Alright, alright. I need to get some things off my chest.
As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I’m not very amused by the fact that conservatives everywhere are bellyaching about the fact that the church is being persecuted and that this is the beginning of the end for religious liberty in the United States of America. Honestly, there is absolutely no reason for all of those people to be getting thrown into a frenzy because of a new equality law. And no, this is not the beginning of a downward moral spiral for this nation. Sorry.As Cory notes in his piece on Bedlam, the main problem here is that the church just plain isn’t used to not getting its way on things like this. I hesitate to use the word “lost” because it implies that there are sides, but frankly, the church “lost” a battle that it thought it needed to win. So now, there are all these people claiming that God is going to judge our country and judge us for allowing these terrible morals into the legal system.
The only thing is that guarding the legal system was never the job of Christians. Our job is not to keep the government in check, making sure that it only passes laws that we approve of. Our job is not to impose our own religious beliefs on the entire nation. That is what will cause the downfall of religious liberty.
Because do you know what that sounds like? I’m not saying anything bad about Muslims, because we are called to love them unconditionally as well, but that sounds like the situation in a lot of Middle Eastern countries that most Christians would not approve of. There, Muslim religious and moral laws are imposed on everyone, regardless of whether they follow Islam or not. Most people agree that isn’t right, so why is it any different here? The answer is that it isn’t.
Also, it is my personal belief that any Christian who says that God is going to judge our country for allowing this law to be passed should stop. Why? Because it’s just not true. I wholeheartedly believe that.
The reason for that is twofold.
First of all, I just do not believe that God consciously judges individual countries or people groups in the present day. I believe that ended in the Old Testament. And the reason I believe that is because God has opened His arms to all nations of the world. He wants there to be Christians from every nation and every people group. Believers no longer come from one single nation, and sorry to break it to anyone, but the United States is not the epicenter of Christianity. It just isn’t. God’s plan doesn’t revolve around the United States, so it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for Him to judge this country just because we happened to pass a law that a lot of people happen to disagree with.
Second, I believe that the fact that this country exists presently is also a sign that God isn’t going to judge us simply for passing a marriage equality law. In case you didn’t know, the United States has a pretty messy history. We aren’t the white saviors of the world like some people might like to believe.
To start off, this country basically exists because several different European countries systematically committed genocide of the countless Native American groups that occupied the Western Hemisphere for years before they arrived. Those people were made in the image of God.
Next, this country allowed people to be enslaved and treated as property all because of the color of their skin. They were persecuted and treated as less than human because of their outward appearance. Those people were made in the image of God.
Then, women weren’t allowed to vote or participate in the governmental sphere because they were deemed to be less intelligent and inferior to men. People thought that they wouldn’t be able to handle it. That was less than 100 years ago. Those people were made in the image of God.
Having said all of that, I think that if God has allowed our country to remain standing after genocides, enslavements, and treating other people as if they are less than human for one reason or another, I wholeheartedly believe that our country will be fine after simply passing a law that gives everyone equal legal rights as everyone else.
So today, another group of people is being treated as fully human, meanwhile, anyone is still perfectly free to disagree with us, so religious liberties are still intact. And this is great, because we are made in the image of God too.
That’s my take on the status of America.
Good day.
Another Anomaly Among Many 