Religious liberty, Liberal intolerance, and The Great Divorce

AP Photo/Doug McSchooler
March 31, 2015

 

Here is an article about Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law that tells it just like it is:

“On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the president of the United States and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington and a few bakers. One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences.
“Yet somehow, the Left and most of the mainstream press paint the current skirmishes over religious liberty as conservative offensives. When Indiana decided to follow the Clinton administration and 19 states in passing a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Left let loose a cacophonous chorus of cries about a dangerous flood of homophobia spreading out from the Hoosier state.
“Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, the largest corporation in the world. He opposes religious freedom laws, and paints them as a growing scourge. ‘There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,’ his Washington Post op-ed darkly began, warning of ‘A wave of legislation’ to protect religious liberty. This is hokum. Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have existed on the state and federal level for decades. What’s new here — the ‘wave’ that’s actually sweeping over the country — is an emboldened and litigious cultural Left, unsated by its recent culture war victories, trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint.
“The Left’s tirades against Indiana’s RFRA rely largely on paranoid predictions of what religious liberty might yield…. We heard these same terrified warnings amidst the Hobby Lobby case: Unless we force Christian employers to pay their workers in the form of contraception, we’ll soon have Exxon Mobil declaring itself as Christian Scientist in order to axe all healthcare. Who knows? Maybe Comcast will come out as Salafist and all female employees will have to don the hijab. Slippery-slope arguments are often valid — but not coming from the cultural Left, about marriage in the United States, in 2015.
“After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views.
“Amidst this culture-war dynamic, the Hobby Lobby decision and Indiana’s RFRA don’t represent any slide down a slope towards religiosity or individual liberty. Instead, our culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
“Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these? But no. Tolerance isn’t the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.
“In Georgia, a Catholic school employed a gay teacher. When he announced he was marrying a man, the school said this violated the expectations of public behavior they demand of their teachers. They fired him. Now the Obama administration is coming after the school…. As stunning as their ambitions of total victory is their continued pretense to be fighting a defensive war. It should be obvious to all that the Left long ago dropped its love of pluralism and tolerance — if that ever was their goal.”

 

Why the huge freak out over what is really a fairly innocuous law? I think that perhaps deep down the reason the sexual revolutionaries are so quick to go into hysterics and fall on their fainting couches is because the religious worldview is larger and ultimately more compelling than the anemic worldview of the sexual revolution. That is why it was, in one way or another, the view of just about everyone for millenia. It is like C.S.Lewis’ depiction in The Great Divorce of the citizens of hell arriving to heaven – they were phantoms who couldn’t handle the more real reality of God. Even the grass in heaven would not bend under their feet and so caused them great discomfort. If Christians merely stand upon our convictions it appears to them as tyranny and oppression, not because that is so, but because the hell they are constructing for themselves is so small.

This kind of forceful, demanding behavior comes from a people who are filled with inner doubts about the morality of their own behavior and thus seek as much outside justification as possible.