When I was a young man just starting off in the ministry, I knew an older Christian minister who, though deeply conservative theologically and politically, believed that it wasn’t a good idea to mandate state-written, teacher-led prayers in public schools. In response, he faced withering attacks from some in the evangelical world. Some called him a “liberal”; others called him a sellout to the other side of the culture wars.
His argument, though, was simple: As a Christian, he believed that prayer could only come through the mediation of Jesus Christ, not through a school board curriculum-writing process. But he also had a warning. He had spent time in England, which unlike America has an established church. To him, the result was rote doctrine and, ultimately, secularization. “If you get what you want,” he told his critics, “you’ll hate it.”
I couldn’t help thinking of that comment this week, with the question of religious freedom back in the vortex of the culture wars after the Supreme Court’s decision that the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers sexual orientation and gender identity. This time, though, the warning cuts the other way.
The court did not rule, in this case, on religious institutions and their First Amendment freedoms. But the immediate consequences are clear and, for many religious conservatives like me, disquieting. What does the ruling mean for Christian colleges and universities, faith-based nonprofits and other religious organizations seeking to serve their communities in accordance with their beliefs? The answers to such questions are at best unclear.
While some secularists may feel that religious conservatives are ascendant, many religious conservatives feel embattled, and not without cause. The last decade has featured debates on everything from wedding cakes to requirements for nuns to provide contraception. The question many have now is whether religious institutions will now be required to abandon their views on marriage and sexuality, or else cease carrying out their missions altogether?
And this is where my old friend’s words came to mind — not for my fellow evangelicals, but for America’s triumphalist secularists. Any attempt to bulldoze over them would invite a kind of constitutional apocalypse — and would harm not just so-called religious conservatives but also those who oppose them.
Whatever the caricatures, almost no one, even among the most religiously conservative, argues that religious freedom outweighs every other concern. Everyone recognizes that as with freedom of speech and other constitutional guarantees, there will be some hard cases.
But it would be tragic to trample over the consciences of citizens whenever their beliefs come into conflict with the fluctuating norms of secular sexual orthodoxy. Likewise, almost no rational person would suggest that a religious-freedom consensus would evaporate our “culture war” disputes. We have real differences, and they are not going away anytime soon. What’s perilous right now is how we choose to have these arguments.
One need not agree with Christians or Muslims or Orthodox Jews or others on marriage and sexuality to see that such views are not incidental to their belief systems. They did not emerge out of a political debate, and they won’t be undone by political power. In many cases, these beliefs aren’t even, first of all, about sex or family or culture in the first place, but about what these religious people believe undergird them. In the case of 2,000 years of small “o” (and big “O,” for that matter) orthodox Christians, this is the belief that sexual expression is confined to the union of a man and a woman because marriage is an icon of the gospel union of Christ and his church.
That does not mean, in any way, that all Americans of deep religious belief agree on how to address these questions in the public square. One could find multiple views — even in church pews — about what, for instance, public nondiscrimination laws should be. It does mean, though, that such views are not peripheral to the missions of many religious institutions. One cannot simply uproot them and expect these people to adjust their consciences to fit the new cultural expectation.
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not argue for the sort of robust religious freedom guarantees that we have in the First Amendment because my Baptist ancestors persuaded them with theological arguments. Jefferson thought people like me were so irrational that he literally cut out of the Bible everything he found incredible, leaving behind something that’s more of a pamphlet than a canon. But these founders also knew that forcing people to violate their religious beliefs would result in a state so powerful that a majority could tyrannize an unpopular minority in the realm of something as personal and as inviolate as the soul.
That’s why those advocating for religious freedom have spent years arguing, for instance, that states and local governments shouldn’t zone mosques out of existence just because Muslims are a minority in those communities, and that health commissions shouldn’t ban circumcision as “barbaric” just because they can’t understand Judaism’s belief in the Abrahamic covenant.
In every case of protecting religious freedom, the issue is not whether the group in question is popular in its beliefs. Unpopular beliefs are precisely what we as Americans seek to protect. The way forward, for Americans of faith and no faith, is not détente, but rather debate. We need to argue about such matters in the arena of persuasion, not state coercion. Yes, sometimes those debates will spill into legislatures and courtrooms.
So let’s have our cultural arguments, with conviction. Americans disagree on some important things — not just on marriage and sexuality, but often on things as fundamental as God and the meaning of life. But, as we have those arguments, let’s keep our First Amendment and our history of religious freedom intact. Without it, we will not be left with arguments at all, but just with the raw power of whoever has more votes at the moment. That’s not what most of us want. But if you do, and you get it, trust me — you’ll hate it.
Russell Moore (@drmoore) is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
"how" - Google News
June 18, 2020 at 06:36PM
https://ift.tt/2zFCKmK
Just How Secular Should America Be? - The New York Times
"how" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MfXd3I
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Just How Secular Should America Be? - The New York Times"
Post a Comment