discrimination against sexual behavior is wrong is finally just an act of will that unjustly requires people to take actions they believe to be evil. The result is not “liberty” or “equality” but the privileging of the conscience and behavior of some (believers in sexual liberation) over others (believers in traditional religious morality). Another term, “dignity,” is now favored by sexual liberation, but here too, one person’s dignity should not require another to take an action believed to be evil, since there is no greater harm than taken an action believed to be evil.
What about religiously based claims for racial separation? This is relentlessly cited as a “defeater” to any claim of religious freedom against liberal public policy. It does not have realistic force, but the disastrous Bob Jones University vs. the United States (1983) decision shows the heart of the problem of liberal public policy versus religious liberty, i.e., a state morality contrary to a religious doctrine. The central contention of the decision, that charitable tax exemption (and presumably any other benefit given by the state) requires “a public benefit” which is destroyed if the institution’s goals “conflict with the common community conscience” really makes the state the final arbiter of morality. Indeed, it is to be doubted that the wider society in Greenville, South Carolina in 1983 had a consensus on racial matters different from Bob Jones’ viewpoint. But the state cannot be a final authority concerning ultimate questions in any case; these questions must be left to the consciences of individuals and the organizations they construct. As a private religious institution, Bob Jones University should not have been penalized (by loss of tax exemption) for enacting its religious beliefs in its internal rules. Declining service at a public accommodation, on the other hand, would carry the duty of showing that an exceptionless moral norm of one’s religion would be violated (i.e., for a Christian, showing that service to customers of a different race is sinful) which cannot be reasonably done from Biblical texts and historic Christian theology.
Christians should pursue what legal protection is available to them. Fine and experienced legal service organizations exist to do that. But given the extent to which the judiciary has been liberalized by Obama appointments, and the unbending determination of the academic world, the legal profession, entertainment industry, and now the corporate world to destroy the Christian subculture and its belief system, we must realize that in many cases, and perhaps increasingly, in the future we will lose. We must therefore resolve to take the penalty, any penalty from any government, even (as far as our commitment’s are concerned) penalties that the Eighth Amendment – forbidding “cruel and unusual punishment” – would proscribe, and become an underclass if necessary, excluded from much of business and the professions. But at the same time, we must always argue for the truth which God has revealed, and never surrender or compromise, regardless of the penalty imposed, for however long it is necessary to obey God without compromising.
And there will be formidable laws, policies, court decisions, and establishment and social hostility to deal with. Just as the Fourteenth Amendment and court decisions following it were implemented by legislation mandating racial integration (both during Reconstruction and following race-related court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s), so the Supreme Court’s decisions mandating sexual liberation are now to be followed by implementing legislation. A Clinton Administration and a Democratic Congress would result in two laws which would severely penalize traditional Christians and all other persons adhering to traditional morality – the Equality Act (dealing with homosexuality and gender identity), and the Do No Harm Act (dealing with abortion and contraception).
The proposed Equality Act would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the categories of prohibited discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act (i.e., race, color, national origin, sex and religion) and treat traditional morality (which prohibits sexual activity outside of natural marriage and cooperation with such sin) as contrary to American law. This is really a national SOGI law, it goes well beyond the long running attempt to pass an Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which applied a sexual orientation antidiscrimination policy only to employment. Like ENDA, which had its religious exemptions removed in its last version as the cultural left hardened its opposition to religious liberty, the Equality Act has no religious exemptions. It applies to public accommodations, and even goes beyond that to specifically deny religious persons or organizations any protection that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) would afford, and even applies to religious schools, although they are not public accommodations.
Like SOGI laws in general, the Equality Act is not really needed. What discrimination homosexuals experience is not normally the result of their identity, but is discrimination against homosexual behavior. As this writer has argued before, using behavior as an antidiscrimination category cannot be consistently done, if “equality” were taken seriously, any behavior could be the basis of protected identity, making even criminal activity legal, and (inconsistently), short of that, it is simply a matter of sensibility (which will turn out to be the fashionable sensibility of the elite) as to which behaviors are to be immune from adverse judgement. Widespread disapproval of a behavior does not demonstrate that the behavior should be protected – if it did, drug use would be legal (an argument we may hear in the future). The clear purpose of the Equality Act and existing state and local SOGI laws is to require people who believe homosexual behavior is wrong to assist in it, and to require action believed to be wrong is wrong.
As always, advocates of homosexual liberation present the denial of freedom as an advance of freedom. Thus, Politico reports that two prominent Republicans, Ted Olson, Solicitor General under George W. Bush, and David Boies, who argued for Bush’s election before the Supreme Court and against California’s Proposition 8, hold that the Equality Act will give “the same protections to LGBT people as to other Americans.” But “LGBT people” already have the same protections as other Americans. The point of the bill is to privilege their behavior against adverse private judgment. Conscientious objection against the behavior of butchers, hunters, loggers, or soldiers is certainly possible. No “equal rights” are involved in this. What is rather being demanded is privileged behavior for homosexuals. And as the Catholic News Agency noted, even verbal opposition to homosexual behavior, which it might be thought would be protected under America’s strong free speech doctrine, might be construed as “sexual harassment.”
