Why is it that so many on the left, so many liberals in the United States, do not see religious liberty as an authentic right? They used to. Why do they not now see it as a right that should be honored among others? They currently see it as something that may have to be forfeited or compromised.
A photographer may be coerced to take photographs of a same-sex wedding. A conscientious Christian baker may be forced to bake a theme-specific cake for a homosexual wedding. The pharmacist may be coerced to participate in euthanasia or in abortion or in contraception of some form that might cause an abortion. Churches get shut down during a pandemic while abortion clinics, tattoo parlors, liquor and gambling enterprises remain open. You have this growing coercion in our culture that religious liberty is going to have to take a back seat, and that raises a host of issues.
Kevin Baine, a First Amendment attorney, just wrote an article in The Washington Post asking the question, “Is Religious Freedom a Liberal or Conservative Value?” Referring to the recent Supreme Court decision on New York CV-19 lockdowns of Churches, Baine wrote in his article, "To be sure, the justices who favored the injunction are generally seen as conservatives and those who opposed it are generally thought of as liberals. But what does it mean to be a liberal or a conservative when it comes to enforcing the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom? Don't liberals generally have a more expansive view of the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights? And aren't conservatives more likely to defer to the decisions of elected officials that might be seen as curtailing those rights? That, he argues, "was how liberals and conservatives lined up on issues of religious freedom in the last century."
So the point that's being made by Kevin Baine is basically that liberals should see religious freedom as their cause too. But the fact is that, increasingly, they don't, and they admit that they don't right out loud.
But every once in a while, something happens in the culture that indicates a turning point.
The November 25 Supreme Court Decision
On Wednesday before Thanksgiving the Supreme Court barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed on religious gatherings.
The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The ruling was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role. Among other things, Gorsuch stated “The bill of rights is not suspended in the midst of a pandemic."
It turns out that this issue has revealed some really important elements, some big challenges to religious liberty. Here are some observations on the ruling,
One response to the ruling came in a jointly written opinion piece that was published in USA Today. The sub headline is “Public Health Loses and Privacy's at Risk.” How’s that for a pessimistic take?
The authors are Laurence H. Tribe and Michael C. Dorf. Laurence Tribe is a professor emeritus at the Harvard Law School. Some 20 years ago the left-leaning Tribe was a likely Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president, but it never happened. Since then, the Democratic Party has moved way left of him. But Laurence Tribe has defined the constitutional left in many arguments for the better part of the generation. The other author is Michael C. Dorf, a professor at Cornell University.
What they both accused Justice Gorsuch of doing in his concurring opinion is reversing a previous precedent that had been undertaken by the court in a ruling that was handed down in a case in 1905 known as Jacobson versus Massachusetts. That ruling had to do with smallpox vaccinations back in the beginning of the 20th century. But the main point that is made in the Tribe/Dorf article is that the argument that was put forward by Justice Gorsuch is going to put leftist causes at risk. I hope they are right. They say the Supreme Court ruling and Gorsuch’s opinion threatens a right to privacy that includes contraception, abortion, child-rearing, sexual partners and determination of how one faces death. They blame Gorsuch for suggesting that enumerated rights trump un-enumerated rights. In other words, rights that are written specifically in the Constitution are more important than artificial rights (recently made-up rights such as abortion and gay marriage). As you probably know, abortion and gay marriage are not even mentioned in the Constitution. But religious liberty and the right to free speech and the right to assemble are. As Gorsuch said "The bill of rights is not suspended in the midst of a pandemic." That raises an important point.
The Real Question
Is religious liberty just one right among other rights, or does religious liberty—and the other liberties that are explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution—stand over against what we might describe as more newly invented artificial rights?
Religious liberty, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and other enumerated rights in the text of the Constitution, are right there—you can read them. They're in the English language, they are printed right there in the text. And these newly declared artificial rights that aren't enumerated just aren’t in there. Read the Constitution over and over again, and find a reference to abortion. You know already, it's not there. Same-sex marriage, not there. You could go down a long list of issues that aren't there.
So the question is then, are the rights that aren't even in the Constitution equal to the rights that are enumerated in it? What we have seen in recent decades and especially right now, is that newly invented rights, whether it's abortion or the entire kaleidoscope of LGBTQ, are pushing religious liberty out. And religious liberty is actually in the text of the Constitution.
