A number of issues animate voters this election cycle — immigration, abortion, free speech, and our country’s involvement in foreign affairs. Another central question for many voters concerns the future of Christians in this country.
Conservative Christians tend to argue that they face unprecedented persecution for the expression of their faith. More progressive persons, whether secular or religious, tend to worry that religious protections have gone too far, claiming they contribute to a growing “Christian nationalism” that seeks to discriminate against others and instill a more theocratic system of laws on the public.
The New York Times’s David French recently argued in a video for “Holy Post” that both sides should relax. To conservative Christians, he declared that religious liberty is not in danger and that American Christians are arguably the freest religious group in the world. To progressives, French said that judicial decisions over the past 20 years have merely bolstered legal protections for Christians equal to those given to others.
French is correct on several points. First, Christians do not face the same kind of legal and social persecution rampant in other parts of the world.
Christianity loves its martyrs — those tortured and killed for professing and living out their faith. Tertullian (160-240 A.D.) wrote that “[t]he blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Those atrocities continue to occur in places such as China, North Korea, and parts of Africa, to name just a few.
Here, believers are not rounded up into prisons for their faith. While targeted attacks have taken place, they are not the regular, much less systematic, occurrence they are elsewhere.
Second, French is correct regarding judicial enforcement of religious liberty. The Supreme Court has consistently sided with litigants advocating religious liberty for more than two decades. The current court has been especially protective of religious adherents against laws, regulations, and other government actions seen to discriminate against or inhibit them.
We should be thankful for those facts. They afford American Christians with privileges in expressing their faith not experienced by many brothers and sisters across the world.
Yet French’s argument depends upon and thus suffers from the narrowness of its vision. There is more to our circumstances than where he chooses to set his gaze.
Regarding persecution, French seems to posit an all-or-nothing standard: Either religious persons face imprisonment, torture, and death, or they only encounter “challenges” or occasional “injustices.” We can keep proportionality in perspective without concurring with this framing.
Consider a New Testament example. St. Paul received legal protections to which he appealed in the book of Acts. That he needed to make such appeals did not exonerate the Roman Empire but instead further implicated it.
Likewise, in significant portions of the United States, Christians do face unprecedented animosity from the government, state and national. People assert the protection of constitutional and legal provisions against the government when public officials try to force them to speak and act contrary to their faith. Thus, the fact that Christians now have to go to court so often displays a change in how many in political power view them. It subjects persons such as Jack Phillips in Colorado to a weaponized and seemingly interminable legal process. It puts Christians under the crushing weight of state and national bureaucracies. And, even where not successful in legal suppression, these efforts certainly seek to try and make the suffering seem not worth it.
These observations lead to a second point. French focuses almost exclusively on Christians’ legal status to make his point. However, this view brackets much of actual human life from serious analysis. Beyond governmental actors, Christians in many places face significant attacks. In the workplace, they face reprimand, even firing for adhering to their beliefs. Their children are force-fed arguments and pressured to conform to lifestyles that directly defy the same. Finally, severe pressure from neighbors and on online platforms can ostracize people of faith, pegging them as bigots and even as accomplices to death. These accusations are made against beliefs that Scripture teaches and that the church has held for thousands of years.
Calling the above something more than “challenges” is not some spoiled fit by Christians that they don’t get their way anymore. Instead, it recognizes that humans are more than their physical bodies. Moreover, they are more than a legal status or its consequent judicial outcome.
Instead, humans are mind and will — beings with souls. Moreover, they are meant not just to live next to each other with a shared police force. Instead, humans are meant to live in community. Such communities only really exist where their members share in some sort of common life. Christians ostracized from their neighborhoods might not receive bodily lashes. But, as human beings, they in such situations receive society’s scourging of their souls.
Christians are called to endure such treatment by loving their enemies and, as part of such love, speaking the truth. But that call to endure does not mean saying there is nothing endured. Nor does recognizing such trials as less awful than those faced by other Christians across the globe eliminate their status as trials.
Toward the end of his video, French quotes, approvingly, President John Adams’s statement that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Yet Adams’s claim seems in tension, if not at odds, with what French had just argued.
In the past, statesmen such as Adams and George Washington recognized that our political community must share principles of justice in common. They knew that these principles did not arise out of public opinion or thin air. They understood them as grounded in God, revealed both in natural law and in special revelation.
The bias against many Christians by government officials and by other Americans not only mistreats fellow citizens. Such beliefs and actions undermine the foundations that have made America a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.
In the end, America needs the church more than the church needs America. The church, in fact, will outlive this election and this country. Thus it is not only true for us to recognize the current threats to religious freedom. And it not only is right for us so do to. It is for our own good, lest we lose our grip on the values and beliefs that made this country what it is.
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Adam Carrington is an associate professor at Ashland University.