Tony Perkins President, Family Research Council

by Jim Tonkowich
September 8, 2009

 

The following article originally appeared on the Crosswalk website, and is reproduced with permission.

After being assaulted by a family member, the sixteen-year-old British girl was placed in a foster home. Her foster mother had years of experience, a good reputation, and was fully licensed by the state. She was also a practicing Christian.

While in foster care, the young girl on her own became interested in the Christian faith and began attending church. Her foster mother neither encouraged nor discouraged her interest. After a while, the young girl professed faith in Christ and was baptized. And that’s when the trouble began.

The girl had been born into a Muslim family. Baptism into the Christian faith is apostasy for Muslims, punishable by death. The strange thing, however, is that the trouble didn’t come from her family or the Muslim. It came from the British government.

In what amounts to a frontal assault on religious liberty, officials immediately closed the foster home and moved the girl, ordering her to stay away from church for at least six months in order to reconsider her decision.

In a country where the soil is soaked with the blood of those who died fighting for religious liberty—the religious liberty that we also enjoy here in what was an English colony—something has gone terribly wrong.

That something is the seemingly insignificant shift from a belief in religious liberty to a belief in religious toleration.

In a world that has toleration as its highest virtue, religious toleration sounds like a good idea. Most people would agree that the world would be a better place if every nation practiced religious toleration.

But does this assumption have any validity? In the April 2008 issue of Touchstone magazine, human rights scholar William Saunders made the surprising argument that religious toleration rather than being a virtue is a source of religious coercion, persecution, and martyrdom.

This is because religious toleration is based on the belief that while religion may be an unavoidable part of human life, it is, nonetheless, dangerous and needs to be managed and controlled.

Saunders quotes John Shattuck who served as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Clinton administration. In a 2002 speech Shattuck said:

Freedom of religion is predicated upon the existence of more than one religion. But a multiplicity of religions has always meant conflict, and religious conflict often led to war and human devastation. This was the state of reality for centuries and millennia, and it is hardly a ringing endorsement of religious freedom.

Shattuck is not in favor of religious liberty. Instead Shattuck believes that religious toleration is a “strategic necessity” and is “necessary for the internal protection of religion itself.” That is, religion is a danger that must be kept on a leash.

Saunders comments:

[Shattuck], and the philosophical liberalism he represents, sees religion, unlike other human rights, as a problem, as a source of conflict, as something to be managed.

Religion is managed by jettisoning religious liberty and substituting religious toleration. Thus the Chinese register, approve, and tolerate churches and religious groups deemed safe in light of the state’s interests. Unapproved churches or religions—house churches, falun gong, Tibetan Buddhism—are seen as dangerous and subject to persecution.

Religious toleration is at the heart of the Muslim notion of dhimmitude. A dhimmi in Islamic law is a non-Muslim “person of the book”, that is, a Jew or a Christian, living in a Muslim country. Dhimmis may practice their religion, but with significant restrictions—especially the restriction on evangelism. They are taxed at a higher rate, have fewer civil liberties, are treated with contempt, and are in every way second-class citizens. The Coptic Christians in Egypt are dhimmis who for generations have been the designated garbage collectors with no option for any other life apart from conversion to Islam.

Similarly, Turkey tolerates the Eastern Orthodox Church. But the Church can’t construct new buildings or repair old ones. When the government expropriates properties, they have no recourse. The Church has few new priests since the state closed their seminary, does not permit candidates to go elsewhere for training, and forbids non-Turks from ministering. The predictable result is that the Orthodox Church in Turkey, while tolerated, is dying out.

Though Dhiminitude is an Islamic concept, the idea is not limited to Islamic states. Communist regimes gave second-class status to religious believers, French secularism has not been kind to the religious, and sadly there are signs of religious liberty eroding in our country.

Hate crimes legislation, certain healthcare reform provisions, attempts to revive the Fairness Doctrine, new rules at the Faith-Based Office, the ongoing push for same-sex “marriage,” the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and the rescission of conscience protection for healthcare workers—these tolerate only certain state approved religious positions and thus undermine religious liberty for everyone.

As Judge Robert Bork has said:

You are going to get Catholic hospitals that are going to be required as a matter of law to perform abortions. …We are going to see in the near future a terrible conflict between claimed rights of homosexuals and religious freedom… You are going to get Catholic or other groups’ relief services that are going to be required to allow adoption of a child by homosexual couples. We are going to have a real conflict that goes right to the heart of the society.

And make no mistake: religious liberty is at the heart of a free society. What can be the meaning or value of economic freedom or freedom of assembly or freedom of speech or freedom of the press if our consciences are not free to believe or disbelieve, to worship or mock, to convert to or from one belief system to another, to change our minds? All human freedoms are important, but religious liberty is the foundation for all the rest. It is the freedom to think for yourself. This makes religious liberty our first freedom in importance and in order.

While religious toleration is a creation of the state, religious liberty is an unalienable right rooted in our nature as humans. It is the freedom to choose, practice, share, and live in private – and in public – the faith each of us believes. Religious liberty sees religion as a positive human good that is healthiest and of greatest benefit when it is most free, not something that is dangerous and in need of management.

From a Christian point of view, religious liberty is founded on the conviction that just as God does not coerce belief, we have no right to coerce belief from one another. Every human has a duty to acknowledge God who is Creator and Judge. Because this is duty, there must be a corresponding freedom to choose or reject that duty. Religious belief may only be proposed to our neighbors’ mind and heart, never forcefully imposed against their wills.

