69 Sermon Illustrations on Religious Freedom

Guidelines for public schools concerning religious expression of students. Students are allowed to pray unobtrusively, read Bibles, talk to fellow students about their faith without harassing them, and can take classes that teach about religion without advocating a particular religion. Very positive for Evangelicals.

Sermon on political and spiritual freedom.

1. Meaning of freedom to Americans.

2. New Testament on freedom.

a. Free to love God.

b. Free from fear of death.

c. Free from power of sin.

3. Freedom has limits.

a. Not free to sin.

b. Unacceptable behavior.

c. Must serve others.

4. Baptists and religious freedom.

a. Freedom of worship in society.

b. Freedom of worship in church. (no creeds)

5. American Baptist Church's convention and homosexuality debate.

In response to the 2022 Dobbs decision on abortion and the Supreme Court’s clear, consistent support for religious liberty throughout this term, many progressives are warning of an imminent “Christian theocracy.” Among the loudest voices predicting our collective doom are mainstream media outlets. For example, a recent story in Reuters claimed, “U.S. Supreme Court Takes Aim at Separation of Church and State.”

What’s missing in virtually all of these pieces is a proper understanding of the “establishment clause.” The establishment clause is derived from the opening lines of the First Amendment which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” There are two ways this statement is commonly misunderstood.

First, it is often described as establishing a “wall of separation between church and state.” In fact, those words are found nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase actually was coined later in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Second, and more importantly, it is assumed that if organized religion cannot be supported by the state, then secularism is somehow “neutral.” Thus, by default, anything goes as long as it’s “secular.”

Understanding the historical context is essential. In the 18th century, an “established” religion referred to an official state church. In the U.S., individual states had already established churches, such as the Anglican Church in Virginia. The First Amendment specifically applied to Congress and prohibited a national church. To prefer the Anglican Church over the Congregationalists or Presbyterians would, at the time, mean alienating certain citizens and entire states. States continued to have established churches well into the 19th century.

In addition, the First Amendment was not intended to prohibit religious activities in governmental institutions. From the very beginning, Congress started each session with prayer. That continues today and is led by an official chaplain.

Our founding fathers, particularly James Madison, believed that religious liberty was an innate right, and inseparable from the freedom of conscience. He also believed that religion would better flourish in a free marketplace of ideas. That thinking was the basis for the free exercise clause.

This understanding of the freedom of conscience is the foundation for the other freedoms protected in the First Amendment. Without conscience rights, we cannot truly speak, write, assemble, or advocate freely from our deepest beliefs. That’s why the freedom of religion is often called “the first freedom.” Its position in the Bill of Rights highlights its importance.

Although the rights of conscience should not be controversial, somehow, that’s what they have become. How this happened is worth considering. By claiming secularism to be neutral, proponents of secularism, as far back as the 19th century, attempted to broadly apply laws originally intended by Protestants to prevent Catholic schools from accessing state funds. In the 20th-century, secularists embraced the concept of “a living Constitution” in order to transform the meaning of the First Amendment, attempting to keep religious institutions from accessing state funds and allowing only “secular” views in the public arena.

Though many court cases illustrate this, among the more important was Torcaso V. Watkins (1961), which declared unconstitutional Maryland’s requirement that officeholders state belief in God. Rather than ruling on the basis of Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for public office, the Supreme Court ruled on the basis of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from violating the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens. The same line of reasoning has since been used to challenge prayers at public meetings, Bible studies in schools, and nativity scenes on public property. In the process, the First Amendment was turned on its head, taking a clause intended to keep the state from backing any one denomination and construing it to position the state in opposition to all organized religions.

In footnote 11 of the Torcaso V. Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black listed secular humanism as one of a number of religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.” Calling humanism a religion was not outlandish. For a century, humanists such as John Dewey and Julian Huxley had defined their beliefs as a religion. After all, secularism involves certain claims about the cosmos, existence, and human nature.

And yet in 1994, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Peloza V. Capistrano Unified School District that while “religion” should be broadly interpreted for free exercise clause purposes, “anything ‘arguably non-religious’ should not be considered religious in applying the establishment clause.” In other words, secular organizations were able to play both sides, qualifying as a religion for the free exercise clause but free from constraints from the establishment clause.

To further determine whether religious activities could utilize public spaces, the Supreme Court derived the so-called “Lemon Test” in the case Lemon V. Kurzman (1991). According to this rule, a religious activity is only licit on public grounds if it performs a secular purpose, neither advances nor inhibits religion, and does not foster excessive government entanglement in religion. This test maintained an obviously secular bias: Secular organizations were not required to pass any tests to obtain access.

In the 2022 decision in the Coach Kennedy case [he prayed on the field after football games], the Supreme Court continued its long-overdue corrections to the anti-religious way the First Amendment had been interpreted. Particularly by unequivocally tossing the “Lemon Test,” the Court has stopped the active suppression of religious beliefs and practice. We ought not fear an impending theocracy, but instead welcome a redress to the unjust and ahistorical understandings of religion.

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Copyright (c) 2022 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

A summary of the Department of Education's guidelines on constitutionally protected prayer and religious speech:

-- Students may read their Bible, pray before meals and pray or study “religious materials” with other students during recess, lunch and other times out of class. Specifically, the guidelines say that students “may pray when not engaged in school activities or instruction....” Such prayer is subject to the same rules “designed to prevent” disruptions.

-- Students may organize prayer groups, religious clubs and “see you at the pole” gatherings “to the same extent that students are permitted to organize other non-curricular” groups.

-- Teachers may pray or take part in Bible studies before school or during lunch, or when it is clear “that they are not participating in their official capacities.”

-- School officials must neither “encourage nor discourage” students from participating in school-initiated “moments of silence.” Students are free to participate or not participate.

-- Schools that have a practice of dismissing students for non-religious needs -- at the request of parents -- must do the same for students with religious needs. For example, a school could dismiss briefly a Muslim student who requests time alone to pray during Ramadan.

-- Students may express their religious beliefs in homework and other assignments “free from discrimination based on the religious content” of the assignment.

-- Assembly speakers may not be selected based on their beliefs. A speaker selected by students may not have his speech restricted because of its religious content. The school is free to have disclaimers saying the speaker's opinion is his, and not the school's.

-- Schools “may not mandate or organize prayer” at graduations but also should not restrict the religious expression of students or other speakers. The school is free to have disclaimers saying the speaker's opinion is his, and not the school's.

-- Schools must make their facilities available to organizers of “privately sponsored religious baccalaureate ceremonies” if those same schools make their facilities available to other private groups.

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The complete text of the education guidelines is available at: http://www.ed.gov/inits/religionandschools/prayer_guidance.html.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13117]

In a recent cover story, Newsweek magazine asked, "What do Teens Believe?" For parents who worry about their teenagers, the Newsweek results can be both encouraging -- and distressing.

Take religious faith, for example. While Newsweek reports that "we're witnessing a new revival of religion" among teenagers -- and that's the encouraging part -- it is distressing to find that "more than half agree with the statement that 'all religious faiths teach equally valid truths.'"

If that sounds like relativism to you, you're right -- it is. Now, one can argue with a teenager that relativism is ultimately incoherent. Christianity and Hinduism, for example, will be equally true only if both are equally hollow, and the word "truth" has lost all meaning. But there's another way to challenge the relativism that young people face in our culture.

With knowledge.

... Let's start with relativism. Many Americans think the notion that relativism -- your beliefs are true for you, my beliefs are true for me -- is a praiseworthy American value, rooted in our Constitution. In fact, as historians Gary Amos and Richard Gardiner show in their book "Never Before in History," what's especially American, and valuable, is our legacy of religious freedom -- which is different.

Though often confused, religious freedom and relativism are not the same thing. Amos and Gardiner point out that the American tradition of religious liberty rests on a Biblical foundation. Why did the Puritans leave England to sail to America? Because the Bible taught them that every human being must respond to God and His Word alone, in freedom -- and no one should be forced to assent to doctrines against his conscience. While relativism denies the very existence of truth, real religious freedom upholds truth as something precious, created by God, which we may freely embrace -- or not. Never Before in History explains that our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our entire system of government work because their framers "drew their ideas about religious liberty and separation of church and state from Christian sources."

Does that surprise you? It probably does -- because the Christian roots of our civil liberties is one of best-kept secrets in American history, particularly in schools. But the book "Never Before in History" lays out the key evidence beautifully -- something teens are not getting in civics courses.

We should be teaching our kids that there's a world of difference between the freedom of conscience that the Bible teaches, where truth is real and precious, and the relativism that uses the cloak of freedom to deny the existence of truth itself. Never Before in History makes the case that if we forget the foundations of our freedoms, we'll lose them -- and that's a lesson teenagers, and the rest of us, need to learn!

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Religious Liberty sprung fully panoplied from the earliest Baptist writings. Their doctrine of the church assumed that the Spirit, and he alone, used the power of biblical truth, normally through preaching, to produce the new birth. The composition of the church consists only of those born again under such influences; believers only, therefore, should be baptized.

The Spirit's sword, not the magistrate's sword, makes Christians. A church constituted by those whose consciences have been either forced or bribed by carnal power is not a New Testament church.

The General Baptists gave lengthy, cogent and gospel-centered arguments for full liberty of conscience, though theirs was violated for this stance. John Smyth, in voluntary exile, wrote, "The prince must leave the Christian religion free to every man's conscience." Thomas Helwys said, "Let them be heretiks, Turcks, Jewes or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure." Leonard Busher wrote in "A Plea for Liberty of Conscience" that "no king nor bishop ... is able to command faith; ... it is the gift of God, who worketh in us both the will and the deed of his own good pleasure."

An anonymous General Baptist wrote "Persecution for Religion Judg'd and Condemn'd." John Murton wrote in A Most Humble Supplication to the king, "Far be it from you to sit in the consciences of men, to be lawgiver and judge therein." John Spilsbury, the first pastor among the Particular Baptists, wrote, "No conscience ought to be forced in the matters of Religion, because no man can bear out another in his account to God."

Christopher Blackwood in "The Storming of Antichrist" asks, "Whether it be lawfull for any person whatsoever to compell the conscience?" He gives the answer, "It is not," followed by 29 reasons for such an answer. Roger Williams labeled the violation of conscience by the civil power "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience." John Clarke in his description of persecution in Massachusetts and his arguments against it calls conscience "a sparkling beam from the Father of lights and spirits that cannot be lorded over, commanded, or forced, either by men, devils, or angels."

All of these were written before John Locke perceived of religious liberty and as much as 160 years before Thomas Jefferson was able to distill it into law in Virginia. Rhode Island under the influence of Williams and Clarke stated in its charter, the one gained in 1663, "A most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained with a full liberty in religious concernments." Those words, perhaps commonplace today, expressed a revolutionary understanding of society and reflected a worldview trained by the gospel and the ideal of a regenerate church membership.

The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message continues this historical witness when it states as its first sentence, "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it."

The article strongly implies that creeds enforced by a civil power would be unwarranted and outside the bounds of legitimate government: "The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind."

The preface of the 2000 BF&M includes a wording on this issue more carefully constructed than that of the 1963 BF&M: "Baptists cherish and defend religious liberty, and deny the right of any secular or religious authority to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches."

Just as strongly, however, the confession encourages and approves the development of doctrinal statements derived from the Word of God and entered into voluntarily by churches for the sake of gospel witness. "The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends" and includes among these "the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power."

