No middle ground

Erick Erickson gained political influence as editor-in-chief of Red State, a conservative blog. He left that in 2015 and is working toward a master’s degree from Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, where he also hosts The Erick Erickson Show on WSB radio.

In January 2016 Erickson launched a new blog, The Resurgent, and in February came out with You Will Be Made to Care: The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe, co-authored by Bill Blankschaen. The book, published by Regnery Publishing, which gave us permission to publish the excerpt below, made WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year short list in the current events category.

Its crucial takeaway concerning the battle to preserve religious liberty: “There will be no middle ground. Many people would like to find middle ground. Many churches would like to find middle ground. But there will be none, because homosexuals and their culture war warriors on the Left are unwilling to have a middle ground.” —Marvin Olasky

Live-and-Let-Live Legislation

When the state of Indiana passed legislation to protect religious freedom in 2015, corporate America, which tends to worship a green god of its own, threatened to pull out of economic activity in Indiana. And the media ginned up a hypothetical case of discrimination. A reporter asked the owners of Memories Pizza, a family restaurant that does not even cater weddings, whether they would cater a same-sex wedding. When the owners said that to do so would violate their conscience, the media firestorm erupted—inspiring fake orders and death threats that forced Memories Pizza temporarily out of business. Governor Pence and the legislature quickly caved to the bullies on the Left and modified the legislation, and people of faith in Indiana found their religious liberties more at risk than ever. And we still did not have one case of actual discrimination to illustrate the rabid fears of discrimination against gay people.

Apple has been guilty of discrimination against Christians in its own business practices—banning from its App Store (read: discriminating against) the Manhattan Declaration app supporting conjugal marriage. But Apple will not do business in Indiana as long as the state was insisting that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment remain on the same legal footing in the courts as the free speech clause of the First Amendment. And yet Apple CEO Tim Cook and his leftist friends in corporate America are happy to do business in countries that jail gays and stone them to death.

In 1993 President Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (all Democrats), and a nearly unanimous bipartisan Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, legislation introduced by none other than liberal stalwart Ted Kennedy. What triggered the act was a ruling by the Supreme Court in a case where an individual was punished for using a psychotropic drug during a religious sect’s ceremony. He sued, saying that under the First Amendment he should have freedom to do so because his religion required the use of the drug for a ceremony. The Supreme Court essentially said that you can believe anything you want, but that doesn’t mean that you can apply it in life. What both the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress agreed on was that the government should not restrict religious liberty—any more than our freedoms of speech and assembly—without a “compelling governmental interest.” The basic argument was that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment should be given equal weight to the free speech, the free press, and the free assembly clauses. Simple enough. In short, RFRA places the burden of proof on the government. It requires the government to demonstrate a “compelling governmental interest” before burdening or restricting anyone’s religious beliefs and the practice of those beliefs. Historically, the compelling governmental interests could be the life of a person, protection of property, national security interests, and race or national origin. For example, in the Hobby Lobby case (2014), the Supreme Court applied the RFRA standard and found that the government could in fact provide access to abortifacient drugs without impeding the religious beliefs of the business owners—so there was no “compelling government interest” in forcing the business owners to violate their consciences.

Unfortunately, court rulings after the legislation was passed revealed that while RFRA provided protection at the federal level, it did not extend to individual states (see City of Boerne v. Flores, 1997). Consequently, thirty-one states moved to protect the freedom of conscience and religious beliefs and practices in some way. Twenty states have passed legislation that essentially just copied the federal legislation passed by a bipartisan Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. The overwhelming majority simply adopted the federal standard and mandated that the state government must have a compelling governmental interest to interfere in the free exercise of religion. If the government of a state can achieve its purpose without burdening someone’s religion, the state should do so.

Indiana was simply the latest to do so. Arkansas did the same at about the same time. And yet while all hell broke loose in Indiana, one of the reddest of red states politically, little to nothing happened in Arkansas. Here in Georgia, cowardly Republicans who made a deal with the devil known as the Chamber of Commerce abandoned similar legislation. Republicans who controlled both houses of the Georgia legislature chose to abandon the protection of religious freedom in exchange for Democratic support of a massive tax increase disguised as a transportation bill. They decided they would rather serve Mammon. They have the thirty pieces of silver to prove it. One thing I have learned from the RFRA battles is that big business is deeply opposed to cultural conservatives. It is not necessarily reflective of the interests of customers, but of the interests of advocacy groups that harass the businesses. For example, in Arkansas, Walmart, whose average shopper is socially conservative, opposed RFRA but supported Obamacare.

RFRA is commonsense legislation if ever there were any. But opponents use a lot of distortion and outright lies to scare people. For example, they falsely claimed RFRA could be used to protect child and spousal abuse. And then they said they would be willing to accept the legislation if there were a blanket prohibition on “discrimination.” The problem with a blanket “discrimination” prohibition like that is that the religious could be compelled to provide goods and services for gay weddings whenever a gay couple cried “discrimination.” If “protected classes” now includes categories of sexual orientation, the very laws designed to protect religious freedom can be used to hammer the faithful into compliance under the guise of protecting society from the evil of discrimination. By including such a vague discrimination provision, Indiana and other states defeated the core purposes of RFRA. We’re now seeing progressive activists going to cities in conservative states and expanding the definition of protected classes at the local level so they can use RFRA against believers and force them to care. When Pence and Indiana Republicans went back and included a discrimination prohibition in RFRA, they essentially gutted it, leaving churches and believers in the state in a worse position than they were before. It was a complete cave-in in Indiana, brought about by outrage orchestrated by gay-marriage-friendly businesses and the media.

