Few stories have filled social and mass media recently like the religious freedom law approved in Indiana by state governor Mike Pence. #BoycottIndiana and other rally cries have filled the internet in reaction to the law. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff proclaimed over Twitter that he would cancel all events that would require employees and customers to travel to Indiana. The law has even been called dangerous. With all of this outcry about the law, it seems obvious that the law is hurtful and should be repealed, right? Before we talk about such direct moves, we have a couple important questions to ask: do the people calling for the repeal of the law actually understand what it says? Do they understand the context surrounding the law?
These may seem like obvious questions, but to many I’m not so sure they are. If the law specifically discriminates against homosexuals, and you stand for true equality, you should be against the law. No view supporting discrimination like that can give way to true equality. Initially, after reading through Twitter, Facebook, and several media sites, I came away disgusted at the law (without reading it yet). I felt a similar passion against the law, but then I did something that changed my view of the whole situation: I actually read through some of the law and sought out various academic opinions on the law. After doing all of that, I’m not sure that I can say that most of the people rallying against the law have done the same. Now, obviously there are many people that have different worldviews than mine that may very well still disagree with the law after researching it, and that’s fine. The point is that at least those people would have taken the time to research the law before jumping onto the popular bandwagon protesting it.
What I’ve noticed is that so many people make proclamations without doing their homework about the things they are proclaiming. For example, few people actually understand the logical out-workings of their worldview. It’s amazing how few people (especially my age) can explain how (and if) their worldviews are logically coherent (this goes for Christians and non-Christians). If asked about their beliefs, most people would have no idea that some of the beliefs they hold deeply contradict each other. I’ve encountered such a small number of people from any worldview that can articulate their beliefs in a clear and logical fashion. This is part of what pushed me into my passion for apologetics. I realized that if I was going to be intellectually honest, I needed to pursue truth vigorously. This meant being willing to abandon beliefs I’d held for my entire life if they weren’t ultimately truthful and coherent. Why believe something if it’s not true? I wanted to be able to articulate my worldview coherently and rationally, but even more important, truthfully.
Intellectual honesty is so incredibly important. When people aren’t intellectually honest and they neglect to do their homework, they can end up making fools of themselves, their belief systems, and they can make incredibly offensive statements that have no actual backing. Take for example Christians making homosexuality out to be a banner-head sin. Christians with that mindset end up rejecting homosexuals from entering their churches and, ultimately, they give the church and, more importantly, Jesus Christ a terrible name. What these Christians would find if they did their homework is that nowhere in the Bible is homosexuality elevated as a sin. The clearest example of this is seen in 1 Timothy 1:10:
“The law is for people who are sexually immoral, or who practice homosexuality, or are slave traders, liars, promise breakers, or who do anything else that contradicts the wholesome teaching”
After reading that verse, it should be blatantly obvious that the Bible doesn’t find homosexuality to be any “worse” of a sin that many of the sinful acts that Christians (and the rest of the world) partake in every day. Every time I give into lust or lie I’m sinning at just as severe a level in God’s eyes. If many Christians treated their sins (that are of equal level according to the Bible) the same way they treat homosexuality they would have a totally different perspective on sin and just how broken they are. Once, while talking with a homosexual friend about Christianity, I mentioned to them that their sin was no worse than mine and that there’s no place they should be more welcomed to than the church and they were blown away. No homosexual should ever have a reaction like that because Christians shouldn’t be treating them with disdain, but with love.
Now, you’ll notice that I still labelled homosexuality as a sin. In the Christian worldview that’s exactly what it is, but not for the reasons most people think. To clarify, the Bible isn’t against the person but rather the sin. A proper grasp of the Christian rationale for the belief usually gives way to a state of understanding from even those that oppose the Christian worldview (I can vouch for this after many conversations like this). Now, we don’t have the time to cover the rationale and full explanation of the Christian stance towards homosexuality in this post, but I’ll give the full reason in a separate post.
That being said, I’m going to make a statement that may shock some Christians and possibly cause controversy. While I am a Christian and am against homosexual marriage (for biblical reasons which I will explain in another post), if I wasn’t a Christian I would absolutely be for homosexual marriage. Before anyone gets up in arms, let me explain. If I wasn’t a Christian, and I didn’t strive to shape my views according to the Bible, I would have no reason to be against homosexual marriage. Especially if I was an atheist and held a secular worldview, I would have no justification for being opposed to it. Here’s the important thing for Christians (and non-Christians) to remember: Christians are not to judge non-Christians according to a Christian’s standards. Paul articulates this in 1 Corinthians 5:12 when he says:
“For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church[b] whom you are to judge?”
