Culture Friday - Religious liberty on trial

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, June 25th, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday, John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

John, good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s start with a couple of religious-liberty items—one of them involving the most well-known bakery owner in the world, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop.

He’s back in the news three years after he won his case at the Supreme Court. More on that in a moment.

The other one also involves the Supreme Court and it’s the foster-care decision that came late last week involving Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia. This was a unanimous decision, a ruling in favor of the Catholic foster-care agency that would not place children in LGBT homes.

Here’s how I’d like to begin here, John. The question is whether this matter is truly settled, just like the Jack Phillips case seems never truly settled.

Because even though this foster-care case was 9-0 against the city of Philadelphia for terminating its contract with Catholic Social Services, some of the more conservative justices complained the case was so narrowly drawn that cities could easily get around it.

As to religious-liberty protections going forward, Justice Samuel Alito said and I’ll quote, “This decision might as well be written on the dissolving paper sold in magic shops.”

So what do you say about that? A 9-0 Supreme Court decision and maybe we’re still not sure whether religious liberty is secure.

STONESTREET: We’re not sure. And I think that’s Alito’s point. I think that even Justice Roberts’ decision, which was very, very narrow (and that’s what you get when you have a nine-nothing decision; you’re not going to get anything sweeping,) indicates it’s not settled. Religious liberty is not this technicality in the same sense that the Masterpiece cake shop decision was; it’s very clear that the government can apply different standards to religious entities and non religious entities. In this case, the city of Philadelphia did. They had a policy of exceptions to their Non Discrimination Act, and it applied to some groups and didn’t apply to others, even though it should have.

So this really wasn’t meant to settle any decision in this epic battle that we’ve got in our culture between so-called sexual freedoms and religious liberties. There’s a lot left to be decided. As we have seen, even in the last term, there’s a lot to be decided as we start applying these things across various aspects of culture. These issues will continue to be fought in the court. Again, it’s good that they came to the decision, don’t get me wrong. The court is not going to address something unless it’s the perfect issue any sort of sweeping way. There was enough bad behavior on the side of the city of Philadelphia. And so that’s where this one came out.

BROWN: I heard a few people saying, interesting timing for this case, with Catholic Social Services winning, just months after Bethany Christian Services, another foster-care agency reversed itself and agreed to place children in LGBT homes in order to keep its contracts with the city. So theoretically, it could reverse back. Do you wonder whether it will?

STONESTREET: I’d love to see it make that decision if it’s true that the decision was made out of an analysis of inevitability, which I think was premature. And I think it’s obvious now that it was premature. Instead of a change of conviction, the only right thing to do is to reverse that decision. I hope they do that. I have no inside information on whether they will.

But I think it’s reasonable for supporters who believe in traditional marriage and biblical sexuality and what’s best for kids in terms of moms and dads and so on to expect that of Bethany Christian services, because that’s the only right decision. And I think it’s also a warning, because we certainly do have plenty of organizations within the Christian world that often want to give up the 50 yard line before the thing is settled. We’ll know when it’s time to retreat into our Christian bubbles, because we’ll have a big strong swift kick in our rear ends and that’s when we’ll know when it’s time to leave the business of being a public witness in this cultural moment.

I think you can see it from here. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t I think it’s happening, but we should not abandon ship before we need to.

EICHER: Now, Jack Phillips. He got sued yet again—as I said—three years after winning at the Supreme Court. Sued for refusing to bake a gender-transition cake for an activist lawyer who wanted to celebrate his transition from a man to identifying as a woman. Does this not show the very high cost of fighting city hall and how do you steel yourself for this kind of battle?

STONESTREET: I think Jack Phillips’ resilience has been remarkable. I think that his treatment at the hands of the state of Colorado has been despicable.

They started this, even just by accepting this complaint. The complaint was clearly a targeted thing on behalf of this lawyer, Sardina, who apparently is obsessed with Jack in such an unhealthy way and actually publicly said that he will not quit until Jack changes his mind or goes out of business. This sort of treatment is despicable. It is something that wouldn’t be tolerated. This is the sort of behavior that civil rights legislation was actually built to deal with, so that you couldn’t unjustly target somebody who believed or lived or looked differently than you. I feel for my friend. He’s a good man, he has tried really hard to be faithful.

And he is living out that observation from T.S. Elliot that for us, there’s only the trying, the rest is none of our business. He’s living out the wisdom of Solzhenitsyn, that you don’t have to show up at every protest, but just don’t say what’s not true. And he’s doing that. And he’s paying the price for it. He’s doing it very often in a time and place where the broader church in Denver and in Colorado is not willing to stand with him. It’s unreal. It’s just stunning. It’s hard to comprehend how long this has been and how hard it’s been on his soul.

BROWN: John, I know you’re a big football fan.

So I want to get your take on the first-ever openly gay football player—Carl Nassib—plays for the Las Vegas Raiders. He announced his sexual orientation on social media and immediately his NFL jersey has become the top selling jersey.

That gets near-universal praise while another NFL player—a retired running back by the name of Warrick Dunn—quietly helped yet another single mom become a first-time homebuyer. This was home number 190!

I found that an interesting contrast and what does that say about what our culture finds heroic or worthy of praise?

STONESTREET: You know, there are rules to civilizations. This is something that has been written on for years. Pitirim Sorokin, for example, has written on this. His categories were the difference between sensate cultures—cultures that live for the senses and immediate gratification—and ideational cultures, which are cultures that live for higher goals or ideals. Just think about the contrast in the story that you have repeated between those two things.

We’re a culture that praises the gratification of the senses versus a culture that praises and treats as heroes those who point to something bigger and higher than ourselves. In Sorokin’s study (founder of the Harvard sociology department, if I remember correctly,) sensate cultures collapsed and ideational cultures grew, even if those ideals of the latter were being built around were bad or unjust like, for example, the Islamic caliphate. It’s just a difference between living for the moment and living for the future.

And it’s not just individuals, it’s what we choose to celebrate what we choose to say is good, who we think are heroes. In his experience, ideational cultures grow, sensate cultures collapse, and there’s no there’s no exception. You can see that as a universal rule for civilizations. I don’t think anybody looks at our particular cultural moment and goes, “hey, we’re doing well!” It’s pretty clear things aren’t going well, and what are we going to blame it on? We’re going to blame it on a president, we’re going to blame it on the stock market. I mean, none of that makes sense. It’s not big enough to explain the level of chaos. What is are the values and the worldview that’s driving our cultural moment.

EICHER: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

BROWN: Thanks John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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