Freedom and the Church’s Sermons

According to the Houston Chronicle, attorneys for the city of Houston have subpoenaed sermons given by prominent local pastors opposed to what the paper calls an “embattled” equal rights ordinance.

Their subpoena seeks “all speeches, presentations, and sermons” related to the new ordinance, to the mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity “prepared by, delivered by, revised by, approved by you or in your possession.”

Regardless of the issues at stake, this is beyond troubling.

Any politician who wants to hear my sermons is welcome to attend the public worship services of the church I serve on any given Sunday.

To require that I submit my sermons to the scrutiny of attorneys or to any political use outside the context of worship—for whatever political end, left, right or indifferent—is so egregious a violation of religious freedom that it’s unthinkable that a city attorney in as large a city as Houston would not automatically refuse such a directive.

That the elders of a major American city imagined that this was somehow a legitimate use of civic powers is unbelievable.

I have friends across the religious and political spectrum. I cannot imagine any of them supporting these actions, not for a blessed moment.

I don’t want to frame this as a conservative or liberal issue. As any good Libertarian will point out, when freedoms go the ensuing vacuum tends to be exploited by both sides of the aisle.

Every person of goodwill—especially pastors—should make it loud and clear that this cannot stand. I will talk about it in the pulpit this Sunday.

These directives deserve the filing of a punitive civil suit that doesn’t back down until the Supreme Court finds it inexcusable.

The city’s leaders should at the very least be made to back down promptly, not as yet another salvo in the culture war that get’s misinterpreted as Christian anger or hatred, but as a basic pursuit of religious freedom for all persons.

Mind you, I do not find any of this a cause for alarm at the “end of the world” level—I think there’s way too much alarm out there in general—but I do think the churches need to resist this encroachment on religious liberty.