The Christian baker's conscience

The baker wars moved to a new stage last week. It seems that liberty, equality, and human dignity in America stand or fall with who is baking what for whom at weddings. A truly moving theme. I can’t wait to see the film.

The Indiana legislature passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that gay activists claimed would, as Apple’s homosexual CEO Tim Cook put it, “allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.” Suddenly, people were talking about little else.

There would be a lot less to discuss if everyone would settle into the mutual respect and civil decency we ordinarily practice. By respect, I mean recognizing other people’s “civic space,” which allows us to share a morally fragmented society without killing or jailing each other beyond what is necessary. When people breach these social limits, we consider them ill-mannered and uncivil, even gratuitously cruel.

What tempts us to incivility today revolves around the wedding arrangements for that new social institution, same-sex marriage, that has established itself over the last 10 years like a Norman Invasion. People are still trying to figure out what it looks like to allow each other the civic space to be ourselves in states that allow this practice. Where is the border between my spiritual integrity and my civil allowance for your difference?

As the City of Man undergoes this rapid change, some consciences in the City of God may be unnecessarily burdened. If, say, Kenny and Quentin ask a baker of tender Christian scruples to sell them a wedding cake, why doesn’t the baker just sell it the way one would sell trays of chicken Kiev or rent out a tent and tables? What they do with the cake is surely none of the baker’s business. If they want a gay-themed cake topper, merchants are free not to stock those.

Florists are in the same position. If people want flowers, you deliver the flowers. The florist who supplies an arrangement to a funeral does not understand himself to be mourning the dead by supplying the flowers. Nor does a baker participate in a wedding by supplying the cake.

Christian photographers face a greater challenge. They have to enter into an activity they may find objectionable. But if a fraternity were planning an orgy and approached a photographer to capture the memories, no one would blame him for declining the business. Wedding planners? Forget it. But one wonders why anyone would want someone to plan their wedding who objects to the very premise of the event?

On the other hand, the most vocal and vengeful homosexual activists are not fighting for toleration or even peaceful coexistence. They want what they can never obtain: the right to everyone’s approval. Given the biblically informed beliefs they’re up against, this will ensnare them in endless vilification, prosecution, litigation, and even violence.

Even the Thirty Years’ War had to come to an end (1618-48). Out of exhaustion, we learned the value of peace, of living decently and humanely with people we wouldn’t choose for neighbors but whom we cannot avoid. Augustine wrote in similarly challenging times, “Peace is a good so great, that even in this earthly and mortal life there is no word we hear with such pleasure, nothing we desire with such zest, or find to be more thoroughly gratifying.”