As we have just witnessed in some of the responses to last week's Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, there are those in our country who would not only diminish religious liberty through government coercion but denigrate as an archaism that our culture should jettison. According to C.J. Werleman in Salon, "The hyper-religious conservatives on the bench of the nation's high court, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, see the federal government as being controlled by 'secular humanists' who wish to make war against the purity of the Christian belief system. Like the 89 million Americans who count themselves as evangelicals, they seek total cultural and political domination ... The American Taliban is on a roll" – and America is a "corporate theocracy."
Yikes - all that from a decision that says a privately-held company can't be forced by the government to serve as a conduit for potentially abortifacient drugs. Who knew?
Granted, Werleman's comments are extreme. Still, they nonetheless reflect the rage of those for whom religious liberty is a matter of ultimate privacy – one's personal thoughts and occasional, four-walled worship. Rather, religious liberty is the very foundation of all other liberties: If our liberties and dignity do not come from a personal, sovereign Creator, from whence do they come? And if they do come from Him, then government's role is one of stewardship of those rights, not manipulation or erasure of them.
So, when government seeks to curtail religious liberty, it is affronting the God Who gave it, and asserting its authority to abate all other freedoms. If the ability to believe and practice (in public as well as private life) one's faith is eroded, what is the foundation of our other rights and liberties? The whim of the state is an unnerving master.
FRC has been at the forefront of the effort to "preserve, protect, and defend” our religious liberty, which is why we wanted you to know about our most recent publication, "Hostility to Religion: The Growing Threat to Religious Liberty in the United States."
This publication, collated by the Director of FRC's Center for Religious Liberty, Georgetown-trained lawyer Travis Weber, contains a list of documented accounts of hostility toward faith in the United States today, broken down in the following four definable types of incidents:
- Section I: Suppression of Religious Expression in the Public Square
- Section II: Suppression of Religious Expression in Schools and Universities
- Section III: Censure of Religious Viewpoints Regarding Sexuality
- Section IV: Suppression of Religious Expression on Sexuality Using Nondiscrimination Laws
"Hostility to Religion” can be both downloaded and shared on-line at no charge. Please use this resource in considering the stakes for people of faith in a culture in which articulate religious belief is viewed by some as comic and pathetic and, thus, unimportant and disposable. We need to keep making the argument, graciously but consistently and firmly, that religious liberty matters – to everyone.