Though Baptists arose in the fires of persecution, endured them for the better part of a century in Old England, witnessed in spite of them in New England and suffered greatly under an established church in colonial Virginia, they have never desired special treatment from civil powers, only neutral protection of universal rights.

"The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work," the confession says. This echoes Madison's famous Memorial and Remonstrance, which echoed the concerns of Virginia Baptists in saying that when the civil authority uses religion as "an engine of civil policy," he thereby indulges "an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation."

Long and sad experience has taught Baptists and even the inside of a jail cell could not dissuade them from the truth of these two assertions of the BF&M: "The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion." John Leland's "The Rights of Conscience" gives the corollary to that concern in proposing the query, "Did not religion receive a deadly wound by being fostered in the arms of civil power and regulated by law?"

Along with such insistent refusal to obey the state in religious matters is the glad acquiescence to the necessity of governmental authority in the lawful regulation of civil society. "Civil government being ordained of God, it is the duty of Christians to render loyal obedience thereto in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God."

No citizen is more loyal to the government or more zealous for the rights of others than a historically informed, gospel believing Baptist.

A well-ordered government should function "so that every church [and every religion enjoys] protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends." This commitment to freedom arises not from doubts concerning the clarity of divine revelation or a relativistic view of truth, but from the happy conviction that the gospel, and it only, is the power of God unto salvation.

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Full text of Article 17: Religious Liberty

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it. Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. In providing for such freedom no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others. Civil government being ordained of God, it is the duty of Christians to render loyal obedience thereto in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God. The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends. The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion. A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.

Genesis 1:27; 2:7; Matthew 6:6-7,24; 16:26; 22:21; John 8:36; Acts 4:19-20; Romans 6:1-2; 13:1-7; Galatians 5:1,13; Philippians 3:20; 1 Timothy 2:1-2; James 4:12; 1 Peter 2:12-17; 3:11-17; 4:12-19.

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Nettles is a professor of historical theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

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Last Thursday President Bush did something few presidents in history have had the courage to do. However, you may not have heard about it, since much of the press downplayed it. But you shouldn't miss it, because the religious freedom of millions rests on people knowing about and getting behind the president's actions.

The president spoke to the American Jewish Committee in Washington Thursday on the subject of religious liberty. Bush spoke about how America, from its birth, has been committed to religious tolerance and religious freedom. We have always been a country that, he quoted George Washington, "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

Over two centuries, Bush noted, "Washington's rejection of religious bigotry has matured ... into a guiding doctrine of our foreign policy."

And then the president took direct aim at the countries that persecute people for their faith: He condemned Iraq, Iran, Burma, Cuba, and Afghanistan for their mistreatment of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities. He reserved special condemnation for China, which, he said, vandalizes churches and mosques, and puts religious leaders under arrest.

But the president's strongest words were aimed at the government of Sudan. Sudan, he said, "is a disaster area for human rights." The Muslim government is "waging war against ... Christians and other non-Muslims. Some 2 million Sudanese have lost their lives; 4 million more have lost their homes. Hospitals, schools, [and] churches ... have often been bombed by government warplanes; ... women and children have been abducted and sold into slavery."

"Aid agencies report," the president continued, "that food assistance is sometimes distributed only to those willing to undergo conversion to Islam."

The president backed up his remarks with some strong action, as well: He announced he had just appointed a special humanitarian coordinator, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, to ensure that U.S. food aid to Sudan goes to those who need it, no matter what their religion. And he promised that his administration "will continue to speak and act for as long as the persecution and atrocities in the Sudan last."

This is great news, and I know from personal experience that we can count on the president to keep his word. A few months ago, Bill Bennett, Rabbi Sapperstein, and I talked with special advisor to the president, Karl Rove. We pleaded for a special presidential envoy to deal with Sudan. Rove got back to me and said, "We will do it." And indeed the president is keeping his word.

The president's action has drawn fire in some quarters. Businesses that use Sudan's gum arabic for soft drinks and other products don't want Bush to take such a hard line against Sudan.

But you and I need to let President Bush know how much we appreciate his courageous stand on this issue -- an answer to prayer indeed, delivered on the National Day of Prayer. So, I hope you'll contact the White House and thank the president for standing up for the rights of persecuted citizens around the world, including many, many Christians.

I also urge you to visit BreakPoint Online for a copy of the president's magnificent speech. You probably won't find it in your local newspapers or on TV. But I want you to read it, because it's evidence that we now have a president, thank God, who is willing to set his jaw -- and do what is right.

For further reference:

Bush, George W. "The First Freedom of the Soul." Remarks by the President to the American Jewish Committee, 3 May 2001. Full text available on BreakPoint Online: http://www.breakpoint.org

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Copyright (c) 1999 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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NICKTOWN, Pa. (AP) - Roads winding around rolling hills cut picturesque paths through this western Pennsylvania hamlet.

But those curves make it difficult for drivers to spot slow-moving Amish buggies _ especially at night, when the all-black, horse-drawn vehicles can fade into the darkness.

"I have had some close calls, and it's really scary," said resident Bonnie DeFazio. "At night, you can see something there, but you can't always tell what it is."

There have been no deaths or serious injuries, but the threat has sparked a showdown with the small, conservative Swartzentruber Amish community.

Its members refuse to use the standard warning symbol of a bright orange triangle that state law requires on slow-moving vehicles, saying the colorful reflectors violate their belief in plain personal belongings. Instead, they outline the back edges of their buggies with gray reflective tape.

Although most other Amish groups in Pennsylvania use the orange reflectors, the Swartzentrubers have received the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union. And state Sen. John D. Wozniak, who represents the area including Nicktown, said last week that he would introduce a bill that would allow the Swartzentrubers to use their reflective tape.

In December, Jonas Swartzentruber spent three days in jail after being cited for not having a triangle on his buggy. Since then, 10 other members of the sect have been cited, and all say they would rather go to jail than pay the $100 fine or perform community service.

"Doing community service would probably require us to ride in a truck or work with electrical tools," said Levi Zook, one of those who have been cited. "We don't want to go to jail, but that is what we will do."

Pennsylvania law requires all slow-moving vehicles, including Amish buggies and farm equipment, to display the familiar triangle reflectors as a warning to drivers coming from behind.

"Slow-moving vehicles are at risk when they travel on the roads in Pennsylvania," said Jack Lewis, a State Police spokesman. "The reflective emblem law is designed to promote safety. We are enforcing that law."

Lewis said there have been a few crashes involving Swartzentruber Amish buggies, and State Police began enforcing the reflector law after other residents complained.

The Swartzentrubers are among several conservative Amish orders in Pennsylvania and elsewhere that object to the reflectors _ both because of the bright colors and the idea that they should wear a symbol for their protection.

"They've cited to me scriptural passages about the perils of putting your faith in a man-made symbol instead of putting your faith in God," said Donna Doblick, an attorney with a Pittsburgh law firm that is representing the Swartzentrubers. "You have to remember these people read the Bible very literally and find that aspect _ the symbol, the triangle _ very problematic."

Swartzentrubers came to western Pennsylvania in 1997 from eastern Ohio. There are now about a dozen families in the area some 65 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Doblick said four states - including Ohio - permit reflective tape outlining the back of a buggy as a substitute for the orange triangle. Doblick's firm and the ACLU are working with Wozniak to draw up similar legislation for Pennsylvania.

One safety researcher argues against an exemption.

"That triangle is there for communicating, 'Hey _ I'm moving slowly,"' said Tom Schnell, director of the Operator Performance Laboratory at the University of Iowa. "When you see not just a triangle, but an orange triangle, you know there's a slow-moving vehicle ahead."

But in a similar case in Wisconsin, state Supreme Court justices in 1996 upheld the right of conservative Amish to use white reflective tape instead of the required orange triangle. Courts in Minnesota and Michigan also have sided with the Amish.

"If we can find something that's equally effective, why not let them use it?" Wozniak said.

America was founded on the pursuit of religious liberty, including the liberty to acknowledge God and to pray in the public square.

This liberty originates in higher law, or “the laws of nature and of nature's God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it. In the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the founders modeled themselves “upon God's ancient people” and “wrote what they considered to be a modern-day interpretation of the basic biblical principles of government.”

Those principles demand a place for religious expression in the public square. Unfortunately, radical advocates have long been trying to rewrite the Constitution by making the First Amendment say something it doesn't. The First Amendment plainly forbids the creation of a national denomination, because that would be an “establishment of religion.” It says nothing about the so-called “separation of church and state.”

Even those who agitate to remove the Ten Commandments monument at the capitol here in Arizona and the now-famous plaques with Hebrew Scriptures at the Grand Canyon will admit -- when pressed -- that the so-called “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution.

What did the founders do and say to make us think religion has a place in the public square?

Let us consider General George Washington. When Washington received a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the Continental Congress, he immediately issued orders that “The Colonels or commanding officers of each regiment are directed to procure Chaplains accordingly; persons of good Characters and exemplary lives.”

The Declaration which motivated Washington's appointment of chaplains contains four references to God: God as the Creator and the source of liberty (“all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights”), God the law giver (“law of nature and of nature's God”), God the ultimate judge (“the Supreme Judge of the World”) and God as the king above all earthly rulers, as the Sovereign (“Divine Providence”).

After he led the army to victory, Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention and was then elected our first president under the Constitution.

At Washington's first inauguration in New York City, Washington took the oath of office on a Bible opened to Genesis 49 and 50, and added the words repeated by every president since, “So help me God.” He told his audience at Federal Hall that, “It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations.”

Washington then went very publicly to pray at St. Paul's Chapel before he attended inaugural festivities. Eight years later, in his farewell address, he said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Washington, as perhaps the leading founding father, demonstrated repeatedly that religion has a legitimate place in the public square. The hue and cry over the Ten Commandments monument and the plaques would seem ludicrous to him and to all who served with him.

In light of that history, why would anyone object to posting “Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds his name is the Lord, exult before him,” at the Grand Canyon?

If religion in general is the thing that keeps radicals up worrying late at night, then why haven't they also demanded that the Hindu names for canyon locations -- Brahma Temple, Vishnu Temple, Siva Temple -- be changed? Maybe for the same reason they want to banish the Ten Commandments from the capitol grounds -- they hate orthodox religious expressions in the public square.

Remember, the monument is one of 20 similar monuments that celebrate Arizona's history, culture and diversity. Surely, the Ten Commandments monument adds diversity. And what about the Arizona state motto, “Ditat Deus,” or “God Enriches.” No doubt the demand to change the motto will come soon.

Why would any irreligious person care about the monument on Wesley- Bolin Plaza? Perhaps they should follow the advice so freely doled out by the radicals like the ACLU, who want child pornography protected as free speech, to “just change the channel” and turn away from the monument.

Perhaps we need a little more accurate history about the so-called “separation of church and state.” In the early 1800s, many of the original states had churches sanctioned by state governments. These were “established churches,” and because they were a state matter they were not forbidden in the U.S. Constitution.

It took a former Ku Klux Klansman turned Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, to move the so-called “separation of church and state” into common jurisprudence, which he accomplished in 1947 in Everson V. Board of Education. As a committed Klansman, Black surely must have participated in the Klan's oath of allegiance, to “most zealously ... shield and preserve ... (the) separation of church and state....” Klan doctrine is not a good way to interpret the U.S. Constitution.

A free and just society recognizes that freedom of speech and religion applies to public religious expression as well as to private. Our founding fathers knew this, as did most previous generations. Forgetting the hard-won lessons of the past is, in our time, freedom's greatest threat.

