Appeal for Religious Liberty to a Culture Embracing Pride Month

In the summer of 1999, I worked for Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, lobbying Congress to pass the Religious Liberty Protection Act. One day, as I walked along a DC sidewalk, I saw the Human Rights Campaign rallying to defeat that same legislation. Suddenly, it came together in my mind. Gay rights would be equated with racial civil rights. Any opponent of gay marriage would be seen in the same light as crude racists. The result was inevitable.

It took years for the scenario to unfold, which was like living out a nightmare in slow motion. While other Christians and conservatives fought for traditional marriage, I focused on religious liberty. I hoped Christians would at least be allowed to operate with legal parity in the American system rather than be officially marginalized as a low-level terrorist group. Ideally, we might be disliked, but we could still be part of the public square. This fraught situation is yet to be resolved, but a betting man would be unlikely to wager on the side of orthodox Christians.

For this reason, I’m appealing to non-Christian friends. I want you to see that religion is core to who Christians are. Yes, we still want to be good neighbors. No, we’re not trying to manipulate American society for our own ends. But we cannot compromise our convictions. We believe America can still be a place that welcomes a plurality of ideas into the public square. It can be a place where tolerance is still maintained.

Shrinking Steel Box

Part of the existential dread I’ve felt watching this situation play out over the last quarter century comes from the recognition that I (and people like me) occupy a shrinking steel box. It’s closing in on us. The only way out is to pay tribute to public opinion, the emperor of the age. But we can’t do that. No matter how reasonable it may seem to think we can simply change our minds and see things differently, we can’t.

Most of our countrymen don’t understand us Christians. They view our opposition to the revolution in human sexuality as a conservatism they can defeat through enough activism and pressure. It’s true that conservatives tend to resist change, preferring the tried and true over the novel. But mere conservatives change course when circumstances seem to demand it. Several conservative opponents of gay marriage changed their views when a son or daughter announced they, too, hoped for a same-sex union. Their change proved these activists were conservatives and not Christians at their core. The distinction is critical.

Most of our countrymen don’t understand us. They view our opposition to the revolution in human sexuality as a conservatism they can defeat through enough activism and pressure.

True Christians have always resisted cultural conformity. The pagan culture around the earliest believers was full of worship. Promiscuous with their religion, people worshiped their own gods—and everyone else. Certainly, they had to participate in the official cult. That wasn’t a problem for anyone except the Jews and the Christians. The Jews got something like an ethnic exception (perhaps today’s Muslims are benefiting from a similar dynamic). But the Christians couldn’t make that claim. Their refusal was obnoxious to the world around them.

That’s where we are now. You’re a bad and dangerous person if you won’t wear the Pride jersey or the pin or attend the wedding ceremony. Eventually, the moral outrage may spread to whether you list your pronouns. (That’s probably already the case in some places.) It won’t be enough to think ill of the one who resists. He’ll need to be officially disfavored, removed from the ranks of acceptable people, set in a corner until he thinks better and offers one of those humiliating apologies that eats away at integrity like acid.

Why We Resist Cultural Conformity

Why do it? Why put ourselves through that? It’d be logical to find a loophole and reconceive the Christian faith. We’d all like to get back into step with the cult of the culture. To be like us is to be isolated, to be thought bigoted, to be written off . . . to be made vulnerable. It’s like watching a meteorite fly toward you and knowing you cannot and will not move.

Why not move? Why not make the performative gesture? Why not do something to make all the pain and pressure go away? The answer is that religious conviction isn’t like a brand of clothing you wear or an ice cream you eat. Christians are encumbered. We’re carrying something we can’t let go of.

My life changed radically at age 18 because God found me in a way I could never unravel. In one sense, I made a series of choices. In another sense, I was a dancer performing scripted choreography. The most compelling thing in my life is the Christianity I’ve learned from the Bible. It’s as real to me as gravity. More real. What I see when I look at the Bible can’t be reconciled with our culture’s view of sex and marriage. It can’t be reconciled with men marrying men, women marrying women, and men and women trying to change their genders. That’s true whether we look at the New Testament or the Old.

So when you ask me to do the performative act, to make the ritual observance in line with the new cult of the culture, you’re asking me to turn my back on something more fundamental to me than my own family or marriage (and those things are fundamental). It’s who I am and what I profess down to the atomic level and then into the spiritual realm. I can’t be what you demand I become. I can’t be that without engaging in a craven, self-destructive act that betrays everyone holding faith with each other and with God on the matter.

True to God

Some urge Christians to consider that they’re simply wrong about their own tradition and sources. Most of what you might say to me along these lines would resemble what the serpent said to Adam and Eve in the garden: “Did God actually say . . .?” (Gen. 3:1). Such sophistry is part of the wide road that leads to hell.

Some may argue that much of what the New Testament has to say about homosexuality comes from the apostle Paul—as though I’d willingly cut out the part of the canon by the foremost author of the letters to the churches. And what of Paul himself? He’s the greatest of the converts, having gone from zealous persecutor to missionary to the Gentiles. How could you explain such a conversion other than through a direct encounter with the living Lord just as Paul described? No, I can’t isolate Paul.

That’s where we are now. You’re a bad and dangerous person if you won’t wear the Pride jersey or the pin or attend the wedding ceremony. Eventually, the moral outrage may spread to whether you list your pronouns.

It’s often claimed that homosexuality and transgenderism are states of being rather than choices. Neither I nor anyone else actually accepts the idea that a “state of being” justifies any and every behavior, but it’s important to note that for those of us who are devout practitioners of our faith, something akin to a “state of being” but even more powerful applies. We’re not only worried about being true to ourselves but about being true to the God of the universe. No matter what penalty or stigma you might propose or inflict, we compare it to betraying our Creator and cannot do the thing you hope we would do. We are not flexible. This is who we are. It’s very much like a state of being. It’s the state of being someone who is submitted to God’s will.

We draw lines unbelievers can’t or won’t understand—not out of a desire to discriminate or oppress but to keep faith with our God. We appeal to the quintessential American right of religious liberty. Go your way with your Pride month and your weddings and what have you. Don’t force it on us. Allow us to live, work, and operate businesses and organizations without putting a hand on the back of our necks or trying to make us bend the knee. We can be the best of citizens if you don’t compel us to do things we believe to be unholy.