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Government establishing religion is not what concerns Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Richard Land. The danger he foresees is the government interfering with the free expression of religion—a threat he explained in a March 7 chapel message to the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention staff.
Recalling the First Amendment guarantee that Congress “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” Land said all of the restrictions in the First Amendment are placed on the government.
“They’re there to keep the government from messing up the church,” he insisted.
Land recalled the position of noted Baptist preacher Roger Williams two centuries earlier in stating that there ought to be a wall of separation between the “garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Land described Williams’ conviction that the wall protected the church from the intrusion of the state.
“For the rest of your lifetime and mine, the greatest dangers to religious freedom are not going to be violations of the establishment clause with the government getting into the religion business,” Land said. “It’s going to be violations of the free exercise clause with the government seeking to confine and limit your ability to share your faith and to live your faith beyond your own home and your own church building.”
That attitude is reflected in a move away from the term “freedom of religion,” he said, in favor of “freedom of worship.”
“Freedom of worship is an emasculated, atrophied form of freedom of religion,” he responded. “Freedom of worship only protects the space between your ears and the space between your shoulders. It protects your home and maybe your place of worship, but it does not protect your Christian school, your Christian charity or your gospel outreach.”
In contrast, he said, “The free exercise of religion guarantees the right to live out your faith and to share your faith. That’s why it’s called the first freedom. It’s the freedom without which all of the other freedoms are meaningless.”
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press are included in the First Amendment to protect the freedom of religion, he explained.
“Freedom of religion is under assault today in an unprecedented fashion by the federal government,” Land argued. “We currently have an administration that either fails to understand or rejects the clear meaning of the First Amendment.”
Recalling the recent Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission case involving ministerial exemption in hiring, Land told of a Lutheran schoolteacher who appealed her firing by complaining to the EEOC that her rights had been violated. “The Obama administration took up her case, arguing that a church school had no more special protections under the First Amendment than a country club.”
That position was so extreme that the Supreme Court rejected it on a 9-0 vote, he said.
A similar mindset is behind the recent federal Health and Human Services ruling that reproductive services must be covered in all health insurance programs offered after August 2013—including those that can cause abortions, he said.
“In other words, it doesn’t matter if a Catholic charity, a Baptist hospital, a Catholic TV network or a Baptist college believes either contraception, abortifacient, or sterilization services are abhorrent and unconscionable, they’re going to force you to pay for them for your employees.”
President Obama announced Feb. 10 an accommodation that he said protects religious organizations by making insurance companies responsible for paying for contraceptives and sterilization, but critics contended his solution was insufficient. Some described it as an “accounting gimmick” that would still require religious organizations to be complicit in paying for employees’ abortion-causing contraceptives through their insurance companies. They have pointed out the president’s accommodation would not protect faith-based insurance plans or individuals who object to paying for such products.
“This shows a willful ignorance that many of these institutions are self-insured like us,” Land said, adding that the Southern Baptist-related GuideStone Financial Resources covers over 200,000 people with such policies. “We’re not going to pay for insurance that causes abortions,” Land insisted.
“We’re faced with a real problem. Either we violate our conscience and pay for insurance that covers reproductive services or we will refuse to do so and have to pay a fine for religious convictions in America and not have health insurance for our families.”
Land added, “We have a First Amendment protection against that kind of coercion from the government, but clearly the administration is acting like it’s violating the establishment clause as well as the free exercise clause and behaving like a secular Vatican granting papal indulgences to those it chooses.”
While advocates of the plan claim it ensures access to birth control and focuses on Catholic objections to contraception, Land said, “This debate is about coercion, not Catholics; conscience, not contraception, freedom, not fertility, and principle not pelvic politics.”
“We can only continue to have these freedoms if we defend them. That’s part of what being salt is,” said Land, calling on Southern Baptists to follow Jesus’ instruction in Matthew to be salt and light to the world.
“Salt keeps a dead thing from becoming a rotting thing. It has to touch that which it’s going to preserve,” he said. “Light has to be close enough that people can see the light and feel the heat.”
America must have a revival that leads to spiritual awakening for real change to occur, Land said. “As the saved who have been revived and the lost who have been awakened apply the truths of Scripture, that’s called a reformation, and that’s what we must have.”
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