Health Care Laws and the Failure of Minimal Toleration

Yuval Levin writes about the HHS mandate and the meaning of religious freedom

So basically, the religious institutions are required by the government to give their workers an insurer and that insurer is required by the government to give those workers abortive and contraceptive coverage, but somehow these religious employers are supposed to imagine that they’re not giving their workers access to abortive and contraceptive coverage. If religious people thought about their religious obligations the way HHS lawyers think about the law, this might just work. But they don’t.

And that’s just the point here. This document, like the versions that have preceded it, betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience. Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It’s not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law. It’s not “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” but the right to answer to what you are persuaded is the evident and inflexible reality of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. It’s not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must.

Governments have to recognize that by restricting people’s freedom to live by the strictures of their faith they are forcing them to choose between the truth and the law. It is therefore incumbent upon the government of a free society to seek for ways to allow people to live within the strictures of their consciences, because it is not possible for people to live otherwise.

There are times, of course, when the government, in pursuit of an essential public interest, simply cannot make way for conscience, and in those times religious believers must be willing to pay a heavy price for standing witness to what they understand to be the truth. But such moments are rare, and our system of government is designed to make them especially so. Both the government and religious believers should strive to make them as rare as possible by not forcing needless confrontations over conscience. And in this case, I think it is just perfectly clear that the government has forced a needless and completely avoidable confrontation and has knowingly put many religious believers in an impossible situation. It is no secret that most of America’s largest religious denominations are opposed to abortion, and that some are opposed to contraception as well. And there are many alternative means by which the government can (and does) make abortive and contraceptive drugs and procedures available to people. The purpose of refusing to provide a religious exemption from this rule would therefore appear to be to force religious employers themselves to make those drugs and procedures available—to bend a moral minority to the will of the state. It is not only a failure of statesmanship and prudence, it is a failure of even the most minimal toleration.

--Yuval Levin, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/339566/new-round-intolerance-yuval-levin

What Does it Mean to be Baptist? Part 2- Church and State

Those of us who think of Mark Dever as a pastor often forget that he did his Ph.D in church history. In this excerpt, Dever discusses an issue that Nathan Finn alluded to in yesterday's post: namely, that the Baptist view of the church as a voluntarily gathered body of regenerate believers was considered radical until a few centuries ago (excluding, of course, the first three centuries of the church). Dever draws out the implications of the idea of regenerate church membership for the relationship between church and state.

"Recapturing the New Testament picture of a church of believers challenged the assumptions most people had made since Constantine, namely, that the state is responsible to provide fo rthe church and the church is responsible for guiding the state. The strongest connection of this sort between church and state continued among Constantine's heirs ans others in the Eastern Orthodox areas. In the East, what has been called caesaro-papism treated the church as the responsibility of the ruler; in effect, to see Caesar as the pope, thus the name. In the West, a less centralized and more varied relationship has existed between church and state. Whereas the state typically held the dominant position in the East, especially since the rise of Islam, the church typically had predominance in the West, given its more centralized organization and tradition of enforcing episcopal jurisdiction over rulers. At times emperors were excommunicated, and entire cities were interdicted--unthinkable in the East.

During the Protestant Reformation the leading theologians continued to affirm the traditional Western understanding of the relationship between church and state. Whereas a somewhat more passive (Lutheran) or aggressive (Calvinist) stance was taken toward the magistrate's authority, the various reformations effected little immediate change in the state-church relationship. A nation facing a reformation would focus on the questions of which church to recognize and which structures to adopt, two questions about theology and leadership that did not disrupt the basic unit of the European parish. Protestant nations varied in their answers to these questions. But in no magisterial reformation was the local parish dissolved or replaced.

As we have seen, the Baptist denial of infant baptism crucially imperiled the Constantinian church-state settlement in Western Europe. The Baptist belief in regenerate church membership made the relationship between citizens and their church, and thus between church and state, voluntary. This would have been unthinkable in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Ultimately, the Baptist ecclesiology provided the seed for the birth of the modern notions of freedom of religion, in which no one church is established and the rights of every religion are secured. As Christians tried to answer the simple question, "Who should be baptized?" they found that their answer to that question had tremendous effects. If they concluded that only believers should be baptized, that would preclude having a membership that was co-extensive with the general population and so effectively would preclude having an established church."

 -Mark Dever, The Church: The Gospel Made Visible

A Lutheran and a Baptist Testify before Congress on Religious Liberty

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/02/19/a-lutheran-and-a-baptist-testify-before-congress/

The Most Important Supreme Court Ruling on Religion in 20 Years

See Justin Taylor's link.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/01/11/the-most-important-supreme-court-ruling-on-religion-in-20-years/

"This is a huge win for religious  liberty."
--Douglas Laycock, University of Virginia Law School

"It is not just a spectacular win on multiple issues and with multiple (indeed, all) justices on board, but it's the Court's sweeping language that is so important...The words of the various justices' opinions ring out like a liberty bell for religious freedom."
--Carl Esbeck, University of Missouri, Law professor

Finally, a word on religious liberty from a Baptist, written to King James I of England in 1612. He was imprisoned for writing it.

"The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual lords over them...If the king's people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our Lord and King can require no more: for men's religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man."

--Thomas Helwys, 1612 (English Baptist), A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity