Shrinking the "Public Square"

Good For All of Us

The US Supreme Court has made a decision in recent days that is significant for maintaining religious liberty in the United States.  We have blogged previously (here, here, here, here, and here) about the "Hobby Lobby" case where a private company, owned by Christians, refused to comply with the Federal Government's Diktat that it must pay for abortifacient drugs for its staff.  The Court has ruled that the Hobby Lobby owners do indeed have the right to apply their religious beliefs and conscience to their business and have upheld their freedom-of-conscience right to refuse to pay for abortifacient drugs to secure abortions for any staff that might seek them. 

The Obama administration has argued that churches (as employers) could legitimately be exempted from its Diktats on the ground of religious liberty--but not businesses because they were not religious organisations.  To Christians, who believe that all of one's property--as an extension of one's life and conscience--must be conformed to Christ's lordly reign, this was a terrible overreach by the government.  The State was presuming to declare that only certain rarefied parts of human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could enjoy religious freedom.  To Christians, this was a claim in direct contravention of the command of our Sovereign Lord that whatever we do, even the most mundane things, such as eating and drinking, are all to be done to the glory of God.  (I Corinthians 10:31; Colossians 3:17; I Peter 4: 11,12). 

Thankfully, the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Hobby Lobby, which is a tremendous boon to Christians, and all people, in fact.  Pete Kasperowicz of Breitbart News reviews the case:

Separation of Church and State

Princeton's Robert P. George on Religion in the Public Square

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Warehouse Full of Guile

Posted on Saturday, December 21, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

[In this important piece Douglas Wilson addresses the issues of the religious foundations of secularism and how that religion is being enforced upon Western citizens.  The specific occasion is the brouhaha that has broken out over the entertainment company A&E trying to enforce its morality upon its staff and contractees--in this case the Duck Dynasty, Robertson family.  The secularists and the talking heads and the Commentariat generally think this is a jolly good thing.  Beliefs and views such as those held by the Robertson's are to be expunged from the public square.  And, the argument runs, A&E are perfectly entitled to insist that their contractees do and act as they require.  Except, bakers and photographers have been prosecuted for refusing their services to homosexuals pretending to marry.  The secularists hold to both positions.  What comes out in the wash is a startling declaration of how secularism wants to repress and oppress that which it utterly rejects--namely, the Lord Jesus Christ and His Church. Ed.]

The contradictions of the secularist mindset have been exposed numerous times, but it is a rare opportunity when this happens while millions of people are staring at it.

Put another way, the rhetoric of tolerance and mutual respect as preached by these intoleristas is a sham, a farce, a lie, a trick, a subterfuge, a whopper — it turns out we have a lot of words for this activity — a fabrication, a deceit, a mendacity, an inaccuracy, and a warehouse full of guile.

They constantly practice their form of the bait and switch, and every once in a while they get caught. And every once in a great while, they get caught with half the country looking on. When this happens, their attempts to explain themselves usually attain to the level of “Uh, aliens kidnapped me. What year is it?”

After my first post on L’affaire Robertson, one of my commenters raised a point which I then passed on to my Twitter feed, to wit, “Why does A&E get to refuse to do business with someone based on their views on sex, but bakers and photographers can’t?” This got retweeted a bunch, and this is how I think the question came swimming into the ken of folks who usually don’t have to try to answer these things. But millions are looking at this tolerance face plant . . . let’s have a try.

Urbane or Prophetic

Paul at Athens

When Christians engage in the public square--that is, in any public debate, whether in the local community or the parliament--some counsel we must become as secular as everyone else.  We must win over the opposition using their frames of  reference.  We must appeal to natural law, reason, and common sense.  We must check in our Christian guns before riding into town to the OK Corral. 

Some claim biblical and apostolic warrant for such an approach.  They argue from Acts 17 where Paul was in Athens, debating with Greeks in the agora, that this is precisely what the Apostle himself did.  Consider the following:

What can we glean from this encounter?  St. Paul, without compromising his message, tailored it to his audience.  He spoke in Hellenistic rather than Judaic terms, as a philosopher more than as a Christian theologian, in a manner that engaged them rather than repelled them.  He relied on common grace rather than on the knowledge and acceptance of Christian doctrine.  "I have become all things to all men," he says in the book of Corinthians, "So that by all possible means I might save some."   [Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Chicago: Moody Press, 2010) p. 117.]

This is a simplistic, unsatisfactory reading of the text.  It is not an uncommon one, however.   A careful reading will quickly show the error of Gerson's and Wehner's view.

Pragmatism Under Christian Veneer

Insult to Injury

In the Wild West the legend has it that tough sheriffs demanded folk check in their guns before going into town.  There are some who argue that Christians should do the same when they come into that great metropolis called the "Public Square".  This would seem to be a view shared by two Christians, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner who have argued a case for Christian involvement in politics.

Here is the heart of their argument:

Oxymorons Aplenty

Private Religion Only Need Apply

One potent component of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the author's ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works.  It befouled everything it touched. 

We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history.  These have not been fictional representations.  They are the real article.  Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent.  Reading these words makes Reagan's "honorific", the Evil Empire appear apt.  But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization--the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.

Choosing Whom to Believe

Mutiny Not Just on the Bounty

One of the more pernicious lies abroad is the that there is a demarcation between the secular and the spiritual.  For the Unbeliever, the secular is the real.  The spiritual realm is either an imaginary weird construct or an unassailable realm of private, personal identity.  Either way, it is irrelevant to the real business of life.

Many Christians have either bought the lie or fallen under its sway.  They have come to accept Jurgen Habermas's distinction between the private and the public spheres.  The private sphere is, well, private. Personal.  Soul stuff.  That's where religion is believed and practised.  At most it should influence no more than a family household--and even that is contentious.  Church is where people who have the same private beliefs about God gather and encourage each other in their private religion.  Such religion is tolerable to Habermas.  He cares not whether the religion is true or not, as long as it is kept private--or irrelevant.