LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 128

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

But then we’ve also seen a change of religion internally. We saw the collapse of the mainline churches. And
Neuhaus’s phrase “the mainline became the old line,
which became the sideline.” Obviously, your community is one of the few that resisted that collapse. But
you can see some of your neighbors, other congregations, which have caved, one by one by one on the
issues that I’ve discussed today.
We’ve seen a splintering within my own communion,
the Catholic Church. We’ve seen the splintering between the so-called spirit of Vatican II Catholics and
the John Paul II generation, which severely weakened
the Catholic witness in the United States. Now we’re
seeing a disengagement from young evangelicals —
young evangelicals who don’t want to be seen engaged on these controversial cultural war questions.
The result is what the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith calls “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” The
average young person, the average person of my generation, believes in the moralistic, therapeutic God
in the sky who wants them to be happy and doesn’t
want you to be mean. And those are the only two
characteristics of that god. He wants me, the believer,
to be happy, and he wants you to not be a jerk.
The second historical change that we’ve seen is a
change in the state. If the American founders were
to come back today and hear about the Little Sisters
of the Poor Supreme Court case, the first thing they’d
say wouldn’t be, “Well, the First Amendment protects them.” The first thing they’d say is, “What is the
Department of Health and Human Services, and why
are they issuing a mandate to an order of nuns to cover abortion and contraceptive devices?” What gives
the federal government jurisdiction to be regulating
the health-care plan of Roman Catholic nuns? Or the
evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby? Or the Mennonite owners of Conestoga Wood?
The growth of the state means it regulates more
aspects of our lives, which means it has a greater
likelihood of infringing upon freedom. Religious
freedom, in particular. We once had an ecosystem of
freedom in the United States, where the presumption
was that a citizen was free to pursue his or her own
goals according to his or her best judgment. Now we
have a presumption of government regulation, and
we have to justify our exemption. So rather than the

128

|

UPON THIS ROCK

government justifying why it has to burden the nuns,
the nuns have to go to court to justify their exemption from this regulation. It’s turned our relationship
between the citizen and the state upside down.
And then lastly, we’ve had a change in sexuality. At
one point, Christian teaching about sexuality was
the public understanding of sexuality, so that we can
see that Thomas Jefferson, the least religious of the
American founders, could say that the God who gave
us life, gave us liberty at the same time and those
things went together. The American founding wasn’t
the French Revolution, where Diderot says, “Man will
never be free until the last king is strangled by the
entrails of the last priest.” Religion and freedom at
loggerheads. That wasn’t our founding. And it wasn’t
our tradition until the sexual revolution pitted sexual
freedom at odds with ordered liberty. The founders
would have viewed the sexual revolution’s understanding of liberty as license. It’s not the ordered liberty that the founders talked about. It was the license
that they said couldn’t exist in an ordered republic.
So if you put these pieces together, you can answer
this question: Why is it that the ACLU is only against
religious freedom when it’s a conservative Christian
pharmacist who doesn’t want to dispense the morning-after pill? Or a conservative Christian baker who
doesn’t want to bake a same-sex wedding cake? Or a
conservative Christian adoption agency that wants to
find children homes with moms and dads? The ACLU
has no problem with the Muslim inmate growing a
half-inch beard. It has no problem with the Native
American ingesting peyote. The ACLU has no problem
with the Amish who want to homeschool their kids.
The ACLU’s problem only touches on contraception,
abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender issues.
So in my closing remarks, I want to suggest that’s
where we need to place our focus. That it’s not just
an isolated baker over there, a photographer over
there, an adoption agency in Massachusetts, a school
in Salt Lake City. When you add all of these pieces
together, what you are seeing is that there is an entire
new vision of the human person. What’s at stake here
are two different anthropologies. To a certain extent,
the history of the Christian Church is a response to
heresy. Heresy pops up and then orthodoxy springs
into action. And that’s how we develop richer understandings of orthodoxy.
“Special Presentation”