We will lose our liberties if we don't fight. We'll lose when we give into all the ACLU's demands. We'll lose when we quit singing God Bless America, or when we take In God We Trust off our currency. We'll lose when we return to the morally and legally repugnant practice of issuing governmental licenses to clergymen and their printers, as the English did here in the 1700s and as totalitarian regimes still do.

Religion should be booted from the public square only if we prefer tyranny to liberty.

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Alan Sears is president of Alliance Defense Fund, religious liberty legal alliance based in Scottsdale, Ariz. This column originally appeared in The Arizona Republic on August 17, 2003.

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Richard Dawkins, an Oxford science philosopher, once stated, “If you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).” For that and other similar comments, Dawkins has earned the nickname “Darwin's pit bull.”

Dawkins's latest book, A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN, touches on themes dear to his heart, especially his belief in evolution and his contempt for religion. In his eyes, people of faith are simply trying to avoid the facts that science teaches — namely, that there is no God and no life after death.

Dawkins sees himself, on the other hand, as someone who has taken a stand for absolute truth and will brook no opposition. He won't even debate creationists or intelligent design theorists, since that might “lend ... respectability” to what he calls their “nonsense.”

To give Dawkins his due, he's a witty, engaging, and intelligent writer and lecturer — so much so that I wonder how many of his readers and listeners realize how dangerous his ideas are. For instance, he writes, “Society, for no reason that I can discern, accepts that parents have an automatic right to bring their children up with particular religious opinions.”

To Dawkins's mind, that's a completely unreasonable thing to believe. For him, if the scientific facts back up his atheistic worldview, then to teach religion to children is deceitful, and it's wrong to lie to children.

Now, I won't get into the intelligent design debate and proofs for God's existence. I've discussed these many times in this column, and you can read about them on our BreakPoint website (www.breakpoint.org). The point that really interests me is how Dawkins's dislike of religious freedom and lack of respect for religious people are related to his worldview of scientific absolutism.

Because he can see religion only as a source of lies, Dawkins complains, “Why do we have to respect [religious opinions], simply because they are religious?”

Dissenters from Darwinism don't even deserve mention. Parents should not have the right to raise their children with religion. Religious opinions need not be respected. This, you see, is the totalitarian impulse in Dawkins' scientific secularism and the great danger of the movement he represents. If there really is no source of truth higher than human beings (or, as Dawkins would put it, higher than human beings and their fellow animals), then it makes sense to see Dawkins and his scientific colleagues as guardians of all the truth that we can know about the universe. Religion, then, is a silly superstition, and it makes perfect sense to put down religious people who try to hide and distort absolute truth.

Christians also believe in absolute truth. All truth — even the truth we discover through science — comes from God. The difference is that, unlike Dawkins, we also believe that God gives humans the dignity of freedom, even if they would use that freedom to deny His very existence. We are told to speak the truth to unbelievers lovingly, not coerce or deride them. Christian absolute truth, you see, includes a universal respect for others.

Darwin's pit bull gets points for tenacity, but his view of the world and the way he would implement that view are tragically flawed and dangerous.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Richard Dawkins, “The future looks bright,” Guardian, 21 June 2003. (More of Dawkins's dubious insights into religion and atheism.)

• Robin McKie, “Dawkins versus the priests and New Age shamans? No contest,” Observer, 9 March 2003.

• Gregg Easterbrook, “'Bullied and Brainwashed,'“ Beliefnet.com, January 2004.

• Laura Sheahen, “Religion: For Dummies“ (interview with Dawkins), Beliefnet.com, 9 December 2003.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 040308, “Science in the Light of Faith: A Valuable Perspective.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 040301, “Charles Darwin Knew: Science and Freedom.”

• Albert Mohler, “The Devil's Chaplain: Richard Dawkins on Christianity,” Crosswalk.com, 25 February 2004.

• Charles W. Colson, “The Devil in the DNA,” Christianity Today, 10 August 1998 (reprinted at BreakPoint Online).

• Al Dobras, “It's All about Luck,” BreakPoint Online, 7 April 2003.

• Learn more about intelligent design at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

• See BreakPoint's “Worldview for Parents” pages: “Is What We See All We Get?“; “Micro- and Macroevolution: Is There a Difference?“; and “Did Life Evolve?“

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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"Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself."

-- Robert Green Ingersoll, famous atheist

"Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

-- Thomas Jefferson

THE EXTREMISTS AMONG US

It is perhaps America’s most enduring myth: The Pilgrims came here looking for religious freedom, found it, and we all lived happily ever after.

They weren’t. They didn’t. We haven’t.

As we’ll see, the Pilgrims actually came here looking mostly for real estate. They were a quirky, if courageous little band of religious separatists. And like religious separatists before them and since — from the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the monks of the Egyptian desert to the Amish of today — they wanted nothing so much as to be left alone to live in their own world according to their own vision of the truth. They came to America not because it offered freedom for all but simply because it offered a refuge for them.

The problem was, other people kept showing up. Even aboard the MAYFLOWER there were the “strangers,” whom the Pilgrims’ English investors had insisted accompany them. Then, after they’d established Plymouth Colony, more ships brought more strangers. As we’ll also see, the Pilgrims did not respond well to this unplanned pluralism. In fact, they attempted to outlaw it. They set up tax-supported churches and banned competing religious services or cultural displays. They kept dissidents from proselytizing. They had religious tests for public office. And they refused to exempt conscientious objectors, like Quakers, from obeying their laws.

We haven’t lived happily ever after, either. We have, of course, come a long way since the Pilgrims first measured out their stingy servings of tolerance. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem that the Pilgrims and the strangers faced when confronted with each other is still with us: How do you reconcile claims of absolute truth with human freedom in a pluralistic society?

In fact, that problem is not only still with us, it is growing ever more serious as our society grows ever more pluralistic — and as the extremists on both sides grow ever more polarized. It has reached the point where we aptly call the whole imbroglio one of the culture wars.

How to resolve it? We must begin by understanding it. So let’s meet the combatants.

IN THIS CORNER, WEARING THE FUNNY HATS ... THE PILGRIMS

On the one hand there are still many Pilgrims among us, people who want to use the state to coerce the religious consciences of those with whom they disagree. For these latter-day Pilgrims the relationship of truth and freedom seems every bit as straightforward as it did to their namesakes in Plymouth Colony: The truth is, well, true. So how, they demand to know, can they NOT seek to establish it legally? If they don’t, won’t they be conceding that they harbor some doubts after all? And even if they did succeed in legally establishing the true religion, would that be such a bad thing? Wouldn’t they really just be doing a favor to the not-yet-enlightened by hastening the day when their eyes are opened?

Most Americans instinctively recoil from such logic. We know it can’t be right. We may or may not know how to parse the philosophical mistake involved, but we're sure there must be one in there somewhere. We know that religious truth cannot be embraced authentically unless it is embraced freely. To American ears, the idea that truth is somehow opposed to freedom rings false. Pilgrims are obviously extremists.

AND IN THIS CORNER, WEARING THE HAPLESS EXPRESSIONS ... THE PARK RANGERS

But Pilgrims aren’t the only extremists. On the other hand there are the Park Rangers, who insist — even after the tragedies of the last century — that only a society that owns no truth at all can be safe for freedom. For them, the price of freedom for everyone is that no one can be allowed to publicly claim that anything transcendent is absolutely true. Why call them “Park Rangers”? In honor of a particularly memorable example of their zeal. Perry Mason might have called it “The Case of the Sacred Parking Barrier.”

It all began in the Japanese Tea Garden of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1989. The tea garden had long been a particularly well-groomed part of the park, a haven from the stresses of urban life. That year, however, there was a problem. A crane operator had abandoned a traffic or parking barrier at the back of the tea garden. It was a small, bullet-shaped lump of granite that clashed with the ordered nature of the place, an irritant that park-goers periodically tried to have removed. Bureaucrats being what they are, however, the stray parking barrier remained.

It remained, that is, until 1993, when the bureaucrats learned of a New Age group’s interest in it. The New Agers, it seemed, had recognized something significant about the shape of the parking barrier: It resembled a Shiva Lingam, a manifestation of the Hindu god Shiva. What was more, they had come upon it unexpectedly and in a wooded setting, just the way you’re supposed to discover a Shiva Lingam. The little band of believers had rejoiced and begun to worship. In fact, they now came regularly to pray and make offerings of incense and flowers to the stone bullet. All of which greatly alarmed the very same authorities (with a little poetic license, the “Park Rangers”) who had resolutely neglected to remove the traffic barrier as an eyesore. The bureaucrats roused themselves and announced that it was their duty to prevent worship on (not to mention of) public property; the parking barrier had to go.

Whereupon, the New Agers promptly got a lawyer and sued for an order blocking removal of the little granite lump. The case settled two months later, in January 1994. Rather than spend time and money in court, the authorities agreed to give the spare barrier to its devotees, who agreed to pray to it in private, someplace else.

Now, as lawsuits go this was hardly a legal landmark. After all, the parking barrier really was public property and the authorities always were free to do with it as they pleased. As an account of religion in public life, however, the case is something of a parable. If ever there was a religion that was not threatening, either politically or culturally, this had to be it. Nobody could ever have mistaken parking-barrier worship for an officially established religion, even in San Francisco. No one could really have wondered whether it would be politically correct to be seen leaving flowers in front of the thing. Nobody could honestly worry that tax money might be spent on incense for it. In short, this particular piece of religious expression did not remotely threaten to coerce anyone to do anything. What’s more, the tea garden was a public park. If people could come to admire the shrubbery, why couldn't they come to worship the parking barriers?

Because, said the authorities, parking-barrier worship was religion and religion didn’t belong on public property. Religion belonged in private. It was just that simple.

There are many Park Rangers among us, from zoning commissioners to school administrators to ... actual park rangers. And they all seem to think it’s just that simple. They come out in force at the holidays. Controversies over Christmas Nativity scenes and Hanukkah menorahs have, of course, become a yearly ritual. But the battle lines have moved far beyond them. There are now annual debates over a variety of cultural offerings. Some Park Rangers, stung by criticism that the Easter Bunny isn’t already a secular enough symbol, have made over the little creature as best they can. For example, the public school system in Lansing, Michigan, now offers, in lieu of Easter, a “Breakfast with the Special Bunny.” And, until nearly everyone laughed at it, the public library in Arlington, Virginia, had replaced its annual Easter Egg Hunt with a “Spring Egg Roll.” Other places have banned in-school celebrations of Halloween, on one of two conflicting theories: either because it’s an inappropriately Catholic celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, or else because it's an inappropriately pagan celebration of something else. At least one school system has banned Valentine’s Day because it's named after Saint Valentine. The kids can still send each other notes, though they can't call them valentines. They have to call them “special person cards.”

What drives these people? Some are devout deconstructionists. That is, they are convinced that there really is no such thing as objective truth at all. Most Park Rangers, though, are not. Most, ever so privately, believe in something or other. But they’re Park Rangers still. Why? Because they think that freedom is incompatible with public claims of any religious truth — even their own. All religion, they insist, must be purely private. And just why is that? It’s largely because they’re afraid of the Pilgrims.