In a speech delivered at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, shortly after the events in Indiana, David French, a writer at National Review and long-time defender of religious freedom, summed up the lessons learned:

From the grassroots to the intellectual elite, conservatives are girding themselves for a long war, and a long war it will be. Four truths are emerging: First, the battle is not between gay rights and religious liberty—although religious liberty is certainly at stake—but between the sexual revolution and Christianity itself. … Second, not a single orthodox denomination is making or even contemplating such changes. This means that tens of millions of Americans will remain—indefinitely—opposed to the continued expansion of the sexual revolution. Third, rather than going quietly, cultural conservatism is showing increasing strength at the grassroots—opposing leftist campaigns at the ground level, bypassing politics to support those most embattled by radical hate campaigns. And fourth, the conservative grassroots and conservative public intellectuals are united … there is no wavering among America’s most influential conservative writers and thinkers. In short, if the cultural left is hoping to dominate the culture—and feels strong in its coastal bastions—it is overreaching, extending beyond the limits of its power. It is exposing itself to embarrassing cultural defeats and succeeding mainly in hardening conservative resolve. In the fight over religious freedom, the left will not prevail.

What we are finding out from the controversy over legislation to protect religious freedom is this: you will be made to care. There will be no middle ground. Many people would like to find middle ground. Many churches would like to find middle ground. But there will be none, because homosexuals and their culture war warriors on the Left are unwilling to have a middle ground. They are intentionally removing it. Maggie Gallagher says, “There’s increasing evidence that for … the Left elite, including the gay Left elite, [discrimination] is a tool they want to use to suppress people and views they find offensive and evil. So there’s no desire to find a live-and-let-live solution yet in America among the Left.” Blanket discrimination provisions inserted into Religious Freedom Restoration Acts allow discrimination cases to go forward against religious individuals and organizations even if the discrimination claim does not reach the standard of a compelling government interest, such as the government interest in stopping discrimination based on race and national origin.

As we’ve seen throughout this book, we need live-and-let-live legislation to protect religious liberty. For-profit businesses can’t discriminate based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, but they do reserve the right not to provide goods and services for events or engage in acts that offend the conscience of the business owner.

People should be free to live and work according to their faith without fear of being punished by government. That freedom of conscience is a basic human right that deserves protection under the law. Live-and-let-live legislation like RFRA simply ensures that religious liberty gets a fair hearing in court and protects every person’s freedom from government intrusion, regardless of party, religion, race, orientation, or any other aspect of someone’s identity. RFRA ultimately says that all of the First Amendment should be treated the same. It’s a matter of being able to live your life based on the tenets of your faith. Andrew T. Walker of the Southern Baptist Church’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission lays out the basic assumption that should undergird any religious liberty legislation:

No one—no institution, no person, no business or non-profit—should be penalized or targeted by the government for holding to the belief that a marriage is the union of a man and a woman. That is a rational, reasonable belief to hold. It has been a belief recognized through all of human history. It is not right for the government to treat those who disagree with this new revisionist understanding of marriage with hostility.

The role of legislation in all of this is to (A) recognize that there are goodwill debates on both sides of the aisle and holding to the traditionalist view of marriage is not irrational; and (B) put into law provisions that state that the government cannot penalize any institution, business, nonprofit, or for-profit from holding to that belief.

What We Do Now

In addition to supporting live-and-let-live legislation and leaders who demonstrate the courage to stand for your freedom of conscience, there is really something much more basic to Christianity that each of us should do as citizens—love our neighbors.

I don’t mean love them in some sort of philosophical or esoteric way, but really and truly connect with the people in the community in which you live and do good to and for them. We derive our word politics from the Greek root of polis, the word they used to describe the city-state where people gathered to form a community. Not to engage in politics is to withdraw from engaging in the public business of the community, a community composed of immortal souls whose eternal destinies you help shape each day. C. S. Lewis famously reminded of this privilege and responsibility in his essay “The Weight of Glory”:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. [emphasis added]

Our duties as a citizen of heaven and of America coincide in a very real and concrete way as we serve our neighbors in our local community. The politics that most affects us is the politics closest to our door. Consequently, each of us should seek out opportunities to plug in to the civic community in which we live. Whether you run for school board, serve on the local parks and recreation committee, or become a person who helps keep your neighborhood informed, you’ve got to be engaged in your local community to show love to your neighbor. If each of us takes care of our local community, that care and concern will percolate up to the state and national levels. Only do what only you can do. Don’t list all the ways you can’t help in politics. Start with what you can do, right where you live, to help the people around you. Find a problem and solve it. “Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a prison cell. “Christians are called to compassion and to action.” The truth is that there is no one better suited to serve the community in which you live than the person who lives in that community—you.

You may not relish the thought of engaging in the political process, even at a local level. It can be hard work. You may not always like it. But as Os Guinness reminds us, “Freedom is not the permission to do what we like but the power to do what we should.” As long as we have the freedom to believe, we have the duty to act—not merely because the Constitution says so, but because the Lord has called us to do so.

From You Will Be Made to Care: The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe by Erick Erickson and Bill Blankschaen. Copyright © 2016. Published by Regnery Publishing. All rights reserved.