From a more secular point of view, religious liberty comes from a conviction that the individual and the core if his or her being, the conscience, ought not to be violated. Humans must be free to believe what they believe or they are not free at all.

Are there limits to religious freedom? Certainly. Human sacrifice, child abuse, and violence are illegitimate religious expressions and are appropriately outlawed. But rather than begin with what is rightly prohibited, we need to begin with the simple fact that religious liberty is a law written into God’s relationship with humans and into the nature of human dignity. That is why it must be the law of every land.

Liberty has always been a fragile proposition. History shows that it takes years to grow, but only a generation of neglect to destroy. The religious freedom we enjoy—whether we are people of faith or not—is something for which we should give thanks every day, defend with all that is in us, and work to spread throughout the world.

Alan Wisdom, January 5, 2010

The following is an edited transcript of an address delivered by IRD Vice President Alan Wisdom at the IRD board luncheon on October 5, 2009. The address was based on Wisdom’s paper “Is Marriage Worth Defending?”

 

I’m not going to give a synopsis of the paper. You have an executive summary at the beginning, and I hope you will find that summary and the rest of the paper useful in all sorts of ways beyond what I can present here this afternoon. What I would like to do instead is to put forward some of the key arguments from the paper in a different way.

My point of entry is an odd feature that some of you may notice. The title of the paper is “Is Marriage Worth Defending?” In the current political environment that phrase, “defending marriage,” has become a synonym for opposing same-sex marriage. So you might think, reading my title, that I was going to spend a lot of space discussing same-sex marriage. Then you would read through the first 29 pages and be puzzled to find only glancing references to same-sex marriage. It’s only on page 30 that I begin in any detail to address the arguments for and against same-sex marriage, in a kind of excursus.

So what is going on here? Is it just that I’m dense? Some people, including my wife, might report that I can be dense on occasion. But I actually do have a strategy here, and the strategy is based on my conviction that same-sex marriage is ultimately a subsidiary issue. It’s a very important issue; it’s a necessary issue that we have to engage. But it’s logically dependent upon what we think about marriage in general. 

The reason that our churches and our society are in trouble on the same-sex marriage issue is that we’ve already lost so much of the meaning of marriage before we even get to that issue. Certainly, in my view, state or church recognition of same-sex marriage would make the situation worse. But in many ways, heterosexuals have already paved the way toward same-sex marriage through their own misunderstanding and malpractice of marriage. To be quite frank, we heterosexuals have done far more damage than the two to three percent of the population that is homosexual could ever do.

The only way that we can resist same-sex marriage effectively is if we first recover the meaning of marriage. And I think that perhaps this is God’s providential purpose in the debate that we face today. It is to make U.S. Christians realize that we’ve taken marriage too much for granted, and now we need to go back into the Scriptures, look back at history, consider the social science evidence, and understand what marriage is really all about.

What I would like to do this afternoon is to strip away some of the myths and misconceptions that have accumulated around marriage, that have spread through the culture, and that have even infiltrated the church. We need to think in a disciplined way, which is what IRD’s whole Mt. Nebo Paper series is intended to encourage. If you go through this paper on marriage, I hope you will see that every other page or so, I am trying to knock down one of these misconceptions.

The first assumption is that marriage is an invention of Western society—that it’s a legal fiction, like the limited liability corporation, developed for its social utility. On the contrary, both Scripture and history testify that marriage was prior to the state. For millennia marriage was practiced without any particular involvement of the state—it was a social custom. The biblical narrative places marriage at the creation—before the covenant with Israel, before the new covenant in Jesus Christ.

The second myth is that the marriage of man and woman is some kind of religious doctrine that Christians are trying to impose on society. Again, that’s not true. Anthropologists will tell you that marriage is virtually universal among human societies. And there are some common features of marriage; it’s variable, but not infinitely variable. The Bible presents marriage as part of God’s order of creation, God’s general revelation, God’s common grace to all humankind. It is not a specifically Christian institution. Now we Christians may have a richer understanding of marriage, where we see it as another way of incarnating the kind of love that God revealed in Jesus Christ. But almost all other religions have teachings on marriage too. The concept of the lifelong union of man and woman is the same for all people.

The third misconception is that there really is no common doctrine of marriage in Scripture. People have the impression that the biblical material on marriage is just this odd collection of stories about polygamous ancient Hebrews and then misogynistic rants by the apostle Paul. It’s to counter such impressions that I begin the biblical section of the paper with the words of Jesus in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 where he’s responding to a question about divorce. Jesus says, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’?”

Those are the words of our Lord and Savior. It’s not just an opinion of the apostle Paul. Indeed, Paul’s discussions of marriage in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians are both grounded in this notion of “the two become one flesh,” which he got from Jesus and which Jesus got from Genesis. So we’re dealing with a teaching that appears multiple times in the New Testament as well as the Old Testament. It runs through the entire history of the church. All major branches of the Christian faith share this teaching on the marriage of man and woman.

You will hear some people sneer, “Well, biblical marriage, that’s just polygamy. That’s incest. That’s all these non-consensual relationships where masters would forcibly marry their slaves and women’s consent was hardly ever taken into account.” It seems that these people have forgotten a basic principle of biblical interpretation: Not everything that is narrated in Scripture is approved by Scripture.

We then have people who propound the improbable postulate that being male or female makes no difference in marriage.  Their theme verse is Galatians 3:28: in Christ “there is no longer male or female.” That is a powerful verse, but they take it quite out of context. In that passage Paul was talking about our salvation in Jesus Christ and the fact that we receive it all by God’s grace, and none of us comes to Christ on the basis of our worldly position. Thus being male or female is of no advantage in coming to Christ; it’s all by grace.

But the same Paul, in his other letters, exalts the marriage of man and woman. By no means is he arguing that sex is irrelevant. God, in Genesis before the fall, created us male and female and declared it good. This is part of God’s good design for humankind. It’s something fundamental to our human identity. It seems to me that the people who are pretending that these differences between male and female are trivial are trying to be more spiritual than Jesus or Paul was. Our bodies do matter. The fact that we are men and women does matter, and God has a purpose in bringing the two together.

The next misconception is that marriage has always changed through the years and the church has always gone along with however marriage changed in society. I think that the best response on this point actually comes from the Catholic Catechism: “Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it has undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes.” The catechism goes on to affirm, “God is the author of marriage.” 

Yes, there have been many changes in the institution of marriage, but the church has not always accommodated the culture. In fact, if you look at history, you find that the church has often changed the culture. In ancient society, many marriages were non-consensual. The church challenged that social reality. And that’s why in the traditional wedding liturgy that we have—it goes back to the Middle Ages—one of the first steps is the declaration of intent. The priest or minister asks, “Will you have this woman to be your wedded wife?” The reason for the question is they wanted to be absolutely clear that there was consent and no coercion. Any coercion was grounds for annulment.

Another example: In Roman times, slaves could not legally marry; at most they could have a kind of cohabitation with certain limited rights. The church insisted—and this was a papal ruling in the 13th century—that slaves must be allowed to marry because marriage is a grace of God that is for all people.

The church also dignified marriage by insisting that the relationship of husband and wife had priority over other relationships. In many ancient societies, a man’s male friends were far more important than his wife. My paper quotes a sermon by John Chrysostom asserting to the contrary: “Show how much you value [your wife’s] company by staying home with her rather than going out in the marketplace. Cherish her more than all your friends, more than the children born of her, and love the children for her sake.”

To this day that same advice is one of the most transformative messages of evangelical preachers in Latin America. In a very macho culture, one of the things they tell the husbands is: “You can no longer go out drinking and tomcatting around and spending all of the money. You come home to your wife and your children. You spend your time with them and you spend your money on them.” Even today, that message is changing the culture of marriage in a whole continent.

There is the myth that marriage is all about feelings of love. We find this assumption crop up in debates about same-sex marriage. People will say, “After all, what is marriage about except two people that love each other?” Biblically and historically, however, marriage has been about a lot more than feelings of affection.

Love is important, but there are structures built to channel and express the love. There are the vows of total and lifelong commitment. There is the public accountability to the two families and the community. Marriage joins man and woman not only in their emotions, but also in their bodies, their finances, their social relationships, their plans and ambitions. Marriage is exclusive—the spouses “forsake all others.” Marriage is normative—we expect that most people will get married. Marriage ordinarily involves children. All these crucial elements are downgraded if marriage is reduced to just any “two people who love each other.”

All this talk of marriage as feelings of love can sound oddly prudish. It’s as if we don’t want to admit that we’re talking about people who are having sex together. I don’t see that same squeamishness in Genesis or Jesus. When they spoke about how “the two become one flesh,” they weren’t just speaking about an emotional bond between the man and woman. Both church and state have always recognized the physical, sexual side of the union. Under classic canon and civil law, a marriage was consummated by what was called, delicately, the “marital act.” The marital act involves one man and one woman—only one man and one woman. They become “one flesh” in a way different from all other sexual acts. What we do with our bodies matters.

There is also the misguided notion that each couple invents its own marriage. Marriage, in this view, is just a contract, and the contract can be anything that two parties agree to. We see this notion illustrated in the frequent practice of couples writing their own wedding vows. That practice, however well intentioned, sends the wrong message. In actuality, marriage is not created by the couple. It is an already existing institution that God created, that previous generations shaped through the centuries, and that each couple enters into. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 1943 letter from a Nazi prison to a couple that was getting married, put it best: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

These misconceptions about marriage—that it is an infinitely flexible contract, that it has no fixed meaning in Scripture or across history, that all that matters is the love between two individuals—give rise to a serious misreading of the current debate about same-sex marriage. People assume, falsely, that changing the definition of marriage to “any two persons” would amount to only a slight expansion or adjustment of the institution. They think we’re doing nothing more than including an additional two or three percent of the population who aren’t able to marry now, supposedly. (Actually, they can marry, but their pool of potential spouses is limited. Everyone’s pool of potential spouses has always been limited. You can’t marry a minor, a close blood relative, someone who is already married, or a member of the same sex. These limitations apply equally to everyone.)

But if you change the definition for that two or three percent of the population, you change it for everyone else. You declare irrevocably that the complementarity of man and woman is a trivial matter and that the bodies of the spouses don’t matter. You declare that marriage does not have any necessary connection to childbearing, because you’re marrying couples that, if they have a child in their household, will have borne that child by a third party from whom the child has been separated.

You are also declaring in effect that marriage is no longer a social norm. The vast majority of heterosexuals want to get married and do get married. To this point, however, only a minority of the homosexual community is in any kind of partnered relationship. And only a minority of those partnered relationships have availed themselves of marriage or civil unions where those are legally available. You don’t hear gay and lesbian leaders lecturing people, “You ought to stop shacking up and get married”—as many a Christian parent has advised a heterosexual child. The homosexual advocates want marriage as an option, not as a norm. But if it’s not a norm for them, then it’s not going to be a norm for anybody else.

In this connection we also have to challenge the popular notion that same-sex relations and cohabitation are essentially the same as marriage. You will hear people say about couples that are living together: “Well, they’re married in everything but name. You know, marriage is only a piece of paper.” On the contrary, there are all kinds of studies that show, in very detailed ways, that cohabiting couples behave differently from married couples. To give one example, married couples overwhelmingly have joint checking accounts. Cohabiting couples very rarely have joint checking accounts; they don’t entrust their finances to each other. And there are many other ways in which cohabiting couples withhold from one another the trust and commitment that married couples commonly share. 

Similar differences are observed in same-sex relationships. I know that this truth is hard for gay people to hear, but the objective evidence is that a relationship between two members of the same sex is radically different from the marriage of a man and a woman. Same-sex relationships are, on average, significantly shorter. They are less exclusive, with more sexual interactions with third parties. And they are not normative, as we have already noted.

There is a very plausible but deeply misleading line of reasoning that one frequently hears from proponents of same-sex marriage. They wield it as a trump card that supposedly quashes all arguments in favor of maintaining traditional marriage. The line of reasoning poses this question: “Suppose that I and my same-sex partner were to get married. How would it affect your marriage?” The assumed answer is: “My marriage wouldn’t be affected at all.”

But that assumption smuggles in radical individualism. It insinuates the notion that my marriage is totally separate, private thing between my wife and myself. Well it’s not. My wife and I got married before a couple hundred people, including all of her family, my family, and a good portion of the congregation in which she grew up. We are accountable to all those people for the promises that we made to one another. I would note that the wedding liturgy in many churches reminds all the married people in attendance of the vows that they previously took. The point is that our marriages are not separate; they are interdependent.

If I fall down in my marriage, my failure affects other people because they are influenced by my bad example. Above all, it affects young people who are shaping their understanding of marriage—whether it is a relationship that they want, whether it is a relationship at which they can succeed. If what young people see around them is predominantly troubled or failed marriages, they may conclude that a happy marriage is beyond their reach and they will have to settle for something less than what God intended. This is one reason among many why the classic wedding liturgy warns that marriage is not a commitment “to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly.”

We also have to resist a kind of defeatism that is spreading. Even orthodox Christians can start to believe that people really don’t want marriage anymore. They look at the declining marriage rates, the high divorce rates, the rising proportion of children born out of wedlock, and other negative trends, and they conclude that marriage is headed to obsolescence. There is no question that we face all these problems. But the best studies show that the vast majority of young people, 90 percent or more, say that they would like to be married. This is true even of poor women who end up having a series of cohabitations and children outside of marriage. They say that what they really want is to find a man who would marry them and have children together with them.

So I think that people still see marriage as a good to be desired. The problem is that the patterns of relationships in which many are engaging are not leading them toward the goal that they say they want, which is a good marriage. Programs like Marriage Savers deal directly with this situation. They don’t have to force engaged couples to come for help in building healthy marriages. They don’t have to force couples in conflict to come for help in saving their marriages. This is what most people want to do. They want to take the vows of marriage and they want to keep them.

Politically, too, defeatist assumptions need to be challenged. One hears orthodox Christians lamenting that we’re losing on the marriage issue and that defeat is inevitable. But that’s actually not true. In most of the states where the definition of marriage has been changed, it has been by court decisions. Where the voters have had a chance to decide the question—in 30 states so far—they have always ended up affirming marriage either by statute or by constitutional amendment. Marriage has prevailed even in relatively liberal states such as California, Oregon, and Wisconsin. 

One even hears laments that we’re losing in the churches on marriage. Again, I think that’s not true. You have to take a global perspective and look at the entire Christian community. In that perspective the number of churches that have in any important way departed from traditional teaching on marriage is very, very small. The Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the evangelicals, the vast majority of the historic Protestants around the world—they all have solid teaching on God’s design in bringing man and woman together in marriage. It’s only a handful of extremely liberal churches in North America and Western Europe that have reduced marriage to just any “two persons.” Even the Episcopal Church, which everyone thinks has gone over the edge, has not yet tampered with the wedding liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. People have a sense that marriage is something sacred, and they are reluctant to touch it.

The final temptation that we need to resist is the one that in the “Policy Options” I call “Option B.” This is the temptation that affects many conservatives. And that is to say: “We know we need to maintain our understanding of marriage in the church, but society is a lost cause. Let’s just give up on society. Let’s get the state out of the marriage business. Let’s just make marriage a private thing that we do in our churches. Whatever relationship people want to have out in civil society, let them have it and call it what they wish. We’re not going to criticize them; we’re just going to try to make faithful Christian disciples inside the churches.”

This option is attractive because it seems to get you out of all the unpleasantness of the culture wars. You don’t have to take the heat for standing up for marriage in public. You just maintain your doctrine quietly inside the church.

But this solution doesn’t work. The forces that are seeking to redefine marriage are inside the churches already. And they are pressing to change the churches’ teaching. Particularly in mainline churches, but also in evangelical churches, you can’t keep them out. If a trend is running through the culture, it’s going to come into the church. Even in evangelical churches, you have individuals involved in homosexual relationships—and large numbers of cohabiting heterosexual couples. Every minister that I’ve met will tell you that he has to deal with those kinds of situations in his congregation.

