By Russell Moore and Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition.
Why should you care if a Sikh isn’t allowed to carry his ceremonial dagger into the workplace? What difference does it make if a Muslim woman cannot wear a headscarf to school? Even before the founding of America, Christians were the leading champions of religious liberty. Our defense of freedom was broad-based, and extended to advocating for the conscience protections of other faiths. As the Baptist leader John Leland wrote in 1820, “All should be equally free—Jews, Turks [Muslims], Pagans and Christians.”
Recently, though, there has been a subtle shift in the views of many Christians concerning who should qualify for religious protections. As has always been the unfortunate case, a minority refuses to defend the conscience of anyone who does not follow their own faith tradition.* However, an increasing number make the opposite mistake. They are quick to defend minority faiths, such as Sikhs, Hindus, and Native American religions, while hesitant to rally behind those who identify as Christian.
But we should continue to defend the religious liberty of all Americans—including unpopular Christians—for one simple reason: Without religious freedom no other freedoms matter.
Because of the priority of religious freedom, the protection of the individual’s conscience should be a higher priority than the advancement of our preferred political causes. We shouldn’t let opinion polls scare us away from standing with those who refuse to discard their conscience and convictions. We should stand with those who stand by their beliefs because it is the right thing to do.
This does not require, of course, that every religious objection be honored and every exemption given. Although all Americans are entitled to religious liberty, religious liberty is never an absolute claim. Religious freedom is not a trump card that allows us any and every advantage over our neighbor. Because we live in a religiously pluralistic society, we must continually work to find ways of resolving conflicts in a way that is respectful of everyone involved.
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As I tell my more conservative Christian friends, if that certain clerk in Kentucky was a Muslim who based her objection to same sex marriage on “Shira” law, rather than fundamentalist Christianity, would those so inclined and Presidential hopefuls be so quick to defend her and her rights?
But that is the beauty of the 1st Amendment, and the establishment clause. It does not allow the secular state to choose religious winners and losers in the nation. Which is exactly the Obama administration and the SC did in the same sex marriage decision, in which the State and its apparatus favors those religious organizations which support their agenda, liberal protestants, secularists, at the expense of those who do not agree with the establishment of the “new” state favored church and religion, PCUSA is indeed a state favored entity. Or as I call it the new unofficial State church, or the church of liberal Democrats to be more specific. History has shown, as it has in Europe that state favored churches soon slip into irrelevance and extinction, such a fate await all who choose to do the State’s or DNC bidding.
Peter
It is hard to read your post with the run-on sentences and syntax errors and to make any sense out of what you are saying. The original article is also incoherent. The fact is Presbyterians are not denied religious liberty. The poor woman in Kentucky who thinks that issuing a marriage license to gays or lesbians infringes on her faith is sadly mistaken. And just for the record it is “Sharia” law. And it is Sharia law that decries homosexuality, rights for women and abortion. So which side are you on?
Art: In terms of syntax and construct, guilt as charged. But this is not grammar school.
Religious liberty, from the time of Augustine and Aquinas has been defined by derived from natural law. In that it is a given implicit in God’s order of creation. It is not a gift from kings or rulers to be granted as a gift, then removed at a whim or political expediency.
The recent SC does indeed set up religious winners as well as losers, depending on how one approaches the matter of accommodations and facilitation of behaviors and actions which one finds objectionable on religious or faith grounds.
In the case of LGBT marriage, the secular state chose to neither in force the law, or punish various county clerks who defied at the time the DOMA, in issuing marriage licenses to LGBTs, when the act was illegal at the time. The fact that it choose to jail a clerk who defied the current, post SC decision “law” at the time is proof that the secular state has established a civil religion of LGBT accommodation, with civil and criminal penalties for those who defy such policies. An in the new state civil religion the PCUSA is the perfect acolyte.
I would further argue that another aspect of the new civil state religion is its neo-paganism, and on that matter the PCUSA is well in agreement.
This writer ignores the London rape epidemic, the plague of the black knife, and the Sharia no-go zones of Tower Hamlet and many English towns. He is blind to the crimes committed against the people of England, France, Sweden, Norway, Holland, and the others. Either blind, or he simply does not want others to see.