Everyone legislates their beliefs

It was a sunny Spring morning on the front lawn of the Legislative Building in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, and our organization—the NC Values Coalition—was hosting a press conference to support a recently introduced bill that would define male and female by biology in the law and protect women and girls in private spaces. Payton McNabb, a former high school athlete who was severely injured by a male on the women's volleyball court, took the microphone and began to tell her story.

That’s when the screaming started. Protesters across the street chanted with bullhorns: “Christian Nationalists are Nazis! Christian Nationalists are Nazis! Christian Nationalists are Nazis!” When left-wing activists and the mainstream media hurl the term “Christian nationalist”, the charge is typically this: Christians who apply their beliefs to public policy are carrying out a sinister plan to impose their religion on all Americans through the law. The noise was distracting, and the message was familiar: Keep your religion out of my government.

What’s interesting is this: Several weeks ago, when the bill to define male and female by biology—instead of gender identity—finally reached Democratic Gov. Stein’s desk, he vetoed it with an explicitly religious rationale. In his statement, he invoked his Jewish faith, saying, “My faith teaches me that we are all children of God no matter our differences and that it is wrong to target vulnerable people, as this legislation does.”

The bill that Gov. Stein vetoed—HB 805—does many things in addition to clarifying that there are only two genders. It protects women and children from exploitation by requiring pornography websites to have written consent from anyone depicted on their websites and proof that everyone is an adult. It states that parents can opt children out of school curriculum that violates their religious beliefs including sexually explicit materials, gives parents oversight over which books their children check out of school libraries, prevents state funds from being used for gender transitions, and requires boys and girls have separate sleeping spaces on overnight field trips in public schools.

It also extends the time in which someone can sue their doctor for malpractice after sex reassignment procedures and requires the state to attach the original birth certificate to a birth certificate that is modified to change a person’s gender.

The provisions in the bill are common sense and popular with the public. Most North Carolinians support defining male and female by biology, and most parents support protecting children from seeing sexually explicit materials in schools. But the bill violates the Democratic Party’s commitment to the transgender cause. After it passed in the Republican-led House and Senate in North Carolina, Gov. Stein’s veto called the legislation “mean-spirited,” and he said that his faith teaches him not to “target vulnerable people”—and by this he means LGBTQ people.

And absolutely no one responded to the veto by saying Gov. Stein was bringing Jewish Nationalism to North Carolina—because that would be silly.

Compare this to what happened when Republican Mike Johnson became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Time Magazine ran a feature article with the title “The Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson.” Speaker Johnson is an outspoken, evangelical Christian, and the article highlighted Johnson’s statements about defending “Judeo-Christian values” and his belief that his rise to office was “ordained by God.”

When Time says Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist, we all know that’s not a compliment. We’re all supposed to be scared that heresy trials are right around the corner. Curiously, when Kamala Harris made a campaign speech in a black church or President Biden talked about his lifelong Catholic faith, mixing faith and politics was no longer sinister but inspiring.

Of course, we all know what’s happening. Those who express grave concerns about Mike Johnson’s faith will never accuse Gov. Stein of being a Jewish Nationalist, because they like what he’s doing. This duplicity illustrates that concerns over religious influence in politics are not sincere but an attempt to bully political opponents into silence. It’s hard to prove that the genderless world they wish to create is a superior path to human flourishing. It’s much easier to make Christians and social conservatives feel bad for having and expressing an opinion.

For now, we’ll set aside the question of why Gov. Stein’s religious faith requires schools to allow boys to share rooms with girls on overnight field trips. But we should all agree that Gov. Stein is free to be informed by his religious convictions. The same is true for Mike Johnson, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or anyone else. Even politicians operating from a secular worldview with no religious underpinnings make decisions based on their beliefs and values. Indeed, it’s inevitable that people will apply their sincerely held beliefs to their policies.

The Constitution explicitly prohibits the establishment of a government religion, but it exists to protect our right to live out our convictions, not punish us for them. Since religious influence is both constitutional and inevitable, we should ignore the Christian Nationalism slurs and move on to the more helpful conversation about who has the better ideas.