You can’t erect a wall between the church and society. If you’re going to challenge unbiblical, dysfunctional patterns of relationships inside the church, you’re going to have to challenge them outside in society.

Moreover, we cannot rest secure in our religious liberty inside the church. If society moves to redefine marriage as just any “two persons,” Christian organizations and individuals will face tremendous pressure to conform to this new view of marriage. Priests and ministers will probably still be free, under the First Amendment, to decide whether to marry a particular couple. But any organization, like the IRD, that would insist on distinguishing the marriage of man and woman from other sexual relationships will be put in the position of being in defiance of state policy. We have already seen the use of coercive state power to force compliance. There was a court case in New York several years ago where an Orthodox Jewish seminary was required to provide married student housing to same-sex couples. We will not be able to avoid more such cases which challenge our ability to maintain Christian doctrine even within the churches.

Ultimately, too, we are not responsible solely for our fellow Christians. God calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. All of the evidence from the past couple decades indicates that lasting, loving marriages uniting men and woman are better for everyone. They are better for children, better for adults, better for society. If we love our neighbors, what we wish for them is to have healthy marriages.

For that matter, promotion of marriage is a major way we can bring people into the church. There are all sorts of studies demonstrating that getting married and having children correlates with coming to church. So the state of marriage in society is closely connected to the state of the church. The kind of people who are drifting around from one non-marital relationship to the next are people, generally speaking, who are lost in other ways too. And these are precisely the people that the church needs to reach. 

So we have all of these myths and misconceptions about marriage that we have to clear away. The frustration is that it seems so hard to dispel them. You can have the best arguments, but they don’t seem to sway people sometimes. You can have natural law arguments from the design of the human body and the chemistry of the human mind. You can cite conclusive social science evidence about the advantages of marriage over every alternative form of sexual relationship. You can point to biblical teaching from Genesis to Revelation. And yet many people—even many Christians—will still tell you that they really don’t see much difference between marriage and cohabitation or same-sex relationships. They will even allege that your pro-marriage position can have no basis except hateful bigotry. It’s as if they hadn’t heard a single one of your carefully constructed, sensitively phrased arguments.

In the end, I think what’s going on is something that’s much deeper than logical argument can touch. We face a spiritual struggle. Some of the key concepts in biblical teaching are becoming difficult, and perhaps have always been difficult, for people to comprehend. Regarding marriage, I would say the two keys are the notion that the two “become one flesh” in marriage and the insight that the love between husband and wife can replicate the total, self-giving, unconditional, steadfast love of Christ for his church.

The apostle Paul refers to these teachings as “a great mystery.” And I think we have to accept that they are a mystery. People don’t naturally get it. It takes a kind of spiritual breakthrough, a revelation to see marriage as God sees it. People are so attached to their individuality that they don’t really believe that two persons could become one flesh. They can’t help seeing marriage as just a mutually beneficial alliance of two still independent individuals.

Likewise, many people can’t imagine the kind of love Christ has for the church. They have never experienced a love that is total and unconditional and irrevocable. They can’t get out of the shell of themselves to believe that something like marriage as the Bible presents it could be possible.

My observation of the same-sex marriage debate is this: You can find many people who aren’t regularly practicing Christians who would affirm the traditional definition of marriage; however, when you look at the people who actually stand up and speak out and take the heat for defending marriage, it’s mostly people of an active religious faith. Perhaps it takes that kind of faith to make you see how precious marriage is and why it’s worth the sacrifice. 

So the responsibility falls upon us who profess Christ. If the spiritual breakthrough is to come for our neighbors and our society, it will have to come through us. Only we can show them the Christ-like love, the one-flesh union, in the marriages that we build. Or rather, only God can show them that kind of love, that degree of union, as his grace works in our lives. So I think ultimately the spiritual challenge to the church is whether we can turn back to God our Creator, who made us male and female and made us for one another, and recover the meaning of marriage and give that back to a society that seems to have lost it in so many respects.

Christianity and the Welfare State
Mark Tooley December 10, 2009

The following article originally appeared on the American Spectator website, and is reproduced with permission.

The old Religious Left and the new Evangelical Left rapturously support Obamacare, though some hardliners are sourly upset that it does not include a direct, British-style “single payer” system. Mostly they accept that the public option is an important first step toward their dream of government-controlled health care.

Religious Leftists admit to almost no limits on the state’s authority over the private economy, including health care, welfare and charity. Typically they cite a few Bible verses about “caring for the least of these,” and assume the Scripture is an automatic mandate for government control. Whether or not the state is actually the providential agency for all welfare and charity, much less whether it is pragmatically the most effective, rarely troubles these liberal religionists.

A recent argument comes from Jim Wallis’s Evangelical Left Sojourners, whose chief executive officer Chuck Gutenson decried resistance to endless statism as simply “selfishness.” But at least he did try to describe the Deity’s purpose for the state.

Gutenson admitted that “political conservatives” grant that Scripture requires concern for the poor but believe the obligation is upon individuals and not governments. A former theologian at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, a Methodist school, Gutenson cited Colossians 1:16, which briefly describes “rulers and authorities” as having been, like all things, “created by him and for him,” i.e. God.

“The obvious implication is that ruling authorities are intended to serve God’s agenda,” Gutenson surmised. “Now, it would be passing strange to think that God had created/ordained ruling authorities to serve his agenda, but then conclude that one of the most consistent themes of scripture (concern for those on the margins of our societies — the poor, the widow, the orphan, etc.) is excluded from the purview of those ruling authorities.”

