The Necessity of Courage in the Defense of Religious Liberty

What does courage have to do with religious liberty? If you listen to many in the broader culture, you would probably say, “Not much.” We are pretty far from the time when religious liberty held a respected place in the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court. Some have come to see religious liberty as a way to maintain space for oppressive patriarchy or discriminatory adherence to traditional views of gender and marriage. When Hobby Lobby sought an exemption from a new federal regulation that would have required the company to purchase contraceptives and abortifacient drugs through their health plan the social media reaction might have led you to think they were fast-tracking the path to the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One might almost imagine orange Hobby Lobby vans roaming about the city, kidnapping workers and forcing them to sell their bric-a-brac and picture frames while simultaneously denying them a full suite of birth control options. My good friend and longtime think tank leader David Blankenhorn wrote a piece recently in which he criticized people like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop for a lack of virtue in refusing to make same-sex wedding cakes. He sees things that way because he connects Phillips to the Mississippi segregationists he observed in his youth. I recently presented a paper at a gathering of fellow Baptist scholars in which some apologetically referred to conservative Christians seeking a “privilege to discriminate.”

Religious liberty is too important, especially for Christians, but also for everyone else, to get wrong. And yet we are certainly in danger of doing that. There is little doubt that the broader culture is developing a caricatured and biased view of religious liberty. But the really painful thing is that many Christians are in danger of making the same mistake.

It is sometimes useful to think in terms of turning a kaleidoscope. If you ever used one, you know that while you continue looking through the lens in the same direction, the colors and shapes in your field of vision change. You see a different picture. In this address, I hope to try to break up perceptions that seem settled and produce a new image that is, I think, more representative of the truth. I hope that we can come to see the part that courage plays, rather than some mean chauvinism, when it comes to religious liberty, courage and integrity.

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In the fifth century before Christ, Sophocles dramatized the problem of the individual caught between faith and the law in his play Antigone. Two brothers, the sons of the tragic figure, Oedipus, have struck each other down in battle. Creon, inheriting the throne, honors one fallen brother and insists that the other remain unburied as a sign of his dishonor. Their sister, Antigone, cannot abide seeing her brother shamed in this way. Despite the king’s order, Antigone fulfills the duty she feels is owed to her sibling and buries his body.

In the face of the king’s outrage at this disobedience of his authority, Antigone confesses that she has committed the deed and that she feels no remorse for having done so. She tells the king:

For me it was not Zeus who made that order. Nor did that Justice who lives with the gods below mark out such laws to hold among mankind. Nor did I think your orders were so strong that you, a mortal man, could over-run the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws. Not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live, and no one knows their origin in time. So not through fear of any man’s proud spirit would I be likely to neglect these laws, draw on myself the gods’ sure punishment.

In this dramatic interaction between king and subject, we have the fundamental tension of religious liberty perfectly illustrated. The state insists that its laws are binding regardless of the principles or beliefs of individual citizens or subjects. But individuals see the state as having something less than the final word. They object with Antigone (and Augustine and Aquinas and Martin Luther King, Jr., read his Letter from Birmingham Jail on that score) that there are man’s laws and then there are the true laws. When the statutes of men echo God’s law and the natural law, then then they possess genuine authority. But if the laws emanate from human will and power without regard for the true law, then they may become something different. They are an abuse of the authority granted to law. Augustine compared governments without real justice to gangsters.

We can move from the genre of Greek tragedy to an early account of the Christian church’s activity. In the book of Acts, we see Peter and the apostles stand before a council having spread their teaching after being warned not to do so. Their answer? “We must obey God rather than men.”1 1 Acts 5:27-29

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The aged bishop Polycarp lived in the second century A.D. (or C.E. as people are now taught to say). He was charged with being an atheist, or one who did not believe in the official cult. A sheriff who had a Christian sister tried to talk him into saying “Caesar is Lord” so as to save himself. Polycarp refused and was taken to the arena where he would be killed. Three times, he denied opportunities to recant his belief in Jesus Christ. When told he would be burned, he said, “You try to frighten me with the fire that burns for an hour and you forget the fire of hell that never goes out.” He was burned to death. We could tell many stories of the martyrs from the early church.

Move forward to Romania in the 20th century. A young pastor in the newly Soviet-occupied country attended a congress convened by the Communists for Christian leaders, the Congress of the Godless. Four thousand clergymen attended. This pastor wrote that “One after another, bishops and pastors arose and declared that communism and Christianity are fundamentally the same and could coexist.” They praised communism and promised the loyalty of the church. The young pastor’s wife was with him in attendance. She turned to him and said, “Richard, stand up and wash this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face.” He told her, “If I do so, you lose your husband.” She answered, “I don’t wish to have a coward as a husband.” He did rise and spoke to praise Jesus Christ and to insist that loyalty was due first to Him. Doing so changed the course of his life. So, too, for the wife who urged him to stand up for the cross.

The young pastor was Richard Wurmbrand. He would ultimately spend many years in prison during two terms. After being released the first time, he immediately returned to underground church work and was put back in prison. During those years in prison he once spent three years in solitary confinement in an underground cell and was tortured brutally on several occasions before finally being ransomed. Wurmbrand wrote of his experience in Tortured for Christ. His experiences and advocacy resulted in the founding of the ministry Voice of the Martyrs.

I have given you -- through the fictional example of Antigone and the historical accounts of the apostles, Polycarp, and Richard Wurmbrand and his wife – some examples to help you think about what it looks like for a person to be caught between two masters. Indeed, it may not surprise you to know that this problem is one governments have tried to manage in a variety of ways. Throughout most of human history, religious and political

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authority seem to have been united. There were emperors who claimed to be gods, popes who crowned kings (and who threatened to remove the authority of kings), and attempts to create new state religions. More recently, there have been regimes that tried to put the question to rest through official atheism, thus leaving the authority of the state beyond challenge.

As Americans who have lived in a country with a strong tradition of religious liberty, we have largely been spared the agony of divided loyalty. As at least a nominally Christian nation, the government has not often caused religious scandal among its people. But now, I think we are beginning to feel the impact of movements that advanced more deeply into the European heart long ago. Abraham Kuyper, whose life bridged the 19 th

and 20th centuries and who amazingly preached, ran a newspaper, founded a university, and served as the Dutch prime minister, wrote of Christianity and what he called “modernism” as “two life systems” which “are wrestling with one another in mortal combat.” 11 He offered an observation more prescient than he could ever know when he stated that:

“Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity. One type must answer for all, one uniform, one position and one and the same development of life; and whatever goes beyond and above it is looked upon as an insult to the common consciousness.” 27

From his standpoint in the Netherlands, Kuyper perfectly grasped the cultural situation. He noted that Germanic philosophical pantheism had given us the idea of the sovereignty of the state as something like a mystical conception. Accordingly, the law is right not because of any harmony with eternal principles, but simply because it is the law. Thus, the will of the state effectively becomes God. 88-89 He saw the French Revolution, which still exerted an influence a century later, as offering a civil liberty for every Christian only to agree with the unbelieving majority. Kuyper also realized that the government will always be inclined to invade social life, while social life will resist the authority of the government. He stated that it is the task of constitutional law to maintain a balance. 93-94 This is a good place to remember Justice Roberts’ insistence in his Obergefell dissent that religious liberty is actually in the constitution.

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And here we are. A century later we Americans are looking more like Western Europe. The state is pushing harder to enact its programs and with little regard for religious sensibilities or ethical objections. We look to our constitution to help us maintain the crucial balance. And the constitutional value with which we concern ourselves is religious liberty.

Unless the church settles for a servile relationship with the state, baptizing either the decision of the government or the social consensus in the way Richard Niebuhr described as “the Christ of culture,” conflict is virtually inevitable. We now live in a day when the likelihood of such clashes in the United States is growing, as is their intensity. Most of the American church has not succumbed to the liberal theology Niebuhr described with the creed: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

So we shouldn’t be surprised that rifts are growing as long-standing cultural controversies finally begin to bear ripened fruit. We hold our beliefs most easily when they are confirmed by everyone around us. In an environment in which worldviews contend with one another, the presence of dissent will be obnoxious to those who have recently prevailed. Dissent signals that questions have not truly been settled. This unsettledness may appear particularly threatening with regard to the redefinition of marriage. Cultural victors are eager to ensure the permanence of their apparent triumph. New laws and regulations present themselves as an answer to those who see sexual traditionalists as “wicked” oppressors who must be punished and whose views should be accorded “no respect” to quote one prominent billionaire and a New York Times journalist in turn.

We need to think about coercion when we consider the nature of government. Government is a different kind of institution than any of the others in our national and community lives together. If you investigate the question of what exactly it is that makes government unique, you finally get down to the essential answer. Government is the institution in society that has a legal monopoly on the use of coercive violence. Government coerces, restrains, and punishes. Government possesses power over life and death. But that power is not a plenary power. It must be used appropriately lest it be illegitimate and raise questions about a government’s right to retain authority.

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When Jesus was asked whether he thought it was right to pay taxes to Caesar, he pointed to Caesar’s image on the coin and urged his followers to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. It is not a giant leap to conclude that God gives governments power over many things, but not everything. God reserves some things to himself. Indeed, that is one way to argue for religious liberty. God does not give government power over the soul. Religious liberty is about government not overstepping its boundary lines. And yes, there are some lines that should not be crossed.

Most of us believe what I’ve said about government, that it doesn’t have the right to dictate everything about our lives to us. People live under such governments even today, North Korea comes to mind, but they are mostly the stuff of dystopia. While we disapprove of abusers of government power, we tend not to see the problem when we agree with what’s being done.

Augustine wrote about our misconception of peace. We often confuse peace with getting our way. It is not surprising that we impose a state of affairs on others that accords with our preferences and then wonder that they don’t celebrate the result. That is probably as true of relationships, marriages, and families as it is of governments and laws. Real peace is not the suppression of conflict by power. Real peace can only come with justice.

But we are rarely so wise and careful in our application of power as Augustine would advise us to be. Alexis de Tocqueville, like Kuyper after him, distressed by the excesses of the French Revolution, had a great worry about the America that he largely celebrated.

The majority thus has in the United States an immense power in fact and a power of opinion almost as great; and once a majority has formed on a question, there are virtually no obstacles which can, never mind stop, but even slow down its march and allow it time to listen to the complaints of those it crushes in passing.2

The American belief in the rule of the majority, examined carefully, led, in Tocqueville’s mind to the “detestable and impious maxim” that “the majority of people has the right to do everything” and that all power thus resides “in the wishes of the majority.” For Tocqueville, this was just another potential

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume One, Part Two, Chapter 7.

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path to despotism. “Only God,” he wrote, “can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are equal to his power.”

Tocqueville argued that the threat of majority power is stronger than the power of a king because of its psychological hold on the community and members of it. The majority, then, “draws a formidable ring around thought.” Religion changes in the Tocquevillian scenario. It exists much less as “revealed doctrine” than as “a common opinion.” The prophet of the new religion will simply be the majority. Under majority power, the dissenting individual is not so much in danger of being burnt at the stake as Polycarp was, but rather suffers “daily persecutions” and degradations. In his text, the lines that follow are particularly telling and relevant to our address today:

[T]hose who condemn him express themselves loudly, and those who think like him, without having his courage, fall silent and withdraw. He gives in, he bows in the end beneath the effort of each day, and he becomes silent again, as if he felt remorse for telling the truth.

There are Christians in the United States today who have experienced something very much like what Tocqueville described. They stand up. They insist upon maintaining their own spiritual integrity in the face of what they believe to be government action that oversteps its bounds. And they wait to see whether others will lift their voices in support or whether they will be left overwhelmed and silenced. This, according to Tocqueville, is a kind of perfection of despotism. It no longer threatens the body, but “goes straight to the soul.” The person under the glare of the majority will live, but will be cut off as though “a stranger among us.”

The stories of those people are different, then, from the ones with which I began. These people will not be burned, sawn in two, fed to wild animals, or even savagely beaten and jailed like the Romanian pastor whose story I told. The “daily persecutions” to which Tocqueville referred take the form of damage to reputation, the loss of an important job, or perhaps a kind of administrative death by regulation and fines. We’ve moved from Torquemada’s torture dream to Tocqueville’s psychological nightmare.

For modern examples, one might look to Brendan Eich, one of the creators of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. When it was discovered he’d

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donated about a thousand dollars to a California proposition defining marriage as a male-female union, he was forced out as the CEO of a company of which he was a founder. Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A answered a reporter’s question about his view of marriage. He affirmed the traditional male-female pairing. In response, controversy erupted. Mayors of Boston and Chicago suggested the company should not be permitted to operate in their cities. Hobby Lobby was almost put out of business because of the founder’s religious objection to providing abortifacient contraceptives to employees in the company’s health plan. Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran offered copies of a short book he’d written which included biblical teaching on human sexuality. Despite his former status as U.S. Fire Administrator under President Obama, he was suspended and then fired by the city for his views. Barronnelle Stutzmann operated a flower shop for many years and served everyone (including gay clients), but was sued when she told a couple she couldn’t provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop came under fire from the Colorado Human Rights Commission after he told a gay couple he couldn’t make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Consider, for a moment, the reality of the situation that faced Steve Green of Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby is a highly successful company with over 500 stores and 28,000 employees. It is worth billions of dollars. The normal course of events would be to do what virtually every other corporation did, which is to simply follow the mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that Steve Green did not obey the mandate, but instead risked financial ruin for his company in the form of massive fines demonstrates the depth of his Christian conviction regarding unborn life. He served God rather than Mammon. That kind of courage and integrity is worth protection by a virtuous people who care about genuine liberty.

On a much smaller commercial scale, but with great consequence for their lives, Jack Phillips, Barronnelle Stutzmann, and other Christians in businesses involved with weddings have faced the loss of their businesses and large financial penalties for their decision not to ply their craft for same-sex weddings. As with Steve Green, there is no doubt the simpler and far less dangerous course would be to simply modify their practice and get on with business. No controversy, no bad feelings, no angry customers taking their business elsewhere, no negative financial impact. If anything, adding same-sex weddings might lead to more revenue. The fact that they didn’t

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do that tells you something. They didn’t change with the broader culture because they did not feel at liberty to do so. Even under tremendous pressure from a variety of sources, they stayed true to what they felt God would have them do.

As a side note, it is critical to get right exactly the nature of their claim. None of the wedding cases, to my knowledge, involves some kind of blanket denial of service to gay customers in the style of the old southern segregation that applied to African-Americans. Rather, the florists, bakers, and photographers have only requested the right not to participate in same-sex weddings, which have a clear religious connotation and which obviously brings faith into the picture. This kind of specific accommodation is a picture perfect application of what religious liberty can do.

The courage here is courage to be different against the backdrop of a new prevailing consensus regarding human sexuality. None of the people I’ve listed here have been in danger of jail cells or instruments of torture. Rather, they have suffered threats to companies they’ve built, to their livelihoods, to their reputations, to their status in society. Nevertheless, they did what they thought was right. They chose to follow through with the kind of integrated lives in which what one believes translates into both speech and action. It is this integration that gives substance to the word “integrity.” In other words, they had the courage of their convictions.

The courage of others is at issue, as well. One of the primary parts of my thesis about courage and religious liberty is that courage is necessary not only for the sufferer of these Tocquevillian ordinary persecutions, but also for the potential community of support. The person caught under the magnifying glass of the majority hopes to receive aid from others. But instead, Tocqueville predicted they will fear the consequences of making their objections known and will “fall silent and withdraw.” We need to have the courage not to fall silent, but instead to demonstrate solidarity with brothers and sisters in Christ who become targets of majority scorn and legal action. Solidarity requires courage because it means that we are willing to be known and to potentially share the fate of the person we are standing beside. Rather than ducking our heads and hoping persecutors will not notice us living our quiet lives, we should defend the religious liberty of those being wrongly coerced.

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As a relevant example we might consider Chick-fil-A after a media firestorm erupted in the wake of Dan Cathy’s endorsing the traditional understanding of marriage. There could have been nothing other than condemnation from media voices and political elites, but then things changed. Mike Huckabee suggested that Christians turn out to show their support for the company on a particular day. What was supposed to be a one day rally turned into two weeks in my town. Across the country, Chick-fil-A locations were mobbed with customers and sometimes sold out of food. The massive demonstration of solidarity for the company and Dan Cathy quieted attacks as those who aimed to ostracize Chick-fil-A realized their tactics seemed to be backfiring.

Probably more often, though, the opposite happens and Tocqueville’s scenario comes to fruition. When Brendan Eich’s contribution to California’s traditional marriage referendum campaign came to light, few in Silicon Valley stood up for him or defended his right to participate financially in a campaign that was successful statewide in California. Instead, he was simply pushed out of his own company. The lesson many surely took from the event was to take the advice attributed to Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton, “Talk less. Smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for.”

Religious liberty is especially worth thinking about in light of Tocqueville’s comments because it, like freedom of speech and other bill of rights freedoms, is designed not to be continually subject to majority politics. It is a freedom one embraces up front and protects because it is supposed to be the kind of thing (a human right) that does not depend on the way the wind is blowing with voters. We protect rights such as religious liberty because we recognize there are important principles at stake for human beings that should not simply be subject to a popular, majority will of the type Tocqueville rightly feared. Majorities are strong and majority decision-making is efficient, but they do not automatically produce truth and righteousness.

Brief excursus . . .

I have discussed religious liberty for courageous dissenters caught in conflict between the government and their consciences. I have also described the need for members of the dissenter’s community of conviction to demonstrate solidarity with them by standing up and being heard rather

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than leaving their fellow believers to stand alone. In addition, it is important to address the whole political society and to make a case for citizens to be virtuous and exhibit a kind of courage of their own in extending religious liberty to people who are not part of one’s own clan.

A couple of years ago, I joined a field of thirteen candidates running for Congress in the Republican primary in west Tennessee. I didn’t have anything close to the roughly million dollars it took to compete to win, but I felt a strong calling to run so as to make a case for religious liberty. Because my area has a high concentration of Christians, I found a ready audience for my appeal to protect religious liberty. People in audiences could readily understand how Supreme Court decisions and cultural changes put many devout Christians in danger. They understood the stakes. One of the ways I measured my own success was in getting some of the better funded candidates to begin talking about religious liberty, as well. The message did strike a chord.

But there was one reaction to my message that came up on a number of occasions. I often found that people in audiences would come talk to me privately and say something similar to this, “Your message on religious liberty really resonated with me. But what about the Muslims?” Each time I explained that I believe in religious liberty for everyone, even for people who may have very different beliefs than my own. I don’t want to empower a government so much that it can trample on the faith and conscience of citizens without making any effort at accommodating them.

You may hear that and be concerned, but there are at least a couple of important things to understand. First, religious liberty is an important part of the idea of the separation of church and state. As much as we can become angry at the way courts sometimes misapply that doctrine, the reality is that the churches in the United States are much more vital than they are in countries that retained formal, legal connections between the two institutions. Christianity has thrived in the U.S. relative to countries in western Europe, for example, where stronger links between church and state were common. Second, extending religious liberty to others requires our respect and our courageous optimism. It means we aren’t afraid for others to practice their faith. We don’t need to coerce them or marginalize them. We have the confidence to stand behind the truth of what we believe and to know that God’s work in hearts and souls does not depend on coercion by the government. Someday, every knee will bow and every

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tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, but it will not be because of our legal regime. We need to have the courage to trust the Gospel to do its work in a free way. In addition, we want to model religious liberty for other societies so that the Gospel may travel freely there.

Ultimately, we should fight for religious liberty as a way of preserving the profoundly important idea of limited government. We must remind the state that it is not divine and neither is the general will. Instead, we should embrace the traditional Christian insistence that there are some things that do not belong to the state because they are between men and women and their God. We belong to God and not to the state. As Jacques Maritain has written, “The state is made for man, not man for the state.” It is an instrument. It should have no pretensions of either ownership or immortality.

One of the fundamental ideas driving Baptists, such as at Union University where I work, and members of the Church of Christ, which provides the basis for Faulkner University where I am standing today, is the belief that human beings stand before God when it comes to their salvation. We believe that salvation is obtained by turning one’s whole life over to God and trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Upon doing so, we engage in baptism which illustrates the death of our rule over our former self and the new life we take on in Christ. The Christian then lives a whole life, an integrated life of the type I mentioned earlier, in the pursuit of holiness and in obedience to God. People who believe as we do simply cannot turn over our moral agency in all things to the state.

This reality presents a choice for our politics. We can either take the view that faith and conscience are merely the last refuges of scoundrels who have no better motive than bigotry when they refuse to fully embrace every aspect of the revolution in sex, marriage, and gender or we can extend respect to people who clearly have sincere beliefs that they uphold even in the face of great harm to their prospects in life. We can accommodate them in the best traditions of American religious liberty. Accommodation does not mean that we suddenly allow the sacrifice of virgins in volcanoes. Rather, it means that when we can accommodate faith and conscience without creating risks to the peace and safety of the community, we should do so. It means that we recognize that the state should exercise careful discretion in its use of the coercive powers with which we invest it.

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People of good will, Christian or not, should be able to perceive this important reality. John Courtney Murray described the religion clauses of the First Amendment as “articles of peace.”3 Together, they recognize that many human beings are not only religious, but are also committed to living out their beliefs. That is why we have a free exercise clause and not mere freedom to worship language. The path to social peace in such cases is to tolerate free exercise to the greatest extent that is practicable. In such a way, a government can keep the greatest number of citizens united in support of the political community that should benefit us all rather than alienating many of them from it and perhaps even planting seeds of conspiracy and rebellion.

The nature of life in this world is that the believers and non-believers are distributed throughout various societies, nations, and communities. We call this phenomenon pluralism. We live and work together. Religious liberty is both a principle and practical response to this reality.

Augustine described the earth as a place in which two cities strive toward their goals: the city of God and the city of man. The city of God is the city within the city. Augustine argued that the Christians would be the very best of citizens within the larger community. Motivated by love, they would serve and bless the city of man. There is one caveat. Augustine said the activity of Christians as the best of citizens would hold as long as one condition is not violated. The city of man must not compel the city of God to commit impieties. Religious liberty helps us avoid that outcome and to help us grow in mutual forbearance rather than in contention.4

It should not be hard to see that having a robust view of religious liberty makes for good government both philosophically and pragmatically. Respecting faith and conscience takes a high view of human dignity and gives real weight to the seriousness human beings accord their quest for truth. At the same time, religious liberty takes into account some hard realities about human beings living in community and how to reduce friction between them. To embrace religious liberty is to understand that law, at bottom, is based on the coercive use of force and thus should be deployed as little as possible in order to obtain the common good.

3 John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1960), 49.4 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Book XIX, Chapter 17.

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Together, hopefully we can strive toward the vision set forth by another member of the Roman polis whom we know as Cicero. He described the work of the statesman who has the task of gathering up the discordant notes that sound within the city and finding a way to draw forth harmony.5 Religious liberty, rightly understood, can help us in the good work of statesmanship in politics and friendship between persons. Hopefully, together as statesmen, as citizens, and as human beings seeking to know the truth behind all things, we will band together to protect the freedom which each person should be due.

5 Cicero, On the Commonwealth, Book 2.

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