To hear the Park Rangers tell it, the West is free because Westerners are mostly easygoing folk, untainted by fanatical devotion to absolute truths. Columnist Andrew Sullivan memorably made this case in his fierce post-9/11 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE cover article, “This Is a Religious War.” Sullivan framed the war against al-Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups as a conflict between two kinds of religion: It is “a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity.” He charged that belief in absolute truth, which he seemed to equate with “fundamentalism,” inevitably produces coercion. “If you believe that there is an eternal afterlife and that endless indescribable torture awaits those who disobey God's law, then it requires no huge stretch of imagination to make sure that you not only conform to each diktat but that you also encourage and, if necessary, coerce others to do the same.... In a world of absolute truth, in matters graver than life and death, there is no room for dissent and no room for theological doubt.” In other words, only uncertainty can save us from the killing fields. The only good religion is a relativist one.

What to do, then, with all those recalcitrant religions that insist they really do possess the truth? The Park Rangers’ answer is simple: Push them out of public life and keep them as culturally marginal as possible. Replace all that messy competition with a wrinkle-free, synthetic, one-size-fits-all culture.

As we’ll see, that’s literally inhuman.

It’s also self-defeating. It doesn’t resolve the culture war; it enflames it. It alarms the Pilgrims every bit as much as their sermons frighten the Park Rangers. So both sides take to their direct-mail houses to quote each other and amass bigger war chests by sowing further anxiety. Each ends up being the other’s best fundraiser and worst bogeyman.

(The Park Rangers’ position is counterproductive in a subtler way as well. Barring public truth claims about who God is often morphs into barring public truth claims about who we are. Yet truth claims about ourselves are what human rights are based on. Barring such truth claims in the name of freedom is like sawing off the limb you’re sitting on.)

In short, the Park Rangers’ solution to pluralism is as defective as the Pilgrims’ is. In their drive to prevent theocracy, the Park Rangers end up promoting a society that is insufficiently human — and is at least as divided as the one they’re trying to forestall.

THIS WAY OUT

It sometimes seems we are condemned to an endless tug-of-war between Pilgrims and Park Rangers and we dare not let either side win. If the Pilgrims prevail, both freedom of conscience and civil society diminish. We will have once again the gray hypocrisy of government-imposed orthodoxy. If the Park Rangers win, we risk having only the sort of temporary, politically based religious liberty that has proven so inadequate throughout much of the world. And we will certainly have a vapid public culture. We will be nervous for our rights in the midst of one vast, unending Breakfast with the Special Bunny.

Either way, religious freedom suffers. But it, and we, suffer from the ongoing struggle as well. Must this be? Not if we can rise above the impasse. To do this, we must be able to guarantee a robust religious freedom for all — and not just for some — and base it on something that’s undeniable to both Pilgrims and Park Rangers. That is, we must ground religious freedom for all in something more universally convincing than the parochial truth claims of the Pilgrims, but do it without contradicting those truth claims. We must guarantee the Park Rangers (and everyone else) their freedom of conscience, grounding it in something far firmer than just their own anxieties, while not unduly aggravating those anxieties. That is our challenge.

[see also HolwickID #30582]

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The expansion of “gay marriage” in the United States would create clashes between church and state that might restrict the religious freedom of Americans who oppose such unions, legal scholars predict.

The legalization of “gay marriage,” it was forecast, could impact, for example, the housing and employment policies of religious schools and other institutions and even the tax-exempt status of churches and parachurch organizations.

The disclosure of such predictions came as the U.S. Senate prepared to vote on a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to a man and a woman. Senators are scheduled to begin debating the Marriage Protection Amendment, S.J. Res. 1, June 5, with a vote expected June 6 or 7.

The Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and other conservative religious organizations have been promoting a federal amendment as the only solution for efforts in the courts to legalize “gay marriage.” Though Massachusetts is the only state to have legalized “gay marriage,” high courts in New Jersey, New York and Washington could legitimize same-sex unions before the end of the year.

It appears proponents of the MPA may be fighting to protect not only marriage but religious liberty as well.

“Legal redefinition of marriage will be an engine for religious freedom litigation for years to come,” said Anthony Picarello, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “Wherever ‘same-sex marriage’ is part of the law, government will be requiring equal treatment of ‘same-sex marriage,’ and that is something most religious groups cannot abide. And that means church-state conflict.”

Recognizing the potential for conflict, the Becket Fund convened a private conference of nine legal scholars last December to examine the implications for religious liberty of legalized “gay marriage” and to produce papers on the topic. The Becket Fund, which is well known for defending religious adherents of all types, selected lawyers from across the political spectrum, from Georgetown University law professor Chai Feldblum, a leading advocate for homosexual rights, to conservative Pepperdine University law professor Doug Kmiec.

Despite their differences, the scholars all agreed -- the legalization of “gay marriage” will produce widespread clashes between church and state.

It will be a “very dangerous train wreck,” one of the panelists, Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, told columnist Maggie Gallagher in the May 15 issue of The Weekly Standard.

And it will or should, depending on the viewpoint, infringe religious freedom, some of the scholars said.

“This increased judicial approval of ‘same-sex marriage’ will metastasize into the larger culture,” Kmiec wrote in a May 26 column for the Chicago Tribune. “Indeed, an insidious, but less recognized, consequence will be a push to demonize -- and then punish -- faith communities that refuse to bless homosexual unions.”

When religious liberty and sexual liberty clash, Feldblum told Gallagher, “Sexual liberty should win in most cases. There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.”

One of the reasons for the widespread conflict is marriage’s pervasiveness in the law, Picarello told Baptist Press.

“Marriage is everywhere in the [legal] code, and so there are going to be as many conflicts as there are places where marriage exists in the code,” he said. “The thing about changing the definition of marriage is it just brings the scope of conflict to a whole new level.”

It appears there will be two categories of cases in this conflict, Picarello said. In one, the state will seek to compel directly churches and religious organizations “to treat same-sex and different-sex couples equally on threat of liability.” In the other, churches may win a legal challenge of the state’s action on First Amendment grounds, but the government might punish them by withdrawing benefits or accommodations it would normally provide.

The cases could involve everything from student housing at a religious university to a plot in a cemetery operated by a church or religious organization, and “hundreds of things” in between, Picarello said.

He offered the following scenarios as examples of what is likely under a “gay marriage” regime:

• A homosexual couple with a marriage license could request married student housing even at a college that bars same-sex couples for religious reasons.

• Religious institutions could be required to provide “homosexual spouses” with benefits.

• Religious employers could be prohibited from firing employees who enter “gay marriages.”

• A person could seek access to his “same-sex spouse’s” family plot in a religiously owned cemetery.

Catholic Charities of Boston already has pulled out of the adoption business because Massachusetts refused to make an exception for its decision not to place children with homosexual couples.

If a church or religious organization refuses to bow to the state and wins in court, the government may do what some cities have done to the Boy Scouts of America. Though the BSA won in the Supreme Court the right to bar homosexual leaders, some local governments have pulled benefits from the Boy Scouts that they previously enjoyed.

The “Big Kahuna” when it comes to government action against churches and religious organizations is tax exemption, Picarello told BP. “Many churches fear that more than they fear God Himself.”

The withdrawal of tax-exempt status at the federal level for resistance to “gay marriage” appears unlikely for now, he said. “It could happen; it’s just not going to happen soon,” he said.

The states are a “different matter,” Picarello said. “Essentially, I wouldn’t want to be a religious institution relying on my tax exemption in a state like Massachusetts.”

Picarello also said he doesn’t believe a pastor will be required to perform a “gay marriage” nor does he foresee a preacher being barred from speaking against such unions.

A state could, however, do what Massachusetts has done with justices of the peace, he said. The state has not permitted an exception for a justice who refuses to marry same-sex couples because it would conflict with his conscience.

“What the government may say [to ministers] is, ‘You can perform all the religious marriages you want, but if you want them to have legal effect, you’re going to need to provide that service” to everyone, Picarello said.

The school season is in full swing across the country, and parents are crossing off items on all sorts of checklists: school supplies, clothes, bus schedules, to name but a few.

But as Mark Earley discussed last week on “BreakPoint,” there’s another item parents have to contend with: just how far their kids can go in expressing their faith in school. It’s an issue that arises out of a distorted reading of the First Amendment.

That’s a lesson that a New Jersey second-grader is learning the hard way. Her school has an annual talent show open to all students. The kids can sing, dance, play an instrument, or even perform a skit. The second-grader chose to sing the song “Awesome God.”

And that’s when trouble began. After reading the song’s lyrics, the teacher said that the principal would have to approve the student’s choice, which, predictably, she did not. The principal informed the child’s mother that the song’s “religious content” was “inappropriate.” Why? Because the talent show involved a “captive audience of ... quite young children.”

“Captive audience?” Are we talking about a school or a prisoner-of-war camp? And what exactly does the principal think will happen to those kids if they listen to a 7- or 8-year-old sing about God for two minutes? Remember, these are kids who are exposed to sexually charged and violent mass media on an almost-hourly basis!

Not surprisingly, the second-grader’s parents are suing the school district. But what is surprising is that they are being represented by the ACLU.

If this proves too disorienting, don’t worry: In Nevada, the ACLU has sided with a school district that cut off a valedictorian’s microphone just in time to spare the exquisitely sensitive from being exposed to perceived obscenities like “God,” “Lord,” and — horror of horrors — “Jesus.”

Like their Jersey counterparts, Nevada officials feared that the student’s words would be construed as a governmental sanction of religion, specifically, Christianity.

These latest episodes of First Amendment follies led columnist Nat Hentoff to note in USA TODAY that “educators and, for that matter, some ACLU chapters — don’t have a clear understanding of the First Amendment.”

Hentoff provides a much-needed lesson: While the Establishment Clause prohibits government actions that favor one religion, “a student can express his or her personal religious beliefs in an assignment or as a valedictorian.”

Now people aren’t stupid; they know these kids are speaking for themselves. But the way we have turned the First Amendment on its head is stupid. The Establishment Clause, which was intended to protect the free exercise of religion by getting government out of the religion business, is being used to repress religious expression.

People are being told that religion, unlike sex, is something that must be practiced behind closed doors. Our reply, like the valedictorian’s, must be a polite “no.” Allowing people to express their religious beliefs in public is a hallmark, arguably the most important one, of a free society. And be sure your kids understand this.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The political atmosphere was charged with issues of religion and morality. Regardless of the Constitution’s prohibition of any religious test for office holding, candidates’ spiritual lives and professions of faith came in for extended discussion and scrutiny. The political parties sought to bring religious voters into their coalitions, especially the large number of Americans who identified themselves as evangelical Protestants. Ministers thundered from their pulpits, although sometimes inadvertently wounding their preferred candidates with their utterances. Some asserted that America was a “Christian nation,” while others clamored for religious freedom, and sparks flew from the friction between Protestants and Catholics. Hot-button moral issues polarized the electorate, and a war that some decried as unjustified and downright immoral exacerbated tensions.

Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation.

Sound familiar? At a forum of Democratic candidates in the summer of 2007, both Senator Hillary Clinton and former Senator John Edwards spoke of the importance of prayer, forgiveness, and how their Christian faith helped them through the most trying times of their lives. On the Republican side, the presence among the leading contenders of a Mormon (Mitt Romney) and a former Southern Baptist pastor (Mike Huckabee) elicited a further outpouring of discussion about the relevance of a candidates’ religion to his or her qualifications for the Oval Office. The two eventual nominees, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, have both written in some detail about their religious experiences. In Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote about how faith in God helped him survive imprisonment and torture during his Vietnam War captivity, and he movingly described a makeshift Christmas service he and his fellow P.O.W.’s put on in 1971. For his part, Obama took the title of his book, THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, from a remark by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. He devoted a thoughtful chapter to religion and politics, in which he discussed his identification with the black church and his decision to join Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

The McCain and Obama campaigns have also had to work to contain damage caused by their engagement with religious themes. McCain caught flak for the perceived anti-Catholic comments of Texas megachurch pastor and televangelist, the Reverend John Hagee, who had endorsed McCain, while Obama had to repudiate Reverend Wright for a bevy of incendiary remarks. The two candidates also made trouble for themselves. McCain had to backpedal and explain himself when he said that the United States is a “Christian nation,” and Obama drew a barrage of criticism when he opined that “bitter,” working-class Americans “cling to guns or religion” along with nativism and protectionism.

Of course there is nothing new about the politicization of religion (and vice versa) in the United States. In fact, contrary to popular myth, there is nothing at odds with the Constitution about all this. Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation. Perhaps no early American is more emblematic of this long-standing entanglement of religion and politics than the early nineteenth-century clergyman Lyman Beecher (1775-1863). Today, Beecher is probably best known for his remarkable brood of children, who included the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the celebrity preacher, writer, and lecturer Henry Ward Beecher. Yet in his generation, Lyman Beecher was one of America’s most prominent clergymen. He was a revivalist during the Second Great Awakening, one of the organizers of innovative missionary and reform organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Temperance Society, and a seminary president, to name just a few of his career highlights. In all of these very public roles, and many others, Beecher navigated the often perilous path between power and belief, religion and politics. A brief exploration of Beecher’s political experiences may thus allow us to see the present religion-politics matrix with a deeper and clearer perspective.

Lyman Beecher was born and raised in Connecticut and studied for the ministry at Yale. Religion and politics had historically been closely intertwined in that former Puritan colony, and taxpayer funds would subsidize the Congregational churches until 1818. Beecher assumed his first pastorate in 1799 over the Presbyterian Church at East Hampton, New York, just across Long Island Sound from Connecticut. At that time, many of his colleagues in the New England ministry bitterly opposed Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Republican candidate for the presidency. Jefferson, they believed, had demonstrated a disturbing sympathy for atheistic, anti-clerical views with his insistence on the separation of church and state — articulated in his famous “Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom” — and his association with the likes of Tom Paine and other known religious skeptics.

To counter these apparent “infidelities,” the New England clergy unsuccessfully agitated for what one historian has termed “a voter-imposed religious test” that would override the Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for government office. Political cartoons drew invidious comparisons between the piety and wisdom of George Washington and the irreligion of Jefferson. They pointed out, for example, that in his Farewell Address Washington had stated that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,” while Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, had written that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Within this contentious, partisan atmosphere, Beecher first made a name for himself by denouncing the practice of dueling, especially on the part of seekers of public office. Not long after Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton, Beecher preached a sermon asking how anyone could vote for a murderer. He delivered the sermon at a few Long Island churches during 1805 and at a presbytery meeting in April 1806, and then published it as The Remedy for Duelling. To counter these sorts of unchristian methods, Beecher advocated a ballot-box solution in which Christians would sanctify the electoral process “by withholding your suffrages from every man whose hands are stained with blood, and by intrusting to men of fair character and moral principle the making and execution of your laws.” Beecher lived in an era of partisan polarization, and yet he claimed that his strategy was above party. “It is in vain to cry out ‘priest-craft’ — or ‘political preaching,’” he said. “The crime we oppose is peculiar to no party.” Instead, displaying his talents as an activist and organizer, Beecher called upon “voluntary associations” to organize a “concert of action” to suppress the culture of dueling.

Following a move in 1810 to the more lucrative pulpit of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher continued to push for action by voluntary societies, which he termed “a sort of disciplined moral militia.” He attacked Sabbath breaking and drunkenness in an 1812 sermon entitled, “A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable.” In his Autobiography, Beecher recalled that he had first become concerned about the problem of alcohol abuse during his time in East Hampton when he observed how unscrupulous merchants plied the Montauk Indians with liquor. He also noted that even when clergymen gathered for such an event as an ordination, they happily imbibed substantial quantities of booze. Now he took a place in the vanguard of the temperance movement, the campaign to get drinkers to swear off at least hard liquor, if not every type of alcoholic beverage. Beecher had a keen appreciation for the necessity of working to change public opinion in order to bring about lasting change. Indeed, over the quarter century between 1825 and 1850, the temperance movement succeeded in slashing the alcohol consumption of the average American adult from seven gallons per year to fewer than two.

This success should not, however, lull us into thinking that policy and belief achieved some sort of easy alliance in nineteenth-century America. Beecher and his clerical peers endured some very difficult days. In support of New England’s commercial economy, for example, they opposed the relatively popular War of 1812. And in their own vineyard, they faced growing competition from rival sects, particularly the Baptists, who called for the separation of church and state. The successful end of the war in 1815 brought disgrace to the anti-war Beecher and his peers in the Federalist Party, substantially weakening their sway in state politics. The result was a sea change in the religious politics of New England. Now the old “Standing Order” of Congregational clergy and New England’s political elite found itself in the minority, unable to stem the tide of disestablishment sentiment. By 1818, Connecticut had formally disestablished the Congregational Church. Beecher realized that the church-state arrangements of the Puritan forefathers were gone for good, and at first he hung his head in gloom. Yet he soon came around to the conclusion that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

In sermons delivered during the late 1810s and 1820s, Beecher rethought the proper connection between religion and politics in a democratic society. He tried to chart a course between the pitfalls of partisanship and the promise of moral influence. In an 1823 sermon, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints, he told his listeners to avoid “things merely secular” and to speak out only on “great questions of national morality.” He warned Christians not to get too attached to any political party but rather to cast their votes strictly on the basis of righteousness. As he phrased matters in an 1826 sermon to the Connecticut legislature, “Multitudes of Christians and patriots have long since abandoned party politics, and, not knowing what to do, have abandoned almost the exercise of suffrage. This is wrong. An enlightened and virtuous suffrage may, by system and concentration, become one of the most powerful means of promoting national purity and morality.” In other words, Beecher envisioned the evangelical community as an electoral arbiter that would stand between the political parties and base its judgments solely on moral principles.

Beecher applied these ideas during the Sabbatarian campaigns of the 1810s and 1820s. Sabbatarians wanted to stop the transportation of the mail on Sundays and close the post offices on that day. They believed that the republican experiment depended on Sabbath observation, because that was when the citizenry learned the moral virtue required of them in a free society. In 1814 Beecher became involved in a Presbyterian petition drive that beseeched Congress to halt postal transportation on the Sabbath day. Congress, however, judged the everyday movement of the mails too important to the communication of commercial and military information and so took no action. In 1828, Beecher, now pastor of Boston’s Hanover Street Church, was present at the inaugural meeting of the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath, an organization made up of people who promised to honor the Sabbath and boycott transport firms that violated it. He penned the organization’s initial statement, one hundred thousand copies of which were printed and distributed nationwide, followed by a second petition campaign.

The anti-Sabbatarian opposition that emerged showed that the introduction of supposedly nonpartisan moral issues into politics would prove deeply divisive. Individuals and denominations suspicious of an overly powerful clergy pushed back, especially those like the Baptists who feared that any mixing of church and state — such as that required by government action on behalf of the Sabbath — would favor their rivals, the Congregationalists. As early political cartoons made clear, these fears were quite widespread. The second petition drive was quashed in a Senate committee led by Richard Mentor Johnson, Democrat of Kentucky. The committee took a hands-off approach to the Sabbatarians’ petitions, saying that it was not for the committee to decide whether the Sabbath should be on Saturday or Sunday. The committee also made a slippery-slope argument, suggesting that if Congress interfered with the Sabbath, petitioners would soon be asking for taxpayer-funded ministers and houses of worship. Johnson’s two reports against the Sabbatarian campaign, which were in fact written by his friend, the Baptist minister Obadiah Brown, made him a champion of religious freedom in some circles.

The political firestorm over the Sabbath was just a prelude to what would be an embattled few decades for Beecher. Through the 1820s and 1830s he found himself engaged in a bitter theological controversy, attacking Unitarian liberals for their rejection of Calvinism and defending himself against charges of doctrinal irregularities made by conservative, “Old School” Presbyterians. In 1832 he took his battle to what was then considered “the West” and assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. There he came face to face with what was his era’s most controversial issue: slavery. Until taking up his post at Lane, Beecher had been able to avoid the matter. But when the Lane trustees forbade discussion of slavery for fear of antagonizing the school’s Cincinnati neighbors, Beecher faced a serious crisis. Most of the more radical student body bolted to Oberlin College, which had been founded in 1833 and had become a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Beecher’s preference for a moderate, unified antislavery course foundered, as it would across the nation in the years leading to the Civil War.

By 1840 Beecher reentered the political fray. During the 1830s, Americans who found President Andrew Jackson and his policies disagreeable had formed the Whig Party. Beecher’s eldest daughter, the educator Catharine Beecher, had been a leading organizer of petitions against Jackson’s policy of Indian removal, the forced relocation of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States. In the presidential election of 1840, Lyman Beecher threw his support behind the Whig candidate, fellow Ohioan William Henry Harrison. Whigs played up the issue of Harrison’s piety, and Sabbatarians and temperance advocates flocked to his standard, regardless of his famous campaign image as a common man who inhabited a log cabin and drank hard cider. Unfortunately for the Whigs, Harrison’s sudden death a month after his inauguration dashed their hopes for an administration of godliness and morality.

In 1844 Beecher endorsed the Whig ticket of Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president. Frelinghuysen, former United States Senator from New Jersey and onetime president of the Sabbath Union, embodied Beecher’s ideal of “the Christian statesman,” but Beecher’s support soon became a liability for the Whigs. In a political move worthy of Karl Rove, the Democrats reprinted forty thousand copies of Beecher’s old anti-dueling sermon so as to embarrass Clay, who had been involved in a couple of duels in his younger days. The Whigs narrowly lost that election, in part because the growing Irish Catholic population in New York City, suspicious of the kind of Protestant moralizing represented by Beecher and Frelinghuysen, voted heavily Democratic.

What lessons can we take from this selective look at Lyman Beecher’s public career? For one thing, he was correct to conclude that the days of the New England founders, who had sought to make church and state mutually supporting, had passed. The United States Constitution is a secular document that prohibits religious tests for office and that outlaws direct state support of religious institutions. Beecher recognized that only to the extent that the United States was populated by those who adhered to traditional Christianity — what he termed “the faith once delivered to the saints” in his 1823 sermon, quoting Jude 3 — would it be a Christian nation.

At the same time, the “separation of church and state” does not mean that voters informed by religious values would remain silent. As Beecher’s generation spoke out against Sabbath breaking, intemperance, Indian removal, and slavery, so people of faith today will continue to champion so-called social issues in the political arena. But they should not expect to be popular as a result. Beecher’s experience exposed both the necessity of speaking out and the inevitability of the ensuing controversy. Moreover, professed Christians of different denominations may very well line up on opposite sides of issues. Congregationalists and Baptists, for example, tend to take different stands on numerous questions today no less than in Beecher’s time.

Beecher achieved his clearest successes when he operated independently of government. The evangelical organizations in which he played such a prominent role really did change the culture and help inaugurate the Victorian era. The same is true of the temperance movement. Yet Beecher also showed that the political parties are unavoidable. He desired Christians to remain above the partisan fray, but he also realized the necessity of eventually choosing to be involved with one or the other if one hoped to influence public policy. Then as now, elections have consequences. Harrison’s untimely death and the Whigs’ narrow defeat in 1844, for example, led to war with Mexico and the expansion of slavery. Beecher’s son, Henry Ward, would side with the new Republican Party in the 1850s as the only effective instrument for breaking the Slave Power’s grip over the United States.