Conservatives often insist that caring for the needy should be “voluntary,” Gutenson noted. But he cited Old Testament civil laws that included debt cancellation and release of bondsmen that were not “options” but ruler-enforced considerations for the needy. Lest these commands be seen as limited to the ancient Hebrew theocracy only, Gutenson noted pagan Sodom was destroyed for having failed to “hear the cry of the needy.” God destroyed the city-state for its welfare failures, evidently.

Relying on this evidence, Gutenson concluded that “selfishness, the need to be in control — these are all reasons why we resist the fact that God ordains governments to have a role in caring for the least.” He admitted that these Scriptural arguments for government welfarism were not the best ones. But finding biblical arguments for opposing “government having a role in caring for the needy” is “much harder,” he insisted.

Separately on his blog, Gutenson asserted a “fundamental and irremedial tension between capitalism and Christian faith.” After all, the Bible, calls for “interest of others and not self-interest.” In contrast, “capitalism elevates and sanctifies self-interest.” He concluded: “Christians, who make libertarian freedom the summum bonum have, I suspect, become much more Lockean political liberals than Christian.”

Gutenson of course is right that Biblical religion does not sanctify “self-interest.” But the biblical tradition asserts that humanity is sinful and innately motivated by it. Utopias that assume otherwise always fail. Free market systems often harness base passions and redirect them for the common good. Limited government similarly assumes that men are not angels and that no individual or group, no matter how noble, can be trusted with unrestricted control.

Liberal religionists like Gutenson with soaring collectivist dreams often deny, or at least struggle, with admitting humanity’s fallen nature. They also tend to ignore providential roles for non-state institutions like the family, church, and private philanthropy. Unrestricted welfare states tend to displace and sometimes extinguish these other divinely ordained agencies.

Gutenson cited but did not dwell on Romans 13, in which St. Paul declared that God had armed the state with the “sword” to uphold justice. The Religious Left, overwhelmingly pacifist, never likes this Scripture. Oddly, liberal religionists never seem to realize that the Welfare State is itself coercive and ultimately enforced with the sword. Franklin Roosevelt, a lifelong active Episcopalian, is the secular patron saint of 20th century American liberalism. But even he cautioned against unrestricted federal welfarism. In his first year of office, he addressed the Hyde Park Methodist Church in his New York neighborhood. “Last spring, when I went to Washington, there were many people who came forward with the thought, verbally expressed, that the government should take over all the troubles of the country,” he told the congregation. But he observed “that is not exactly the American way of doing things. Some countries in the world may find it more convenient to put all their burdens on one person, but we do not. So I took the position then, and I think the country has understood the reasons for it, that the Government of the Nation has a responsibility, yes, but a responsibility which should be exercised only if the smaller units of the country have done everything that they possibly could and if that everything has proved insufficient.”

FDR told the Methodists that “before extending federal assistance to states or to communities, we ask the question: Have the people in this community done their share?” Communities can help the needy through their “taxing powers,” he said. But “they can do an enormous amount of work for the relief of suffering humanity through their churches.” The Federal Government should intervene to ensure that “nobody starves” only after local alternatives have failed, Roosevelt declared. “That has been the principle which we are trying to extend to all the work of our government, to see to it that every man and woman and, I might add, child has done his share toward the common good.” He concluded that the “men and women and children who make up the congregations of the churches have shown a splendid spirit in these days.”

Some may argue that FDR did not always abide by his own principle of limited government intervention. But at least he admitted the principle. The Religious and Evangelical Left rarely do.

Permission to Speak Freely?
The Need for an International First Amendment and a Ban on Hate Speech Laws
Faith J.H. McDonnell
March 20, 2009

What if America’s First Amendment went global? What if freedom of speech was valued and upheld all around the world?

There would probably be more obscenity and more “free expression” that is just plain disgusting. There’d be more America-haters like the Code Pink and A.N.S.W.E.R. impresarios swaggering about Capitol Hill, dressed like demented Statues of Liberty or throwbacks from Sufi Camp. There’d be thousands, maybe millions, of people with, as my mother used to say, “their noses out of joint,” offended by something that someone, somewhere had said. But truthfully, that would be a small price to pay to know that everyone had freedom of speech (within the usual limitations regarding crying “fire,” etc.) and no government could arrest an individual for expressing an opposing opinion.

The Insidious “Defamation of Religion” Agenda

Far better the wild abandon and potential to insult of free expression than the alternative, the egregious law proposed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other bad actors such as China, Cuba, and Russia. For years now the United Nations, a bastion of free speech – if you want freedom to condemn Israel – has passed a draft “defamation of religions” resolution. The resolution expresses concern about the “serious instances of deliberate stereotyping of religions, their adherents and sacred persons in the media and by political parties and groups” and calls on all countries to alter their legal and constitutional systems to prevent “defamation of religions.” The resolution includes a claim that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism,” just in case we weren’t sure that the entire purpose of the United Nations, never mind the resolution, is to advance Islam.

It doesn’t matter whether the so-called stereotyping actually refers to accurate, factual information. As with other such decisions, such as to not call enemy combatants what they are, or to call Islamic jihad terrorism “anti-Islamic activity,” reality does not matter. What matters is if someone’s feelings are hurt, or a religion is “defamed” by being associated with terrorism.

