Last month the Supreme Court made a monumental 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges which legalized gay marriage nationwide. Every justice who voted in the minority on this case wrote separate dissenting opinions. For days this decision was the major focus of both traditional and social media.
Christian views of this decision have been predominately negative, and a great deal of ink has been spent in an attempt to determine what impact this decision will have on religious freedom. Some of us suspect that Christian colleges and universities may face accreditation issues in the future, and that church’s tax exempt status may be threatened. Some go further and believe this is simply one more step in a chain of events that will lead to greater and greater marginalization of Christians and eventually to open persecution.
While I am more optimistic than some, the marginalization of biblical Christianity in the public square is something we must deal with in light of the new legal reality in our country. In particular, we need to make a concerted effort to cultivate a general philosophy of law that will continue to permit the practice of biblical Christianity.
Take for example the cases of Christian bakers, photographers, and caterers who have been forced as public accommodations to offer their services at gay weddings or for gay marriages. While the majority of people in the United States believe there should be exemptions in such cases, the current legal reality is that there are not such exemptions. Christian caterers who do not want to cater a gay wedding face a choice between their conscience and their livelihood. The same goes for bakers, photographers, and others who offer wedding-related services that are considered public accommodations.
If we want to live in a society where such exemptions are live legal options, we need to cultivate a philosophy of law that permits them. In this regard, legal positivism can present a threat to the free practice of biblical Christianity. If the appropriate authority makes a law that has a negative impact on the free practice of Christianity (or any religion), then there is essentially no recourse, no appeal to moral principles that supersede human law.
What we must convey to the public at large is that legal positivism, in which law is merely a social construct enacted by legitimate authorities, is not only a threat to biblical Christians, it is a threat to nearly every individual of conscience. The Muslim, the atheist, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Jain, the humanist, could all be equally negatively impacted by laws that run roughshod over individual conscience. Suppose legitimate authorities passed a law requiring the observance of the Sabbath, from sunset on Friday evening to sunset on Saturday evening. The freedom of conscience of an atheist could here be infringed upon.
Traditionally, we have recourse to a theory of rights. That is, the atheist has the right to be irreligious, and a human law is incapable of robbing him of that right. Genuine rights supersede human law, should the two come into conflict. It is not merely the case that the atheist is free to violate the law, it is actually the case that this “law” is not a law at all because it does not have an appropriate relationship to justice itself. As St. Augustine stated, appealed to by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “an unjust law is no law at all.”
However, this natural law view of the law has been rejected in our current cultural context. Law is that which is enacted and enforced by appropriate authorities. Given this, law is little more than a tool to be used as a function of public opinion. This is why Justice Kennedy can find in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution a meaning that for the better part of 135 years was not considered to be there. There are not inalienable rights protected in the supreme law of our land, there are merely words which have a changing meaning depending on how they are interpreted and whose tribe has the cultural wind behind their sail at the moment.
If, as biblical Christians, there is any hope of preserving our God-given inalienable rights, it is in recognizing that those rights are actually God-given and inalienable and in demanding that human law be constrained by justice itself. No human authority, whether the President or the Supreme Court, has the legitimate authority to overturn justice itself or to deprive any individual of a right bestowed by God. Rights are something we discover, truths about our nature that come from reality itself. They are not, and never will be, mere legal constructs invented by a bare majority of a court whose use of language is only slightly sloppier than its legal reasoning.
Christian views of this decision have been predominately negative, and a great deal of ink has been spent in an attempt to determine what impact this decision will have on religious freedom. Some of us suspect that Christian colleges and universities may face accreditation issues in the future, and that church’s tax exempt status may be threatened. Some go further and believe this is simply one more step in a chain of events that will lead to greater and greater marginalization of Christians and eventually to open persecution.
While I am more optimistic than some, the marginalization of biblical Christianity in the public square is something we must deal with in light of the new legal reality in our country. In particular, we need to make a concerted effort to cultivate a general philosophy of law that will continue to permit the practice of biblical Christianity.
Take for example the cases of Christian bakers, photographers, and caterers who have been forced as public accommodations to offer their services at gay weddings or for gay marriages. While the majority of people in the United States believe there should be exemptions in such cases, the current legal reality is that there are not such exemptions. Christian caterers who do not want to cater a gay wedding face a choice between their conscience and their livelihood. The same goes for bakers, photographers, and others who offer wedding-related services that are considered public accommodations.
If we want to live in a society where such exemptions are live legal options, we need to cultivate a philosophy of law that permits them. In this regard, legal positivism can present a threat to the free practice of biblical Christianity. If the appropriate authority makes a law that has a negative impact on the free practice of Christianity (or any religion), then there is essentially no recourse, no appeal to moral principles that supersede human law.
What we must convey to the public at large is that legal positivism, in which law is merely a social construct enacted by legitimate authorities, is not only a threat to biblical Christians, it is a threat to nearly every individual of conscience. The Muslim, the atheist, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Jain, the humanist, could all be equally negatively impacted by laws that run roughshod over individual conscience. Suppose legitimate authorities passed a law requiring the observance of the Sabbath, from sunset on Friday evening to sunset on Saturday evening. The freedom of conscience of an atheist could here be infringed upon.
Traditionally, we have recourse to a theory of rights. That is, the atheist has the right to be irreligious, and a human law is incapable of robbing him of that right. Genuine rights supersede human law, should the two come into conflict. It is not merely the case that the atheist is free to violate the law, it is actually the case that this “law” is not a law at all because it does not have an appropriate relationship to justice itself. As St. Augustine stated, appealed to by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “an unjust law is no law at all.”
However, this natural law view of the law has been rejected in our current cultural context. Law is that which is enacted and enforced by appropriate authorities. Given this, law is little more than a tool to be used as a function of public opinion. This is why Justice Kennedy can find in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution a meaning that for the better part of 135 years was not considered to be there. There are not inalienable rights protected in the supreme law of our land, there are merely words which have a changing meaning depending on how they are interpreted and whose tribe has the cultural wind behind their sail at the moment.
If, as biblical Christians, there is any hope of preserving our God-given inalienable rights, it is in recognizing that those rights are actually God-given and inalienable and in demanding that human law be constrained by justice itself. No human authority, whether the President or the Supreme Court, has the legitimate authority to overturn justice itself or to deprive any individual of a right bestowed by God. Rights are something we discover, truths about our nature that come from reality itself. They are not, and never will be, mere legal constructs invented by a bare majority of a court whose use of language is only slightly sloppier than its legal reasoning.