I Woke Up Today and Discovered I Live in a Gulag

Sorry folks but the recurring refrain that Christians in the United States are experiencing persecution simply because some people object to Indiana’s RFRA law is getting old and sounding hysterical. Rachel Lu puts it this way:

By contrast, the Judeo-Christian tradition calls for subsidiarity and a respect for natural community and natural rights. It also advises restraint, born of the realization that political community will always be imperfect in a fallen world. These two impulses do not mesh harmoniously.

The bottom line is, unless we want the whole world to march to a liberal progressive drum, we can’t expect to compromise with the hard secular Left. “You will be assimilated” really is their driving ethos.

What does the Left want, more concretely, with respect to religion? I would refer you to this interesting article for some sociological evidence on this point. To summarize, they currently want to chase religion into the cloisters (ideally literally) so that they never have to see, hear, or think about it. Religious people may continue discussing God and performing weird ceremonies on their own time and at their own expense, in the privacy of a few clearly-segregated spaces. Meanwhile, secular liberal norms will dominate all public spaces and all major political and cultural institutions. Of course these will enjoy significant taxpayer support, including the involuntary support of religious conservatives.

I understand that some on the left are not very tolerant and I am concerned by changes to U.S. marriage laws that make gay marriage possible. But to hear many Christians these days, you’d think we were living in Syria.

First, the question is explicitly one of whether businesses may discriminate and on what grounds. Civil Rights legislation, something that most Christians (who weren’t as worried about the growing power of the federal government as they might have been), took away religion as a basis for white business owners not serving blacks. If you support such legislation, and if you think gays have suffered from discrimination, then it does make some sense to extend such Civil Rights to gays.

Second, is this really a question of the freedom to practice religion? Most Americans experience remarkable liberty when it comes to faith, church life, Bible reading and study, and worship. I still may worship as my communion deems fit, I have incredible access to a variety of religious goods, and I suffer no overt hardships because of my faith. So can we at least talk about the plight of Christian business people and not about the persecution of all Christians — especially the ones who blog?

Third, my own Protestant tradition teaches the doctrine of Christian freedom in ways that are remarkably different from the way that many of the hysterical put the question:

The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the condemning wrath of God, the curse of the moral law; and, in their being delivered from this present evil world, bondage to Satan, and dominion of sin; from the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and everlasting damnation; as also, in their free access to God, and their yielding obedience unto him, not out of slavish fear, but a childlike love and willing mind. All which were common also to believers under the law. But, under the new testament, the liberty of Christians is further enlarged, in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of.

So if Christians want to talk about the freedom of Christians, can’t they/we at least talk about the real deal?

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