As L. Bennett Graham from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty explained to the Council on Foreign Relations, “The problem with this resolution is it turns the traditional understanding of human rights on its head.” Graham says that “traditional defamation laws protect individuals from false truth claims, not ideas, which cannot easily be proved true or untrue in court.” Defamation is a concept that refers to individuals, not religions. Taking the defamation of religion “to the higher level of human rights is dangerous because we are no longer talking about the protection of individuals, we’re talking about the protection of concepts,” Graham argues. The Becket Fund, along with several other human rights organizations, was successful in reducing support for the resolution by 23 countries in 2008. But ongoing vigilance is needed against the intimidation of anyone criticizing radical Islam and violence associated with it.

Graham said that the “Defamation of Religions” resolution created the idea that “there is a right not to be offended.” But in the inventory of human rights, this particular “right” is not found. And besides, when the person whose feelings are hurt by someone citing suras in the Koran that deal with killing infidels is actually killing infidels, the delicacy of their sensibilities might be called into question.

An international First Amendment, similar to that which the people of America have enjoyed and taken for granted for so many years, would bring new freedom to many. It would also help restore the freedoms that have been lost through obsequious submission to political correctness in Europe and, increasingly, in the United States. Repression of free speech in Europe and elsewhere in the West has resulted in harassment, financial costs, and threatened criminal charges against those who have dared to speak the truth. While most Americans feel themselves insulated against such worries, they may find themselves in the crosshairs of those seeking to stifle all opposition at any time in the future.

The Truth – Offensive or Not

On February 27, 2009 the Center for Security Policy and the International Free Press Society held a press conference to discuss recent attacks on free speech around the world. Speaking to a packed room at the National Press Club, the speakers called for an international First Amendment and for the banning of all hate speech laws. The press conference featured Geert Wilders, the Dutch Parliamentarian whose documentary about radical Islam’s war against Western civilization, Fitna, has caused uproar across the globe.

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney
Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney opened the event saying, “We are in the midst of a titanic struggle” between Islamic Shariah, a theo-political program, and “everything we hold dear.”

“The insinuation of Shariah legal codes and practices into Free World societies includes the effort to impose Shariah blasphemy, slander, and libel lies in the West,” Gaffney stated. According to Shariah, he said, “it is impermissible to engage in speech or writings that “defame” Islam or otherwise offend its followers.” If one didn’t know better, one might think the United Nations was under Shariah already.

Gaffney said that Americans must oppose all efforts to impose these restrictions in the West. “Every concession that is made in the face of such threats is an abridgement of our freedom,” he said. “We bear the responsibility for having allowed our freedoms to become as curtailed as they have because of our failure to confront such threats more effectively in the past,” he challenged. Geert Wilders is in the front lines of this battle, Gaffney said.

The next speaker, author Diana West, is Vice President of the International Free Press Society. West said, “The ideal speech protections . . . lie in the American First Amendment.” She called the First Amendment a “lodestar for efforts to repeal hate speech and blasphemy laws in Europe.” She warned, though, that even though America does not yet have the repressive “hate speech” laws of Europe, “Americans have increasingly submitted to personal and institutional codes of self-censorship.” These codes have come about through the desire for political correctness. But more recently, they are being experienced “under the influence of specifically Islamic speech codes.”

Author Diana West, Vice President of the International Free Press Society

“We obviously don’t need a campaign to install a First Amendment here,” said West, “but there is a crucial need in this country to reestablish, or, perhaps better – reassert – the full range of political expression and debate that it guarantees.”

West was followed by Lars Hedegaard, President of the International Free Press Society. Hedegaard said that hate speech and blasphemy laws are common in many European countries. As with most knee-jerk reactions stemming from the desire to be politically correct, these laws lack clarity as to precisely what they aim to criminalize.

“We live at a time when free speech is under the heaviest attack we have experienced since the Nazis tried to impose their absolutist rule two generations ago, said Hedegaard. “At a time when we should be exchanging views and information about the real threats to our civilization and whole way of life, Western countries and international organizations are busy trying to shut down free discourse.”

“We need to repeal all hate speech and blasphemy laws that are now being adduced to take away our liberty,” Hedegaard concluded. He then introduced prime example of the attacks on free speech, Geert Wilders, MP. Wilders had recently been arrested and deported from England where he had traveled to speak and show his film Fitna at the invitation of members of the House of Lords. The British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who barred Wilders from England, is the same person responsible for the Orwellian “anti-Islamic activity” phrase that is now used to describe Islamic jihad terrorism. She has allowed radical Islamist sympathizers from Hezbollah and other jihad organizations free access to the United Kingdom.

Lars Hedegaard, President of the International Free Press Society

Geert Wilders began to a standing ovation. “It’s always a pleasure to cross a border without being sent back on the first plane,” he said wryly, telling the audience what he had told the United States Senate when he spoke to them on February 26, 2009. At a screening of Fitna Wilders told the Senate that “the European liberal establishment” is “blinded by their cultural relativism.” Possibly addressing a few Senators who had more in common with the European liberal establishment than with himself, he continued, “Their disdain of the West is so much greater than the appreciation of our many liberties … the left once stood for women rights, gay rights, equality, democracy. Now, they favor immigration policies that will end all this. Many have even lost their decency. Elite politicians in Europe have no problem to participate in or finance demonstrations where Muslims shout ‘Death to Jews.’ Seventy years after Auschwitz they know of no shame.”
At his press club screening of Fitna Wilders said, “What we once considered our birthright, we now have to battle for. . . . Will we leave our children the values of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, or the values of Mecca, Gaza, and Tehran?”

