“Religious liberty” has been in the media a lot lately so this piece is hardly news. But as Mississippi prepares to roll its “Religious Freedom” bill into law on July 1, apparently there’s still room for an opinion. Here’s mine:
Too many Baptists don’t understand “religious liberty.”
That liberty is foundational to Baptist understanding and practice of faith. An unwavering commitment to religious liberty gave us our start and got the first, ornery American Baptist exiled from the New England colonies. Roger Williams insisted that freedom meant freedom for all. (Could it really be called “freedom” if all people don’t have it?) Let the Jews be Jews. Let the Turks be Turks (Muslim). Let the papists be papists (Roman Catholic).
In that place of exile he called Providence Plantations (Rhode Island), where he paid the Narragansett tribe for a patch of their land, Williams also insisted those natives could practice their animism, their spirited and superstitious non-Christian religion. Williams may have thought they were wrong about those beliefs — maybe he feared they were going to hell for them — but he was absolutely sure they must be allowed the freedom to believe as they chose. Without the “liberty of conscience” there is no true faith.
And it was that Baptist spirit, insistent on real, actual, true freedom for all people — Christian and Muslim and Jewish and animist and atheist — that led the Danbury Baptist Association in 1801 to express concerns to President Jefferson, whose affirmative reply memorialized the all-important if rarely-understood “wall of separation between Church and State.”
Because of our history Baptists should understand that religious liberty means freedom for all people — whether you agree with their religion (or their non-religion) or not. So, when I read about Mississippi’s new “Religious Freedom” law — and all the Baptists who are celebrating it — I’m confused.
Come July it will be legal in the “Hospitality State” for Christians who own businesses, operating within the secular marketplace governed by our secular constitution, to defy the law of the land affirming same-sex marriage with impunity. Christians whose religious convictions are offended by same-sex marriage or a transgender identity may discriminate, legally, against these people.
And that’s religious liberty? For whom?
I understand that religious convictions are strong, and sincerely held. They should be. I understand that those of a particularly conservative brand of Christianity might celebrate that their freedom to exercise their understanding of faith within the secular arena has been validated.
But, as a Baptist, I can’t understand calling this “religious freedom.”
This “freedom” doesn’t necessarily represent the sincerely held beliefs of Jews and Turks and papists and animists and atheists. It doesn’t even represent the religious convictions of all Christians! The so-called “freedom” of these Christians to practice their discrimination denies the legal rights guaranteed by the constitution to other individuals in our society. It also infringes on the beliefs of the people who will experience this legalized discrimination — most of whom are religious and hold equally-sincere beliefs.
So conservative Christians may feel victorious that the government has given them the right to express their religious convictions in opposition to the law of the land, but that is not religious freedom; it’s just a certain brand of conservative Christian freedom.
The Baptist instinct invites us to a broader vision that courageously, uncompromisingly invites us to let freedom ring — for all.
Liberty does not cling to the past, it embraces the future. Liberty does not insist on conformity, it celebrates difference. Liberty does not constrict, liberty … liberates! True religious liberty is not afraid and it does not need any government to give a nation its religious values. If Christians want a culture of Christian values, it is the job of the Church and individual Christians, emboldened by the liberty of love, to model those values for our culture — not to have them imposed by the hand of the State.
I’m praying today for the gay and transgender citizens of Mississippi, some of whom will soon feel the binding restraints of legalized discrimination. And I’m praying for many Baptists in our land who are too bound, yet, to know the expansive freedom of true religious liberty.