What’s important to understand here is that Paul is talking to Christians about sexual immorality here. But instead of talking about sexuality immorality outside of the church, Paul is referring to sexual immorality inside the church. Rather than casting judgement on the lifestyles of those outside of the church, Christians should be judging and holding accountable those inside the church. I cannot stress how vital this is to grasp. If someone is not a Christian, they have absolutely no reason to hold to many of the things Christians do, even if they end up holding to some of those things anyways, but that’s a post for another day.
With that all being said, let’s get back to the original topic at hand: the Indiana religious freedoms law. Before talking about Christianity and homosexuality, I had stressed the importance of intellectual honesty and the need for people to do their homework before making proclamations. I said all of that because there are many claims being made about the law with virtually no real knowledge of it or its context. First off, it’s important (and probably surprising for many) to know that this law isn’t a new one. According to the Wall Street Journal,
“Measures similar to that signed into law by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence this week are already in place at the federal level and in some 30 states”
30 states = 60% of the states in the U.S. An appropriate term for this percentage would be a majority. A majority of the states in this nation have laws similar to the one passed in Indiana. In 1993, Bill Clinton signed into action Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 which is basically the same act as the one stirring up all of this controversy. For those who might have forgotten amidst the shock of this news, Bill Clinton was (and is) a Democrat, which makes his signing the act even more amazing. So why, if this law has been around for so long, have you never really heard of it? That answer comes in the form of the major change in opinion of homosexual marriage in the past 20 years. In 1993, homosexuality wasn’t talked about or accepted like it is today.
It’s also important to note that a similar law is in place in Washington D.C. So when various CEOs and governors (like the one in Connecticut) claim they are going to boycott Indiana, they would, if they were going to be consistent, have to boycott Washington D.C. too. I would be shocked if that happened.
Now, the controversy of Indiana’s law is so red hot because many are claiming it gives people the right to deny services to homosexuals because of “religious reasons”. While that concern is certainly understandable for secularists, it’s absolutely essential for you to understand that in the 20+ years laws like Indiana’s religious freedom law have been in existence, they have yet to be used in that manner. Let me repeat that: in the 20+ years laws like Indiana’s religious freedom law have been in existence, they have yet to be used to deny services to homosexuals. Please grasp this.
When we argue about this issue of Christians denying homosexuals services for religious reasons what we’re really arguing is whose rights are more important or whose rights take precedence. For the secularist, it seems obvious that the homosexual’s rights regarding their intrinsic sexual choice should take priority over the Christian’s so called “religious reasons”. But here is where there seems to be a major misunderstanding. Many secularists view a Christian’s convictions as vastly less important than sexuality. But I would argue that the opposite is true in regards for Christians. For a true Christian, their faith takes precedence over their sexuality. This is why we see so many Christians forego any sexual intercourse because of they are called to pursue God without a spouse. This is exactly what Jesus did. We have to at least come to this joint understanding when discussing this issue.
That being said, Christians shouldn’t be denying homosexuals services on a whim. There’s only a small number of instances where there would be a legitimate moral dilemma. One would be a Christian wedding planner being asked to provide services for a wedding he sees as not morally acceptable. Christians should never be denying homosexuals because of their sin, outside of those few instances because, by that logic, they would have to deny their services to all others, including themselves ,since everyone sins.
As has been hammered home multiple times in this post, intellectual honesty is vital. In few places is it as crucial and required as in the media since the media helps shape so much of the public’s opinion on the news. When headlines claim the Indiana law is intolerant and discriminatory towards homosexuals, it shows a major lack of intellectual honesty for no clearer reason than the fact that the actual law says nothing about homosexuality. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel O. Conkle, a professor of law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, was quoted as saying:
“The reaction to this is startling in terms of its breadth—and to my mind—the extent to which the reaction is uninformed by the actual content of the law,”
To claim that the Indiana law is directly discriminatory to homosexuals in an absolute lie.
All of that being said, I completely understand the concern from the secularist when it comes to the possible implications of the law. I could see a scenario where religious freedom and homosexuality were pitted against each other in the future because of the law. But again, it’s crucial that we remember that in over 20 years since the original act was passed this hasn’t been the case.
Ultimately, though, this whole controversy comes down to an issue that has been debated for centuries in this nation: the separation of church and state. As someone who dedicated their entire high school senior thesis to this topic, I have a fair bit of knowledge about this issue. My exact thesis question was, “Should there be separation between the church and the state?”
After an entire year of research, I came to the conclusion that there should, in fact be a line of separation between the two. This may surprise some, but it was the conclusion I came to while I was striving to be intellectually honest. Of course I wish our government was totally Bible based and of course I wish everyone was a Christian, but that’s just simply not the case. There’s an incredible myriad of different views held in our nation, and the only way we can live fairly within that diversity is to have laws of religious freedom like we do in our great country. One of the best things about America is that we are free to believe what we want. That freedom is something we should never take for granted because so many countries have no such freedom.