The Fitna displayed the values of Mecca, Gaza, and Tehran in image after sobering image. Including quotations from the Koran dealing with treatment of infidels, the killing of Jews, Christians, and others who do not embrace Islam, and the actual footage evidence of the global jihad in which radical Islamists are engaged today, nothing was contrived. Nothing was taken out of “context” in the film, as the context is global jihad. Often condemned as “offensive,” the only offensive aspect of the film is the offense against humanity being committed by the jihadists. And yet even free speech advocates have distanced themselves from Fitna and from Wilders.

Enforcing freedom, or repression?

A statement from the International Free Press Society condemns this as hypocrisy, saying that “Opinion leaders in West, while claiming to support free speech in the abstract, invariably argue against it in cases where speaking freely may “offend” Muslims, in effect acting as enforcers of Islamic, rather than Western, law.”

“ In recent years,” the statement continues, “we have seen Western societies mobilize not only courts of opinion, but also courts of law to protect Islam from criticism and debate . . . The European Union has advanced a kind of newspeak that would in effect make it illegal to link any totalitarianism or terrorism with Islam. The United States Government has issued similar guidelines prohibiting such linkage in official communications. Meanwhile, the United Nations, including the UN Human Rights Council, has become the engine driving the effort to enforce a worldwide ban on criticism of Islam.”

Because of IRD’s focus, the political and social witness of the churches, I asked Wilders if churches in the Netherlands had supported him. “You expect them to be the first on the line in the anti-jihad movement,” said Wilders ruefully. (Not if you’re familiar with most American churches!) But Wilders receives support at the grassroots level from church members, while church leaders in the Netherlands were “the first to say nasty things about Fitna.” Media elites try to silence him. CNN called him “the Al Qaeda of the Netherlands.” But Wilders retorted that defending our culture and values is something of which to be proud. And he expressed some hope because the public in Europe is “fed-up with the cowardly political elitist government.”

Netherlands Member of Parliament Geert Wilders
Wilders concluded by offering suggestions to address radical Islam. Mosques in Europe have been funded by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, the Emirates, and Bahrain. Those funders choose imams that preach jihad as is documented in Mr. Wilders’ film. Government leaders concerned about terrorism need to closely monitor the mosques in their communities and stop the spreaders of hatred and terrorism. And all of us should be concerned about the virulence of hate speech laws, supporting the call for an International First Amendment that guarantees us permission to speak freely.

Dr Richard Land

Dr. Land tells why the Washington DC headquarters of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention is named after John Leland of Virginia.  

Orthodox Forum | by Fr. Symeon | Nov. 24, 2009

On the one hand there are those who find it [the Manhattan Declaration] “shocking” and part of the culture war, etc. These are frightened that the document will be perceived as harsh and unloving, etc.. God forbid that anyone Christian ever stand in public for Truth. And on the other hand those that are relieved to see an Orthodox Pastor with backbone to stand with others and speak truth to error, truth to power, and truth to the politically correct stricture in our society that is choking free speech and seeking to criminalize Truth. – If this much sets you off, don’t bother to read further.

My Bishop, fifth generation Orthodox priest, survived the Holodomor, the systematic starvation of between 10 and 20 million people mostly Christians in Ukraine by the communist in 1932 and 33. His father was forbidden to celebrate divine liturgy – all Christian worship was forbidden. He celebrated liturgy anyway and at the end of the service the local commissar showed up and told the congregation to return at 3pm that he had a wonderful surprise for them. He asked the priest to remain behind to help him prepare it. At 3pm the people returned and the priest was hanging upside down on the church doors. They held the crowd at gunpoint and slit the priest’s throat. My bishop at age 14 watched his father bled like a pig on the church doors.

He escaped the communist on the way to “reeducation camp” and in the fifties made his way to America. About ten years ago, at least before 9/11 he asked me one day, “Father tell me, why are all these news people constantly painting everything that is good about America as evil and everything that is evil in society and is killing this country as good.”

I told him what I knew to be true. “It is the spirit of the anti-christ trying to snuff-out the brightest light on the planet.” He said, “These people are sitting on soft couches in a grand cathedral God has ordained, throwing bombs at the foundation walls. And still they are going to be the most shocked when the entire edifice comes tumbling in around them.”

I have for more than fifteen years, been beating the drum about Christian persecution around the world. Until 9/11 no one would listen, and then they only listened for a very short time. Now every news media is as silent as they were on 9/10, as silent as they were for two generations. The death toll is in the millions. We think it isn’t about to happen here?

If something truly drastic does not happen shortly, it surely will happen here. Stricture of “laws” keeps slowly closing on free speech and soon, very soon it will be illegal to preach the Gospel. Oh yes, it will be legal to preach “some sort of feel-good inspirational gospel of all inclusion love and antinomian heretical grace, but the second you add that salvation comes also by living Jesus’ moral teachings, you will be in violation and the second you say that Salvation is by Jesus the Person, and not through feel-good inspirational all inclusive antinomian love, you will be in violation.

We are already crossing the lines of ‘political correctness’ to speak the truth and political correctness is constantly being incorporated into law. It is an all out assault on truth in this country and Truth is a person, Jesus Christ.

-Archpriest Symeon

Andrew Klavan on the Culture.

This guy’s take on Political Correctness is both entertaining and sobering.

Great combination – enjoy!