Time to Take a Stand - Word Foundations

I wrote the following in July of 2019, as part of a series titled “Principles of Liberty.” The series explores ten biblical principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Later, I would release a 5-session Bible study series that carries the same theme.

The article where this content originally appeared is available here.

Principle 8: Government does not grant rights but has the responsibility to recognize, maintain, and protect them.

Read carefully this portion of Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Obergefell, the June 26, 2015 Supreme Court ruling that mandated same-sex “marriage” nationwide.

Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The Framers created our Constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it.

Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits.
—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—

The “right” to same-sex marriage was carved out of emotional appeals and myths; it was fabricated by government manipulation and exploitation. No such “right” is unalienable [or God-given]; it is bestowed by government, regulated by government, and subject to government whims.

Let us also understand this specifically about the Court’s redefinition of marriage. With Obergefell, elitists moved natural, man-woman marriage itself under its own jurisdiction. If government can grant rights, then it can twist them, reshape them, manipulate them, and even take them away. This is tyranny, and it is a form of tyranny that is even worse than the oppression our forebears opposed and fled. Justice Thomas understands as do far too few just how contrary to America’s founding principles Obergefell is.

Same-sex “marriage” and other “rights” created by government elites are based on what the late Francis Schaeffer called “arbitrary absolutes.” Because the imposition of arbitrary absolutes is unbiblical and constitutes tyranny, Christians must oppose these and similar actions. Our opposition must include, but cannot be limited to, our 1) upholding biblical truth in the form of the Founders’ perspective on rights as unalienable and fixed (see Principle 5), as well as 2) our contending for the Founders’ belief that absolute truths, including right and wrong, exist and are knowable (see Principle 2).

Dr. Schaeffer believed that no government that acts to impose its own version of morality on society can amiably coexist with citizens who hold them accountable by pointing to bedrock, immutable truths. The early church faced a similar scenario when its members refused to worship Caesar as lord because they knew only Jesus was and is Lord. In America the confrontation won’t be one about actively worshiping government elites as deities, but leftist tyrants will demand allegiance nonetheless. Just ask Barronelle Stutzman. Barronelle is a Christian florist in Washington State who politely turned down an invitation from a gay man and a friend who’d been a customer of hers for 10 years. He wanted her to arrange flowers at his “wedding” ceremony. She declined because of her commitment to Christ and biblical principles, including what Scripture says about marriage. Barronelle has been in court defending her religious liberty rights for many years now, and her case still is unresolved. [Update, July 2, 2021; also go here.]

The need is urgent. Christians must actively oppose “the tyranny of the elites,” and they must do so on an ongoing basis. If they don’t, their inaction will amount to surrender and a forfeiture of religious and economic freedom. Schaeffer offers a sentence for his readers to memorize. “To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.”

To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.
—Francis Schaeffer—

Dr. Schaeffer’s words, in context:

Rightly defined, secular humanism — or humanism, or secularism, or whatever name you may wish to use — is…a vicious enemy. Here again balance is important by means of careful definition. The word humanism is not to be confused with humanitarianism, nor with the word humanities. But humanism is the defiant denial of the God who is there, with Man defiantly set up in the place of God as the measure of all things. For if the final reality is only material or energy which has existed forever and has its present form only by chance, then there is no one but finite man to set purely relative values and a purely relativistic base for law and government.¹

[H]umanism haș no final way of saying certain things are right and other things are wrong. For a humanist, the final thing which exists — that is, the impersonal universe — is neutral and silent about right and wrong, cruelty and non-cruelty. Humanism has no way to provide absolutes. Thus, as a consistent result of humanism’s position, humanism in private morals and political life is left with that which is arbitrary.²

The danger in regard to the rise of authoritarian government is that Christians will be still as long as their own religious activities, evangelism, and life-styles are not disturbed.

We are not excused from speaking, just because the culture and society no longer rest as much as they once did on Christian thinking. Moreover, Christians do not need to be in the majority in order to influence society.

But we must be realistic. John the Baptist raised his voice, on the basis of the biblical absolutes, against the personification of power in the person of Herod, and it cost him his head. In the Roman Empire the Christians refused to worship Caesar along with Christ, and this was seen by those in power as disrupting the unity of the Empire; for many this was costly.

But let us be realistic in another way, too. If we as Christians do not speak out as authoritarian governments grow from within or come from outside, eventually we or our children will be the enemy of society and the state. No truly authoritarian government can tolerate those who have a real absolute by which to judge its arbitrary absolutes and who speak out and act upon that absolute. This was the issue with the early church in regard to the Roman Empire, and though the specific issue will in all probability take a different form than Caesar-worship, the basic issue of having an absolute by which to judge the state and society will be the same.

Here is a sentence to memorize: To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.³

Notes:

¹Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1984), 34–35.

²Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 128.

³Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? 256-257.

The statements from Dr. Schaeffer cited in footnote #2 are quoted by Bill Muehlenberg in this post.

top image credit: Alliance Defending Freedom