A similarly intolerant bill, the oxymoronic Do No Harm Act, awaits on the other major issue concerning personal morality, namely abortion. It is, of course, abortion which is harmful, killing unborn children, and contraception which, whether one considers it immoral or not, inhibits life. In some sense, this proposed bill is even worse, since it directly attacks liberty of conscience as harmful to society, and in particular advances the outrageous claim that conscientious objection from action believed to be evil amounts to “imposing” one’s view on others. It should be obvious that it is not people requesting objectionable goods and services who are being imposed on when someone declines to provide them, but the merchants and professional workers who are required to take action they believe immoral who are being imposed on by state requirements. No one should be required to take action believed to be evil, regardless of how pained or offended anyone is. For American law to exhibit this degree of partisanship in matters of conscience, and heap shame on the conscience commitments of millions of Americans is deplorable in the extreme. In all cases, if they are faced with this law, believers and anyone else sharing traditional morality should insist, from the start, that it is the providers who are being imposed on, not those requesting service the provider believes is immoral.
What is really being advanced is a disgraceful claim of hurt feelings against the moral duty to avoid sin felt by Christians toward God, disregarding that this is the most important thing in the lives of Christians. Additionally, there is probably the intention to change belief by requiring people to take action against their consciences.
A comment by Dr. Christopher Hook at the 2015 annual L’Abri Conference on issues pertaining to life and liberty is an apt assessment on the goal of the cultural left. He quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying:
“what would truly satisfy the pro-slavery faction? What will convince them? This, and only this, cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right, and this must be done thoroughly, done in acts as well as in words, silence will not be tolerated, we must place ourselves avowedly with them, the whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.”
Free speech and different viewpoints are part and parcel of a modern and free society. What does it suggest when people insist that they are entitled not to hear that they are wrong? A reasonable guess, with both the “pro-slavery faction” of Lincoln’s day, and the advocates and practitioners of abortion and homosexuality today, is that it speaks of a guilty conscience that cannot bear to hear accusations it agrees with.
Our first response to these requirements to be involved in sin, and surely many more like them in the years to come, should be to appeal to God, as King Jehoshaphat of old did, when the Kingdom of Judah was faced with overwhelming odds against its survival from a foreign invasion (II Chron. 20:12). God can again deliver believers today against an American establishment bent on our destruction. Our next response should be to declare the whole truth of God to the nation, and then appeal to the right of conscience, which all should recognize, not to be involved in activities believed to be evil. Probably the majority of people today continue to believe that it is wrong to require actions believed to be evil, rather than imposing an idea of the good life favored by an elite. The right of conscience should thus be a bridge between faithful Christians and the American public, if not a bridge to the courts.
But it is vital at this time, and into the indefinite future, that Christians, both as individuals and organizations, not compromise with sin. The very logic of liberty of conscience is that an evil action can never be taken. This means not supplying goods and services that contribute to the destruction of human life, to homosexual or other sexual immorality, not renting property that contributes to such behavior, not paying for employee benefits that do the same, closing Christian institutions rather than complying with sinful requirements, not being part of or patronizing compromised Christian organizations, and not engaging in expression which advocates or justifies sinful behavior. Closure of beloved institutions, in which so much devotion, love, money, and work have been invested, will be especially difficult, but it is what must be done, rather than engaging in the sinful behavior the state requires. Many of these conscience requirements are now illegal, and have been illegal for some time, in many jurisdictions in the United States; with the Equality and Do No Harm acts they may become illegal everywhere.
Finally, we need to have firm in our minds the conviction that our beliefs are objectively true, regardless of how institutions may change. For the period from 1980 to 2012, social conservatives had two strong and effectively impregnable bastions, the Catholic Church and the Republican Party, against the sexual revolution advanced by the western elite. With the papacy of Pope Francis and his change of direction for the church, exhibited especially in the two synods on the family, and even proposals to change the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the subject of homosexuality, and with the Republican inability to win elections or enact modest religious freedom legislation, it may well be that one or both of these bastions will disappear. This cannot alter God’s revelation in his Word, known by believers to be true by the power of the Holy Spirit. Apologetics to defend revelation is indeed important for reinforcing faith, and for justifying Christian faith and religious freedom to the wider world, but this too can be suppressed by the state, as it was by communists in the last century. It is not wrong to live without it by faith alone without reason. That is all God’s Word, which certainly predicts persecution, requires (Rom. 5:1). It was all that millions of believers had who lived under communism for decades.
The loss of religious freedom in America, just a generation after the collapse of communism seemed to have secured it, is grievous – securing the ability to live in obedience to God’s commands, as we understand them to be, was the reason several American colonies were founded, and religious freedom was an important goal of the American constitutional founding. But America is not eternal, and our first duty in life is to obey God, and testify to his truth. We must obey the One we have not seen until his return, and be subjects in God’s kingdom eternally.
Comment by Wesbury on September 10, 2016 at 9:50 am
Thank you for the strong, clear-eyed sequel.