Lyman Beecher’s efforts to scrutinize the morality of governmental policy and to mobilize voter support for his causes ultimately contributed to the robust, participatory democracy of antebellum America. He carried a Puritan tradition of prophetic preaching into the early republic and set ground rules for Christian involvement in politics that are still relevant. Contemporary American political culture, with its “values voters” and “faith forums,” is heir to his legacy.

================

FURTHER READING:

An invaluable source for understanding Beecher is Barbara M. Cross, ed., THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LYMAN BEECHER, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). Originally published in 1864, it is a collection of his and his children’s reminiscences and letters that were compiled during his retirement years after 1850. It also includes extracts from many of his most noteworthy sermons.

The best general biography of Beecher is Vincent Harding, A CERTAIN MAGNIFICENCE: LYMAN BEECHER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM, 1775-1863 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991). There are perceptive chapters on Beecher’s evolving thinking about social reform in Robert H. Abzug, COSMOS CRUMBLING: AMERICAN REFORM AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION (New York, 1994) and John G. West Jr., THE POLITICS OF REVELATION AND REASON: RELIGION AND CIVIC LIFE IN THE NEW NATION (Lawrence, Kans., 1996). Two works that include Beecher as an important participant in debates over religion and politics are Richard J. Carwardine, EVANGELICALS AND POLITICS IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA (New Haven, Conn., 1993) and Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 10:4 (1990): 517-67. On the election of 1800 see Frank Lambert, “‘God — and a Religious President...[or] Jefferson and No God’: Campaigning for a Voter-Imposed Religious Test in 1800,” Journal of Church and State 39:4 (1997): 769-89. Daniel Walker Howe, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA, 1815-1848 (New York, 2007) provides a magisterial survey of Beecher’s age.

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Jonathan D. Sassi is associate professor of history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of A REPUBLIC OF RIGHTEOUSNESS: THE PUBLIC CHRISTIANITY OF THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY NEW ENGLAND CLERGY (New York, 2001).

Every Sunday, women and children gather to pray in a tiny, whitewashed church on the edge of the southern Indian village of Medipally, sitting cross-legged on blue plastic sheets as they sing Christian hymns.

The men don’t dare to come. “If they are seen in the church, the officials will be informed,” says Vatipally Aharon, Medipally’s Baptist pastor.

Almost all the Christians here -- and the overwhelming majority across India -- hail from the so-called Dalit community, the former “untouchables” relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy.

Under India’s constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. That provides the country’s most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.

Only women and children risk expressing their religious beliefs in the Dalit community in Medipally, India.

But there is a catch: Any Dalit caught abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villagers’ comings and goings.

The plight of India’s secret converts, ignored for decades, is now at the forefront of national politics. Partly driving the change is Indian Christians’ new partnership with Islam, a religion frequently at odds with Christianity elsewhere in the world.

Representatives of the two religions have turned to the courts to restore benefits to converted Dalits. India’s Supreme Court is currently reviewing several challenges filed by Christian and Muslim Dalits that could result in an overturning of the affirmative-action exclusion. A separate bill to remove the restriction is pending in Parliament. Government members, influenced by India’s 150-million- strong Muslim community, have indicated their cautious support.

For decades, backers of the existing legislation have argued that since Christianity and Islam have no caste, Dalits who abandon Hinduism find equality amid their new co-religionists and therefore no longer need special protection.

SCRAPPING THE BAN

But the movement to end official discrimination against these converts is gaining momentum in the world’s largest democracy. This year, a special government-appointed commission, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Ranganath Mishra, concluded that Dalits retain their stigma in India’s society even after converting and recommended scrapping the ban.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination earlier this year also formally rebuked India for denying affirmative-action benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam, and recommended that the prohibition be removed.

“The government of India seems quite sympathetic” to such demands, says Sardar Buta Singh, a minister-level official who heads India’s agency overseeing Dalit affairs, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. “All the parties have started thinking about this problem, and it can be solved.”

India’s Dalits have tried over the centuries to escape their low status, which Hindu scriptures teach is a punishment for sins in a previous life, by embracing caste-less religions. In centuries past most converts turned to Islam, a religion professed by many Indian rulers before the British seized the subcontinent in the 19th century.

But with India’s expanding economy offering unprecedented opportunities for social and economic advancement, a great many Dalits are now turning to Christianity, attracted by benefits like education and health care that are sometimes offered by Western-funded congregations. This allows them to seek opportunities beyond the government sector, in the booming information-technology and services industries that put a premium on the Westernized outlook and English- language skills.

Much to the dismay of Hindu nationalist groups, the number of India’s secret Christians has climbed in recent years to an estimated 25 million people, about the size of the officially registered Christian population.

The gains among secret Christians come despite the obvious risks: Affirmative-action benefits often mean the difference between grinding poverty and a glimmer of hope for better life.

A lanky 30-year-old with a trimmed mustache, Venkatesh Gunti was born into a Dalit household here in Medipally, a cluster of pastel-colored homes set in the rolling green hills of Andhra Pradesh state. Since his teenage years, Mr. Gunti frequently prayed in the village’s Zion church, established by South African missionaries. Three years ago, he found a prized job that would have allowed him to escape the misery of rural life -- as a handyman in a government college in the town of Bhongir.

The job was reserved for a Dalit, and Mr. Gunti had to produce a “scheduled caste” certificate -- something he believed would be a mere formality.

But when Mr. Gunti applied for it at the local government revenue collection office, the clerk, Mr. Gunti recalls, refused to issue the document. According to reports filed by the village secretary, Mr.

Gunti was a regular churchgoer and therefore no longer qualified for “scheduled caste” status. He didn’t get the job and had to stay in the village, eking out a living as a manual laborer.

To gain back the affirmative-action benefits, Mr. Gunti says he had to pretend that he had reverted to Hinduism, participating in a Hindu religious festival when he knew that the village secretary was watching. Last year, the subterfuge finally worked, and Mr. Gunti was reclassified as a member of the “scheduled caste.” He says he won’t partake in any more Hindu rituals, but will also steer clear of the church. Mr. Gunti has yet to find a new job.

Questioned about the case, Raghu Rama Rao, Medipally’s village secretary, explains that he has no choice. “This is the law -- if we’ll come to know they go to church, we’ll have to make an inquiry and submit a report,” Mr. Rao says in his home, its outer wall sporting a poster for a Hindu nationalist organization. Mr. Rao adds that he’s already showing kindness by reporting only the active churchgoers, and leaving alone those believed Christian Dalits who do not openly flaunt their faith.

Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India’s society. “If they ever find out I’m a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it,” says a Dalit schoolteacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyderabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

“The government is forcing us to lie,” echoes Prasadarao Yadavalli, a 48-year-old official in Andhra Pradesh’s state bureaucracy who rose to his post thanks to Dalit quotas while hiding his Christian faith. Mr. Yadavalli says he has decided to finally come out this year, as he could no longer maintain this double life: “Whatever the consequences, God will take care of us.”

Even one of the Dalit converts who petitioned India’s Supreme Court is keeping his true beliefs secret from neighbors.

Mukesh Kumar, a zoologist, complained in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in 2005 that he was denied a university job reserved for Dalits because he converted to Islam. His wife, Reena, added in the same affidavit that she also wants to embrace Islam but is afraid to do so because she would lose her current job of village administrator, an elected position gained under the Dalit quota.

POSTERS OF HOLY MEN

Interviewed in his village of Neyazoopura, in the northern Uttar Pradesh state, an agitated Dr. Kumar -- who helps his wife run the village administration -- initially denied any link with the Muslim religion. His office is decorated with posters of Hindu holy men. Only after hastily chasing away curious villagers and shutting the doors would Dr. Kumar, 37, confirm his signature on the affidavit. “It’s a constitutional right to change a religion at any time if you want it,” he says.

India’s 1950 constitution indeed guarantees the freedom of faith, in addition to outlawing discrimination against the Dalits. But, in defining who is entitled to affirmative-action protection afforded to the Dalits, a 1950 presidential order excluded any “person who professes a religion different from Hinduism.”

The rule was amended in 1956 to include Dalit Sikhs and in 1990 to embrace Dalit Buddhists, on the grounds that these two religions can be considered offshoots of Hinduism.

Indian Christian groups have tried for decades to win a similar exception for Christianity, which is believed to have arrived in India when St. Thomas disembarked in Kerala in the first century. A bill to do so was approved by the national government in 1996, but never made it to a Parliament vote because of a coalition crisis that prompted new elections; these were won by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The party is a staunch opponent of conversions from Hinduism, now practiced by 80.5% of the general population. “People convert to Christianity here mostly because of aggressive proselytizing by missionaries, who induce very gullible people. This must be stopped,” says Ram Madhav, a spokesman and national executive member of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, or RSS, a powerful organization that promotes Hindu nationalist ideology and is affiliated with the BJP.

The years of BJP rule were marked by violence against Muslim and Christian minorities. Facing a common enemy, India’s Christian and Muslim organizations joined forces in protecting the country’s secular tradition. Christian groups organized relief for Muslim refugees from religious pogroms in the state of Gujarat in 2002, and Christian churches were sheltered in some Muslim areas. Though the BJP has denied that some of its leaders helped orchestrate religious violence, the U.S. has since canceled the visa of Gujarat’s chief minister, a BJP member, because of his role in the 2002 bloodshed.

“The Christians and the Muslims are a minority in India, they are both oppressed, and so there is a natural alliance between us,” says Mahmood Madani, a Parliament member and secretary-general of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the country’s leading Islamic body.

Viewing the Dalits as the main source of potential converts, some Christian and Muslim organizations started working together in recent years among these communities. While discrimination against Dalits is illegal, it is in practice widespread, particularly in rural parts of India, where people from higher castes often won’t touch a Dalit or share with them food or water.

Here in Andhra Pradesh, Muslim and Christian leaders now regularly break this barrier of untouchability as they organize festive meals in Dalit villages, eating from the same giant plate of rice and vegetable curry.

“This is a real physical demonstration against caste discrimination,” says Joseph D’souza, the president of the All-India Christian Council, who has organized many of these gatherings.

Though no open proselytizing is conducted at these events, shared meals frequently end up producing new converts. “The condition of Dalits is like that of dogs in India,” says P.K. Ahmad Sabir, Andhra Pradesh state leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and Mr. D’souza’s partner in the Dalit outreach effort. “Our religions -- Christianity and Islam -- teach that everyone is an equal. Hindus don’t believe in this, which gives a good chance to Christianity and Islam.”

JOINING FORCES

In 2004, the votes of India’s religious minorities helped oust the BJP government, bringing into office a center-left coalition led by the traditionally secularist Indian National Congress. This time around, the Muslims joined the earlier Christian campaign to end the discrimination against Dalit converts, and the issue returned to the government agenda.

“The Christian community has realized it is small compared to the Muslims, and that if they stand alone, they have a much smaller chance for success,” says Tahir Mahmood, one of India’s most prominent constitutional experts. “Together, they’re a force to be reckoned with, and so they’ve become friends in adversity.”

Instead of merely adding a waiver for Christianity to the 1950 presidential order, advocates today demand that any reference to religion be deleted from it altogether.

Campaigners are pressing the government to act without delay. “This is not just a Christian problem,” says Jose Daniel, president of the National Coordination Committee for Scheduled Caste Christians and one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court challenge against the anticonvert rules. “It’s a denial of rights to all the Dalits in India.”