In order to be fair to all worldviews, our government can’t assume the identity or message of one particular belief system. It must stay as neutral as possible. Obviously with laws of religious freedom like we have, controversy is bound to happen because of the way so many worldviews contradict each other. The import thing is that our government recognizes the various worldviews and stays as neutral as possible. This is where I think we have a serious, yet hidden problem today. In an effort to appear as neutral as possible, the government has faded out religious influences and references within itself and that is totally fine. But what the government has failed to do is recognize the way it is influenced by worldviews that don’t classically get labeled as religions. The biggest example of this is secularism. While Christianity has been faded out of much of the government (so much so that we are now labeled as a “post-Christian” nation by many), secularism has slipped into the mind of the government almost unnoticed. This is important to recognize because a government functioning under the influence of secularism isn’t neutral; not in the slightest.
At this point, some of you might be saying, “But secularism isn’t a worldview!”
It’s here that I will vehemently disagree. Secularism is just as much of a worldview as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or New Age Spirituality. All of these things provide a set of lenses through which people view the world. All of these things set out to answer the four main questions of a worldview (made famous by Ravi Zacharias): origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. Atheism, scientism, and naturalism all fall into the category of worldviews as well.
What’s really happened in our government is that it has traded its predominantly Christian influence for a secular one. This is not religious or worldview equality neither can it be called neutral. But because secularists so often hide under the façade that secularism isn’t a worldview, this goes totally unseen. Let me be clear: I’m not saying this to attack secularism. I’m saying this because I want as pure of worldview equality in this nation as possible; something I think we all want. The irony of the whole situation is that while the secularist pushes for Christianity to be evicted from the government for purposes of worldview equality, they simultaneously move into the very place they wanted the Christian removed from. It doesn’t get more duplicitous than that. Again, this isn’t meant to be an attack on secularism. I merely want to point out a major phenomenon happening in our government today and push for true equality. I’ll absolutely march with the secularist for worldview equality, but if I make the sacrifices necessary to make that happen, I expect them to do the same. A recent editorial board post from the Washington Post displayed the duplicitous nature of secularism clearly while crying out against the Indiana law when it said:
“For instance, a bill the Georgia Senate approved this month bars the state government from infringing on an individual’s religious beliefs unless the state can demonstrate a compelling interest in doing so.”
To the editorial board, this move by the Georgia Senate was considered questionable, if not wrong.
But, if we want true equality and freedom, the government shouldn’t be able to infringe on someone’s rights unless there is an extremely good reason for doing so. That’s just an inherent part of the freedom we all so want to affirm and enjoy.
We talk so much about discrimination of homosexuals today, yet we miss the subtle discrimination that occurs against Christianity daily. Now, I’m not about to sit here and claim that Christians have it bad in America. That would be a lie. Clearly, homosexuals are under more pressure and discrimination in the U.S. And clearly, Christians are still in very high number in our nation. But I think it is important for us to recognize any discrimination when it happens. The large number of Christians in our nation, along with the exponential growth of secularism, is often why we miss discrimination against Christians. A great example of this comes in New York, where many churches that have, for years, met in public schools on the weekends (when the schools are not in use) are possibly going to be forced to find other places to meet. Now, this may seem like a positive when striving for worldview equality, but not when one considers that secular organizations are allowed to meet in those same schools. What kind of message does it send if we reject some worldviews to use schools while allowing others that same right? It definitely doesn’t send a message of equality.
We live in the greatest nation in the world that allows us the freedom to worship and believe as we so choose. Let’s strive to keep it that way.
But there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this: while we constantly see discrimination in various ways in our country today, we don’t see any in the Bible. Romans 3:23 says:
“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”
We’re all equal in God’s eyes. We are all broken and sinful people who desperately need a savior. The beautiful thing is, we have that savior. He died in our place on a cross just over 2000 years ago so that we might enjoy a perfect relationship with God in Heaven. This week marks the celebration of that Savior’s death and resurrection. Rather than fighting over these issues, let’s celebrate our savior. His name is Jesus Christ and He wants to be in a personal relationship with you. Take Him up on it and you’ll understand what true equality and love are really like.
Citations
Editorial Board. “Keeping Them Safe from Gay Marriage.” Washington Post 26 Mar. 2015: n. pag. http://Www.washingtonpost.com. 26 Mar. 2015. Web. Mar. 2015. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/keeping-them-safe-from-gay-marriage/2015/03/26/88ea407c-c772-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_story.html>.
Peters, Mark, and Jack Nicas. “Indiana Religious Freedom Law Sparks Fury.” WSJ. N.p., 27 Mar. 2015. Web. Mar. 2015. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/indiana-religious-freedom-law-sparks-fury-1427491304>.
Mohler, Albert. “The Briefing 03-31-15.” Audio blog post. http://Www.albertmohler.com. N.p., 31 Mar. 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2015. <http://www.albertmohler.com/2015/03/30/the-briefing-03-20-15-2/>.
Unchaining the Lion 