A critical distinction in the conversation

New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute documents Americans’ views on “LGBTQ rights” policies. The survey focused on three key pieces of legislation, including same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination protections in housing and workplace scenarios, and religious liberty for small business owners.

The survey report features an extensive analysis of white evangelical views—deemed one of the “least supportive of LGBTQ rights.” PRRI doesn’t seem to find this demographic’s results acceptable, but how it phrased the poll’s questions contributed to this outcome.

Intentionally using terms like “protection” frames some policies as inherently good and others as dangerous. Notably, the survey identifies “nondiscrimination protections” when referring to housing and jobs legislation. However, when it comes to small business owners, it doesn’t say “religious liberty protections,” which would make sense. Instead, it’s oddly worded as “religiously based service refusals.” A little consistency would go a long way, but that wouldn’t have fit the intended narrative.

According to PRRI, 62 percent of white evangelicals support “religious-based service refusals” while only 34 percent of the general public does. But changing the wording of a poll makes a world of difference. When the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty polled people on religious freedom, it found support from 92 percent of self-identified people of faith and 81 percent of the secular public, with 18 percent of secular individuals saying it is “protected too little.”

“Religious-based service refusals” are religious freedom, which allows people to live and work in ways that don’t violate their conscience or compel them to conform to government or culture. They’re also exceedingly rare.

This comes down to worldview differences. Non-Christians may not fully understand the importance of the Christian sexual ethic, which has always been a core tenet of the faith. Nothing about this has changed in the past decade. What has changed, in rapid succession, is Western culture. It’s hard to believe that even President Barack Obama claimed to believe in such an ethic just a few years ago. His beliefs from 2008 would get him canceled, even by his own party, in 2022.

When I consider people like Colorado cake baker Jack Phillips or Baronelle Stutzman, the Washington state florist who refused to create a custom floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding, I see faithful believers who take their creative calling seriously.

We are given our talents and abilities as gifts from the Lord and are instructed to “use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace” (1 Peter 4:10). To use such gifts to participate in sinful activity would be an abomination to the Lord.

It certainly would have been easier for Phillips and Stutzman, and countless others, to cave to the pressure. They could have saved their businesses, avoided name-calling and harassment, and shielded themselves from media scrutiny and unfair characterizations. Instead, they clung to their belief in God’s Word and His promise to walk with them.

The Bible tells us that if we belonged to the world, “it would love you as its own.” But, Christians don’t, and “that is why the world hates you” (John 15:9). Obedience to Him should always take priority over cultural coercion to propagate sin. Only someone seriously committed to sanctification by the Spirit would put themselves through what these individuals have.

What’s missing in the PRRI survey is the distinction between providing any service and providing for specific, religiously tied events—namely, weddings. Christians shouldn’t support denying basic services to people because of their sexuality, and the evidence doesn’t show that they do. The hard cases are about artistic presentation, not selling hamburgers. Almost every case we’ve seen in the media is related to a marriage ceremony, which Christians consider a celebration of a sacred covenant made before God.

In Ephesians, the Bible tells us that earthly marriage symbolizes Christ and the church. To the world, weddings are a secular celebration. To Christians, they are a holy ceremony conducted in the name of Christ. Anyone who fears the Lord wouldn’t participate in a wedding that violates this.

As a reminder, those involved in these high-profile cases were perfectly happy to provide cakes and floral arrangements to their LGBTQ clients for non-religious events. In fact, the men who sued Stutzman were actually among her longtime customers.

Phillips has no problem creating cakes for LGBTQ clients, so long as the message or event doesn’t conflict with his religious beliefs. “I don’t create cakes for Halloween, I wouldn’t create a cake that would be anti-American or disparaging against anybody for any reason,” he said. “Even cakes that would disparage people who identify as LGBT.”

The secular narrative doesn’t allow for the critical distinctions found within the religious liberty conversation. The fact is, Christians don’t deny service to LGBTQ individuals. They refuse service for specific events and messages that conflict with their faith, and that nuance matters greatly in this case.

To be sure, there will be a rare case of someone abusing the concept of religious liberty. In 2015, a pediatrician refused to treat the baby of a lesbian couple. Caring for an innocent child, no matter who her parents are, is not in conflict with our faith. But this story is an anomaly, and I’ve not heard another like it.

Religious liberty protections are not just another form of discrimination. They support the rights of Americans to live according to their faith, and that’s the kind of protection every American should have. Just read the Bill of Rights.