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Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2007, page A1.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is an unlikely scourge of European secularism: He is on his third marriage and has been called the “playboy president” by his critics.

But it is what Sarkozy has just said about the role of religion in French life that has really got his critics up-in-arms.

For more than a century, what the French call laïcité has been the defining characteristic of French politics and public life. The word, which has no English equivalent, goes beyond the separation of church and state. It is a kind of secularism that tends to see “any strong religious views as a direct threat to [France’s] freedom and way of life . . .”

Thus, discretion about one’s religious views, especially among leaders, is regarded as “a necessary part of being French.”

Sarkozy disagrees. In a book he wrote before becoming president, Sarkozy declared, “I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my religious practice is episodic.”

He continued this theme after becoming president. He has criticized removing references to “Europe’s Christian roots” from the European constitution. In a speech in Rome last December, he emphasized France’s Christian roots. He invoked France’s ancient title of the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

He proposed a new version of laïcité, one that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” That is because, according to Sarkozy, when it comes to teaching right and wrong, “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor.” Well said.

Sarkozy has also stood up for France’s often-beleaguered Jewish community. He recently announced that, starting next fall, French fifth-graders will have to learn the story of at least one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust.

He defended his plan by blaming the wars of the twentieth century on the “absence of God.” He further shocked French sensibilities by adding that Nazi racism was “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

This latter point is not hypothetical for the French president, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish.

Critics are appalled by Sarkozy’s invocations of religion. As one socialist leader put it, “a speech citing God not only on every page, but on every line, creates a fundamental problem for the republic.” Others chide him for disregarding the separation of church and state.

And, of course, they do not hesitate to point out the gap between his rhetoric and his lifestyle.

I wish that Sarkozy’s “religious practice” was less “episodic.” Nevertheless, I am gratified that he is taking on what has been called a “major taboo” in French public life. This may be the first time since the French revolution that a French leader has spoken seriously to the people about God.

A French-born writer, Hilaire Belloc, put it this way, “the faith is Europe.” Without Christianity, Europe would not exist. European secularism and the denial of its Christian roots have cut it off from its own heritage, leaving it vulnerable to the challenge of Islam.

After all, you can not fight something with nothing, which is what a “post-Christian” Europe is left with. That is why I welcome Sarkozy’s message — however unlikely the messenger.

________

Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

It was one of the more awkward moments in the presidential campaign. Senator John McCain was appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she was asking why McCain did not support same-sex “marriage.” A well-prepared DeGeneres made the usual arguments about inclusiveness, and compared those who reject same-sex “marriage” to those who once refused to allow women or blacks to vote. It was all about fairness, she said.

McCain’s response? “I just believe in the status of a marriage between a man and a woman ... We just have a disagreement.”

Maybe, given the sensitivity of the situation, that was the best answer Senator McCain could come up with. But suppose the senator and Ms. DeGeneres could talk backstage, away from the glare of TV lights. What could he say to seize the moral high ground? To start, he could discuss the true meaning and purpose of marriage.

In his book, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES, Princeton professor Robert George writes that matrimonial law reflects a moral judgment. That judgment is that marriage is inherently heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent — a union of one man and one woman. This judgment is based on both the biblical and natural law understandings — that marriage is a two-in-one flesh communion of persons. This communion is consummated and actualized sexually.

That is, marriage is made real by acts that are reproductive, whether or not these acts result in children. They unite the spouses as a single procreative unit. This organic unity is achieved even by infertile couples. Only a mated pair can be a complete organism capable of human procreation.

By contrast, homosexual acts cannot be procreative and cannot unite people organically. As a result, these acts cannot be marital, which means relationships integrated around them cannot be marriages. In other words, same-sex partners are physically incapable of marriage; it takes a man and a woman to become “one flesh.”

I can already hear the arguments your secular neighbors will make: “Okay,” they will say, “that’s your definition of marriage. But why should your views be imposed on everybody else?”

That is when we have to be ready with additional, non-religious arguments for traditional marriage. For instance, if we expand the meaning of marriage to include same-sex partnerships, on what grounds could we legitimately oppose marriages between three or more people? Or weddings between siblings?

Remember, we are not just defending the Christian view of marriage. Since the beginning of recorded history, virtually every society and every major religion has revered and protected traditional marriage. Why? It is the institution that produces, nurtures, protects, and civilizes children. And marriage is the cornerstone of society’s foundational institution: the family.

If the proponents of same-sex “marriage” succeed in foisting it on America, marriage itself would be reduced to nothing more than a legal contract between two (or more!) people. True marriage would be abolished, and the damage to our society would be incalculable.

These are the arguments we all need to learn to defend traditional, true marriage, particularly in those states where constitutional amendments are on the ballot this fall.

Tomorrow on “BreakPoint,” I will explain how same-sex “marriage” laws pose a threat to your religious freedom.

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Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.”

Thus writes Newsweek editor Jon Meacham in this week’s cover story, “THE END OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA.” The image on the front cover says it all, declaring “THE DECLINE AND FALL OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA” in type set to form a cross.

The cover story is a serious consideration of the issue Newsweek set as its priority for the week of Easter, and the seriousness of the magazine’s approach is evident in the fact that its editor, Mr. Meacham, wrote the cover story himself. The essay, elegant in form and serious in tone, demands attention.

I read Jon Meacham’s essay with no small amount of personal interest, for Mr. Meacham had talked to me as he was writing the article. Here is how his essay begins:

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth

paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009

American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert

Mohler Jr. — president of the Southern Baptist Theological

Seminary, one of the largest on earth — read over the document

after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence.

For a believer like Mohler — a starched, unflinchingly

conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular

province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will

preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

as the only means to eternal life — the central news of the

survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no

religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from

8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his

mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated

in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now

changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold

of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic

foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.

I do remember that moment quite well, and I expressed my thoughts in an article posted March 27, “THE ECLIPSE OF CHRISTIAN MEMORY.” The increasingly secular character of New England, now surpassing even the Pacific Northwest, is a portrait of Christianity in retreat. The course of this retreat has been long. Indeed some historians would trace the secular trend in New England to the period of the Revolution itself. In the minds of at least some New Englanders, King George was not the only authority dethroned in that generation.

Still, the region remained under the influence of Christian memory and, for most of the intervening decades, under the influence of the Christian worldview. Now, New England is the most secular region of the nation, representing a model of what I believe is rightly designated post-Christian America.

Mr. Meacham picked up on this description of the pattern, and Newsweek launched a cover story. A good portion of the essay deals with my argument and a consideration of its accuracy and significance. Without doubt, Newsweek considers the pattern to be of great significance -- thus the cover story. Mr. Meacham looked at the same data that had caught my attention, the American Religious Identification Survey [ARIS] and the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study. His summary response to the post-Christian designation: “There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory.”

Here is the essence of Jon Meacham’s analysis:

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith,

our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by

movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than

they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing —

good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders

saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel

or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for

Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the

virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what

Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious

dissenters, called “the garden of the church” from “the

wilderness of the world.” As crucial as religion has been and is

to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never

been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom — not least

freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for

neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically

treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the

republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall

of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America

creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers,

may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious

life.

This is a fair and insightful rendering of the pattern. What does become clear in this paragraph is that what Newsweek sees as the essence of the issue is political influence. While this is hardly a non-issue, my greater concern is not with political influence and what secularization means for the political sphere, but with what secularization means for the souls of men and women who are now considerably more distant from Christianity -- and perhaps even with any contact with Christianity -- than ever before. My main concern is evangelism, not cultural influence.

One key aspect of Mr. Meacham’s argument is his suggestion that what binds America together is not “a specific faith” but instead “a commitment to freedom” and, in particular, freedom of conscience. There is something to this argument, of course. The founding generation did not establish the young republic on any religious creed or theological doctrine. Still, there is something missing from this argument, and that is the recognition that freedom, and freedom of conscience in particular, requires some prior understanding of human dignity and the origins of conscience itself. Though the founders included those who rejected the Christian Gospel and Christianity itself, Christianity had provided the necessary underpinnings for the founders’ claims.

Mr. Meacham also suggests that this new situation is perhaps healthy for the church. To this extent I agree -- the church gains a necessary knowledge any time the distinction between the church and the world is made more evident. Our first concern is and must be the Gospel. It is good that non-Christians know that they are not Christians and that Christians be reminded of that fact that what sinners need is the Gospel of Christ, not merely the lingering morality of the Christian memory.

I am haunted a bit by this section of the Newsweek article:

Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week

lamenting the decline — and, by implication, the imminent fall —

of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable

culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The

most basic contours of American culture have been radically

altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last

millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-

Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our

culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote

this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new

narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large

portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in

Louisville, Kentucky.

I appreciate the care, respect, and insight that mark this essay by Jon Meacham. I also appreciated our conversation about an issue that concerns us both. Still, I hope I did not reflect too much gloom in my analysis. This much I know -- Jesus Christ is Lord, and His kingdom is forever. Our proper Christian response to this new challenge is not gloom, but concern. And our first concern must be to see that the Gospel is preached as Good News to the perishing -- including all those in post-Christian America.

“The head of the ACLU says same-sex marriage nationwide is now ‘a sure thing.’

“Whether he’s right or not, any change in marriage legislation must protect religious liberty. Will churches that don’t believe in same-sex marriage be forced to allow those ceremonies? Will Christian colleges with married-student housing be forced to rent to same-sex couples?

“In Iowa, the attorney general has told county recorders they must issue same-sex marriage licenses or face criminal charges and even dismissal. New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission fined photographers who refused to serve a same-sex commitment ceremony.

“All same-sex marriage legislation should explicitly protect the liberty of those who, for religious reasons, cannot as a matter of conscience condone or serve same-sex marriages. Otherwise by granting new social freedoms to some, we remove religious freedoms of others.”

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David Davenport for www.Townhall.com

A public school superintendent told Baptist Press he has been unable to discover why a deputy sheriff visited the home of a first-grade boy to warn him not to share Scripture with classmates at a school in the superintendent’s district.

Religious freedom advocates Liberty Counsel contacted Palmdale School District Supt. Raul Maldonado after a Los Angeles deputy sheriff visited the home of Christina and Jaime Zavala, whose child was cautioned this spring about sharing with classmates written Scripture notes his mother had put in his lunchbox.

While Maldonado doesn’t deny that a sheriff’s deputy visited the Zavala home in relation to the Scripture notes, he told Baptist Press [BP] the school has been unable to determine why such a visit occurred.

“We really should not discuss or identify individual students, parents or teachers without their consent, so I cannot talk about the family and teachers you have mentioned,” Maldonado said in response to BP’s June 6 information request. “However I can tell you, we have not been able to identify anyone at any level at the school in question who called the sheriff and asked for a visit to a child’s home about this matter.”

Several pastors were slated to hold a press conference at noon Pacific Time today (June 7) on the steps of Desert Rose Elementary School in Palmdale to address the issue. Paul Chappell, pastor of Lancaster [Independent] Baptist Church in Palmdale, released an advance copy of his prepared comments to BP.

“If in fact this 7-year-old child was reprimanded for sharing his Bible verses and notes, we believe the staff involved need training regarding the educational codes and a reminder that we do not bully or demean students,” Chappell said. “As faith and community leaders, we believe it is vital for people of all faiths that the district provide assurances that the children’s constitutional rights are upheld.”

