The Layman – June 2005 Volume 38, Number 2 – Posted May 27, 2005

The sad, silent evil of ‘religious’ freedom In the “bad” old days, when all Christendom believed more or less in the same thing, men and women measured their conduct on the basis of good and evil, living into their salvation wrought by Jesus Christ. Despite a sometimes bumpy road through his kingdom on Earth, these convictions became a strength and, along the way, they changed the world. Alas, today that strength is disparaged and some so-called modern church leaders have joined a broken-world chorus by denigrating Scripture as “the words of men” (Confession of ’67) rather than acknowledging it as the God-given standard for measuring good and evil. This institutional worldview and the spawn of its offspring in philosophy, science, technology, politics and culture continue to unravel what’s left of the historic unifier in Western civilization – what G.K. Chesterton called the “idea of wonder” in Christianity. It splinters and re-imagines the plain text of Scripture and the doctrines of the 16th century Reformers in a Byzantine effort to replace good and evil with “It’s not so bad” and “It could be better.” This revisionism, this ignoring of “good” and “evil,” takes many forms. One instance occurs when church leaders equate any practice – no matter how isolated, strange or illegal – with “religion,” simply because the perpetrators of such a practice may declare it to be so. Underlying this acceptance, of course, is the assumption that all paths to salvation are valid. A case in point involves a lawsuit by an obscure Brazilian-based religious sect that seeks to prevent the United States government from prohibiting the sect from using a hallucinogenic tea in its ceremonies that worship spirits in plants and animals and encourage ritualistic vomiting. The case now is before the U.S. Supreme Court. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has supported the sect by filing an amicus curiae brief. Accepting the sect’s claim that it is a religion, Kirkpatrick argues that it is entitled to “religious liberty” and, therefore, its drug use – no matter how dangerous – should enjoy constitutional protection. (In the interests of full disclosure, Kirkpatrick was joined in the amicus curiae brief by the Christian Legal Society, the Queens Federation of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals. The Presbyterian Lay Committee is a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, but does not agree with that organization in this case.) On the surface, arguments in favor of religious liberty sound so sensible and reasonable as to preclude any questioning of such freedom. A person in today’s society should be able to worship as he or she pleases, right? Probing beneath the surface, however, one discovers the fatal flaw. These proponents conspicuously have neglected to define religion or, for that matter, liberty. According to their vagaries, anything that calls itself religion is so, simply by virtue of the claim. Doesn’t this elevation of the bizarre to the level of Christianity fly in the face of “Thou shalt have no other gods before me?” (Exodus 20:3). Doesn’t it violate the first Great End of the Church – the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind? Doesn’t it defy the Great Commission (Matt: 28:19)? In the “bad” old days, church leaders would label such assumptions heresy. Today, however, having done away with the standard for discerning good and evil, there is no such thing as heresy. Thus, the institutionally religious continue to go about their business, presuming that it is God’s business. And that’s the sad, silent evil of “religious” liberty, and is illustrative of a denomination grown more political, bloated and distorted in its failed attempt to be all things to all people. Today’s curia seemingly has forgotten what the church leaders in the “bad” old days never did: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). The Apostle Paul didn’t forget. When preaching in Athens, a city whose diversity welcomed multiple and mutually contradictory truths, he emphasized the truth – the one truth that Athenians of that day and their progeny among today’s denominational leaders find intolerable. The upshot, without that truth, is that we are living within the shadow of the fall without the sense of wonder engendered by the hope of the resurrection. We have become church wanderers searching for the rebirth of wonder, bereft of a safe and secure faith in which to take refuge from a world that seemingly has gone mad, escaping from a denomination that has strayed from the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. In the “bad” old days, church leaders knew that “the truth and the life” was the only “way.” Too bad some of today’s church leaders can’t see that.

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