The liberals used to be very concerned about state imposition of power. But you'll notice, now that they're trying to drive a revolution in the culture, they want the state to coerce. They're going to be very disappointed if the state doesn't coerce.
As Adventists, we should stand up for religious liberty against all attacks be they from the left or the right. That is the ethical Christian approach. Right now, all the attacks are coming from the left, and many of our left-leaning RL leaders don’t recognize this as a threat.
They see the left as more of a friend and the other side (often Christian themselves) as a perennial threat. Even some individuals in the SDA Religious liberty departments see John MacArthur as an unfortunate abuser of liberty, unscientific and low on compassion. I’ve witnessed this in person.
What the left fears is that the defense of religious liberty that we saw from the Supreme Court on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is a sign of the future, and they see that future as scary. They are fearful that the Supreme Court may stand as a barrier to everything that they hope to accomplish post January 20, 2021.
Why Does the Left Have Less Affection for Religious Liberty Now Than in the Past?
I believe the answer to that is twofold.
They are in a revolution, a moral revolution.
They have developed a greater affection for something else.
Moral Revolution
Without Christ, people are anxious to change things around them, in hopes of changing the self that they hate. In Jesus, we move from something less to something greater. We move from the worship of self to the worship of our Creator. We move from love of self to love of God. In short, we move from bad to good. Lacking that, people try to change their surroundings to conform to their emptiness inside.
The moral revolution is an attempt to shift culture away from biblical values to man’s fallen values. It celebrates lust in place of love; it substitutes unbridled desire for purity. It is inordinate affection(s), well illustrated by the LGBTQ agenda. And that leads us to the second answer.
Greater Affection
In our fallen state, who do we love? Ourselves. That's the way it works in other dimensions of life as well. The left in the United States has not decided, “We don't care about religious liberty”, it's just that they care about religious liberty less than they used to. Why does the left in the United States have less affection for religious liberty than they had in the past? Because they have found a greater affection for something else. What would that greater affection be? It is the newly invented ‘rights’ of the sexual revolution. These rights that aren't in the text of the Constitution… You'll not find them there. And they are certainly not found in the Bible, a Book that the left has come to hate.
These unenumerated ‘rights’ are the rights that are trumpeted by the cultural left in the United States. These are the rights that students on college campuses are told that are superior rights to rights like religious liberty or freedom of speech. But the left is now willing, or for that matter, determined to sacrifice those old enumerated rights that are there in the text, constitutional rights, like religious liberty, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech, because they now worship at the altar of greater rights. And by the way, they're the ‘rights’ that aren't even in the Constitution but have been declared by courts in their service to the moral revolutionaries.
Covid-19 Concerns
The CV19 liberty issues confronting our world, and by extension the Church, boils down to this: Is religious liberty is just one right among other rights? Does religious liberty and the other liberties that are explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution stand above what we describe as more newly invented artificial rights?
There is a real danger that rights denied or abridged during one emergency for one class of people will ultimately be denied during another emergency for another class. When government seizes upon opportunities, even legitimate opportunities for action, and extends itself into action, it almost never contracts from where it has extended itself.
To quote from Barack Obama's advisor Rahm Emanuel "Never let a good crisis go to waste." In other words, use the opportunity of the crisis to gain political power, to expand the government. This was very much an agenda of the Obama administration, to put the government in where it's never gone before, knowing that after the crisis it will not leave. And that's one of the big dangers in the COVID-19 pandemic, and that danger intensifies as we go into the new year with a new administration, an administration that may well try to follow this very motto, don't let a good crisis go to waste.
They extend government, knowing that it will never contract. And that means also, extend government at the expense of certain liberties, especially religious liberty, knowing that the government's actions in the course of the pandemic will be very difficult to reverse. That encapsulates the concern that many of us have over recent government expansions during the CV19 issue.
Summary
So why the horror from the left over the recent Supreme Court decision? They are concerned that it’s a signal that the Supreme Court is not going to just willingly go along with the moral revolution. The Supreme Court has not reversed that revolution, but it has at least put itself in the way of it, and to its credit said that religious liberty is right there in the Constitution. The free exercise of religion—it's there in the text.
For now.
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