Liberty Counsel gave the school an ultimatum in a May 24 letter and follow-up communication, according to Liberty Counsel founder and president Mathew Staver.

“Having reviewed the ... facts, District policies, and applicable law, it is clear that the actions of District staff in this instance, in prohibiting voluntary student religious expression during non-instructional time; then completely banning such student expression from school property entirely; and finally calling the police to report the same are simply unconstitutional,” reads the letter posted at Liberty Counsel’s website. “These actions must be disavowed and reversed, to avoid liability for civil rights violations.”

Incidents surrounding the dispute date back to April 18 when, according to Liberty Counsel, Christina Zavala received a call from her son’s first-grade teacher who expressed concern because a student said to her, “Teacher, this is the most beautiful story I have ever seen -- [the 7-year-old boy] gave it to me.” The teacher, unnamed in the letter, told Christina, “Please tell your son that there is a separation of church and state.”

The teacher on at least two occasions reprimanded the boy in front of his classmates causing him to shed tears, Liberty Counsel said. On May 9, while the student was handing out notes with his father Jaime Zavala who had come to get him at the end of the school day, “Principal Pagliagro approached,” Liberty Counsel said, “and ordered them to stop handing out the notes, because it was ‘against school policy.’” The father and child complied with the principal’s instruction to limit the note distribution to a nearby sidewalk, Liberty Counsel said.

But at 4:30 p.m. on May 9, a deputy sheriff knocked on the family’s door and stated “that the school had called him to report that [the student] and his parents had been sharing papers at school; and that this was not permitted because ‘someone might be offended,’” Liberty Counsel’s letter reads.

The school does not prohibit religious speech among students but does require approval of written materials before distribution, Maldonado told BP.

“We are strongly committed to our religious liberty and at no time is any student prohibited from talking about or discussing Scripture with anyone during their school day on or off campus,” Maldonado said June 6. “There is only a policy regarding the distribution of written material without prior review by the school.”

Liberty Counsel is prepared to take the issue to court, said Staver, who also expressed concern for the child’s psychological health.

“When a 7-year-old boy gets a visit by a law enforcement officer it imprints a shocking memory in his mind,” Staver told BP. “I cannot imagine how he is processing this visit, and how he is processing the fact that he was reprimanded in class by his teacher for sharing a Bible story about Joseph. This is outrageous and we intend to correct this horrible act by the teacher and the principal.”

Chappell, who leads a ministry to law enforcement officers, told BP that the deputy sheriff who visited the home was courteous to the Zavalas and displayed excellence in his duties.

“Our primary concern today is to stand for the religious liberty of a 7-year-old student of this school,” Chappell said. “We are encouraged by a child who believes in the powerful truths of Jesus Christ and desires to share with friends. We are praying for the Zavalas as they endure this difficult time for their faith.”

Chappell expected to be joined at today’s press conference by the Zavalas’ pastor, Sean Appleton of Hope Chapel in nearby Lancaster; elected officials; educational leaders and others.

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Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ general assignment writer/editor.

If you have heard me on BreakPoint before, you know that I am not an alarmist. While I am concerned about the culture and the Church’s place within it, I don’t sound the alarm after every setback.

Still, I am concerned about the increasingly small space to which our culture is seeking to confine the practice of our faith. We are heading in the direction of making faith a purely private matter, one that is not allowed to intrude in any public square or discussion. Recent cases making their way through the courts illustrate this direction.

The first story originates in San Francisco. On December 7, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the Christian Legal Society and the University of California-Hastings Law School. The local chapter’s recognition and funding were revoked after the CLS added a provision to its statement of faith which voting members must affirm. That provision stated that “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle is inconsistent with” affirmation of the statement of faith.

Although the language includes all sex outside of marriage, school officials decided that the provision discriminated against gay students and, thus, violated the school’s non-discrimination policies. It didn’t matter that all Hastings students were welcome to attend and participate in the organization’s meetings.

The CLS sued the school, and in March the Ninth Circuit ruled that Hastings could require student groups to “accept all comers as members, even if those individuals disagree with the mission of the group.”

The precedent for this ruling was a 2008 opinion by the same Ninth Circuit, Truth V. Kent School District, involving a Bible club in Kent Washington. There, the application for official recognition was rejected because voting membership was limited to those who affirmed biblical inerrancy and pledged to live in accordance with Christian teachings.

In ruling in favor of the school district, the Ninth Circuit essentially said that if you want to be officially recognized, you must undermine your religious mission.

You don’t have to be an alarmist to wonder if such a requirement would be imposed on any other kind of group.

It’s difficult to reconcile these rulings with the Supreme Court’s decision in Rosenberg V. Rector. There, the court ruled that the University of Virginia could not deny funding to a Christian publication while providing it to other student publications. This denial was a form of “viewpoint discrimination” that violated freedom of speech.

The Los Angeles Times editorialized that something similar is at work here. The CLS is concerned with a person’s beliefs and whether they live by them, not who they are. Yet 14 years after Rosenberg, people are still singling out Christian groups for exclusion.

Well, we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say because they’re up next.

In the end, groups like the Christian Legal Society aren’t seeking to change school policies — they simply want to identify themselves publicly as Christians in the same way that members of other groups can publicly identify themselves.

This apparently is too much for a culture that, having freed one group from a closet, now seeks to stuff Christians into it.

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Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times asked “What’s God got to do with it?” The “it” being referred to was the security and freedom that Americans enjoy and often take for granted.

The answer to the question is “quite a bit,” and arguing otherwise requires taking something else for granted: our way of life’s debt to Christianity.

The man asking and answering the question was Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine. Shermer took exception to the words of a recent House resolution to keep “In God We Trust” as the national motto. The resolution read: “Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured.”

Shermer was troubled by the “belief that religion has a monopoly on morality,” especially, he says, “in this age of science and technology, computers and cyberspace, and liberal democracies securing rights and freedoms for oppressed peoples all over the globe.”

According to Shermer what really makes people “feel free and secure” are things like “the rule of law,” “education for the masses,” the establishment of “fair and just laws,” and the “equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

What Shermer doesn’t tell us is that things like the rule of law, mass education, and the other things he credits with making our freedom and security possible, didn’t spring fully-formed out of nowhere. They are part of Christianity’s legacy to the West.

Take the rule of law. It was Christianity that taught the West that rulers are not free to do as they pleased and that they are not above the law. According to John Calvin, resisting tyranny was the duty of those “who desire that every individual should preserve his rights, and that all men may live free from injury.”

The same can be said about mass education and even the science that Shermer puts so much stock in. They are the result of what Christianity taught: that God created the world, and we were called to explore every aspect of it.

Most of all, our ideas about what constitutes a free and secure society are derived from Christianity. Political scientist Glenn Tinder has written about how much of what we celebrate in our society, like the “respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings,” has “strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity.”

It was Christianity, you see, that taught the West that all human beings are created in the image of God. Without that understanding, the very words of the Declaration of Independence, “that all Men are created equal, that they endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” could never have been written.

Without this Christian vision we wouldn’t have the freedom and security that Shermer ascribes to science, technology, and politics. And I give a very concrete and current example of this on today’s “Two-Minute Warning,” which I urge you to go see at ColsonCenter.org.

The issue isn’t what’s inscribed on our money but whether Americans understand what makes our way of life possible. Sadly, I’m afraid the answer to that right now is “no, they don’t.” So it’s up to us, the Church, to explain just how vital the Christian faith has been — and still is — to our rights and freedoms.

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Copyright (c) 2011 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Dr. Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, says it was a Protestant standing up for Catholics who gave us the idea of religious freedom as we now know it when he broke the spiral of silence four centuries ago.

In 1612, the English-speaking world first heard the radical idea of Thomas Helwys, a British missionary who co-founded the Baptist denomination. Helwys sought to challenge King James I’s tyranny over religion. This was no easy or safe task. For years, those who sought to practice Christianity according to their own consciences faced severe persecution. The year before, Baptist Edward Wightman was been burned at the stake for his beliefs. And while Helwys was working in The Netherlands, his own wife was thrown into prison back home.

Desperate to stop the persecution, Helwys spoke up. But rather than beg the king for mercy, he made an audacious move that ultimately cost him his life. With his book, “A Short Declaration on the Mystery of Iniquity,” hot off the press, Helwys attached a polite cover letter and mailed this historic defense of religious liberty to King James. Needless to say, the king was less than pleased, and four years later, Helwys died in Newgate Prison, a victim of the persecution he sought to end.

But the radical idea of his book (and the church he helped start) lived on, and was adopted not only in England, but throughout the Western World — most famously in the First Amendment of our own Constitution.

His words renouncing the persecution against Roman Catholics are worth repeating here:

“For we do freely profess that our lord the king [of England] has no more power over their consciences than over ours, and that is none at all. For our lord the king is but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes ... For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves.”

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Copyright (c) 2012 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Take a look at the Bill of Rights. What’s the first freedom listed? And why is that first freedom on the ropes today?

The first words of the Bill of Rights read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Founders thought enough about the importance of religious freedom that they put it at the top of the Bill of Rights.

One can’t help but wonder where religious freedom would rank if we held the debate today.

The question occurred to several of us here at BreakPoint after reading an article at Yahoo entitled “From Peyote to Sex: Religious Liberty Fight Recast.” In it, Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press described how the religious freedom issues being litigated in the courts have changed over the decades.

Seventy years ago, courts were deciding whether Jehovah’s Witnesses could be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag. Forty years ago, the issue was whether Amish children could be compelled to attend school past ninth grade. But today, mainstream Christian groups like Catholic nuns, evangelical businessmen, and Christian nonprofit organizations are being told to do what just a few years ago was unimaginable for them. And the issues being decided all boil down to the same thing: can Christians be compelled to go along with the Sexual Revolution as a condition for full participation in American society?

Now if that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s not. Last summer, a justice on the New Mexico Supreme Court wrote that the state’s anti-discrimination law compelled Christians to “compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives.”

He called this compromise “the price of citizenship” and argued that this compromise was “part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people.”

Now leaving aside the one-sided nature of this “compromise” — notice the other side is never asked to compromise its beliefs — it’s telling that the “tolerance” being called for concerns sex.

In many ways, sexual freedom is becoming, if it’s not already become, the first freedom to Americans.

If that sounds like an overstatement, consider the fact that just about the only speech our culture will not tolerate is any which calls the sexual revolution into question.

“But what about racist speech?” you might ask. Well, comedienne Sarah Silverman, who recently won an Emmy, says things about African-Americans and Latinos that would be at home at a Klan rally or White Supremacist websites. Yet far from being condemned, she is feted for being “edgy” and “provocative.”

No such consideration is extended to those who, for religious reasons, dissent from the orthodoxy on sexual freedom. To oppose same-sex marriage is to be called a “bigot” and face reprisals, even though the President held the same position as recently as four years ago.

For fighting the HHS contraceptive mandate, Hobby Lobby was vilified, even though it is — in all the ways that really should matter — a model employer.

The triumph of the sexual revolution is why, to use Zoll’s phrase, the battle of religious freedom has been “recast.” Freedom has come to mean personal autonomy, and that autonomy is principally expressed in the sexual sphere.

Thus, the Christian insistence that sex, like every other human activity, is subject to norms is seen as an assault on the idea of human freedom itself, even if we only seek to apply those norms to ourselves.

No matter that our beliefs inspire our lives. The fear that it might make others question their own beliefs makes religious freedom the wrong kind of freedom these days.

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Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.