Dwight A. Moody
Once upon a time, religious liberty was understood as the struggle to worship as we please: as a Muslim, a Protestant, a Roman Catholic; to attend the church of our choice or start our own church; to hire the minister we wish and pay him according to our convictions and our means. The government had no role in all that. Governors, magistrates, and judges stayed away from the religious issues. We were on our own: free to worship, free to believe, free to write, free to organize.
And yes, the flip side of this freedom was, and is, the freedom to not believe, to attend no church, to engage in no worship, to confess no creed or make no promises to God, Scripture, or Church. It was freedom all around, and it took a look time and a mighty struggle to forge this civic space for religious autonomy. It is embedded in the United States Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, and in the first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those are the first words; it is the first freedom.
But now, religious practice and religious freedom have taken a turn, it has turned from the narrow highway of public worship and private confession onto the superhighway of social engagement and business activity. It is now about more than what happens on Sunday morning; it is about what happens Monday through Friday in the workplace, it is about what happens all weekend—at the movies, in the stadium, around the neighborhood, and throughout cyberspace. It is about life, all of it.
Are we free to adhere to our religious convictions in every arena of life, not just that which centers on public worship? Are we free to run our business, play our game, organize our community, or speak our mind insofar as any of these is shaped by our religious convictions?
In one sense this is good. We as Christian believe that God is sovereign over all and Jesus is Lord of all. When we surrender ourselves to God we surrender all of ourselves, not just that slice of us called religion, but also our affections, our habits, our values, our associations, and our behaviors—24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
If religion is this wide and this deep, it makes sense that religious freedom needs to be this wide and this deep.
Or does it? Is this what the framers of the constitution had in mind when they wrote those famous first lines of the Bill of Rights?
Probably not, and this constitutes the first problem for those who so assert it, because many of those who are seeking to expand the definition of religious freedom are also those who champion what is called “original intent,’ that is, seeking and affirming only what was intended by those founders of our nation.
There is a second problem.
Religion has been used to justify many things we now consider evil in American; things like slavery, and inter-racial relations, and segregation, and bigamy and polygamy, and ethnic cleansing. And it has been used to condemn many things we now consider matters of human rights, like divorce, and equal rights before the law and in society, and even democracy itself.
As a rule we try to make allowances for such conflicts. We excuse doctors from performing abortions, if they object; we excuse soldiers from the military if they object; we excuse prison guards from assisting with capital punishment if they object. Remember the recent case of the county clerk in Kentucky who did not want to sign marriage licenses for gay couples? How was that resolved? Simply by finding others in her office who did not share her objections. We try to make allowances.
What happens when a religious conviction runs contrary to human rights or public law?
For instance, many people consider co-habitation a violation of religious ethics. Suppose such a person is a landowner, renting apartments to people. Suppose an unmarried couple asks to rent an apartment from this religious landlord. Does he have the right, citing religious freedom, to deny the rental application of this unmarried couple? Or to take the example presented to the Supreme Court: does a cake baker have the right to deny service to a wedding couple of whose lifestyle he disapproves…on religious grounds?
That is the question before the courts today; and that is the question before the people as well. What is my freedom before God and within the law to serve those whose habits I abhor?
Do I have freedom before God to treat them as humans and serve them as people?
Or do I have the freedom within the law to deny them service and turn them away?
Judges and legislators will have their say; but the important discernment will be by millions of neighbors, merchants, and managers who will search their own souls and ask: how shall I treat this person—as a sinner in need of judgment or as a neighbor in need of grace?
