It’s really troubling to me the extent to which American Christianity is now a kind of tribalism that argues for special treatment of their kind of Christian. People who want businesses to be able to opt out of offering birth control don’t want businesses to be able to opt out of paying for war–even though being pacifist is just as much a “sincere religious belief” as being opposed to birth control. Businesses owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses have health plans that allow blood transfusions. If we’re going to allow a doctor to refuse to perform life-saving abortion, are we going to allow a Jehovah’s Witness doctor to refuse to perform a blood transfusion?
What are “sincere” religious beliefs? Current political discourse (and media coverage) suggests that only right-wing, pro-war, anti-abortion people are sincerely religious. Supporting a particular political agenda makes you a real Christian, as far as they’re concerned. When pro-war Christians talk about Christian arguments for pacifism, suddenly it isn’t whether a belief is sincerely held, but whether they think pacifism is really authorized by Scripture. James Dobson argues that sharia law requires terrorism, yet he doesn’t argue that their terrorism should be permitted, even though he thinks Muslims have sincerely held religious beliefs requiring them to be violent, and he argues that the law should not require that people violate sincerely held religious beliefs.
It would be interesting to know what kind of crossover there is among people who insist that people should be allowed to exempt themselves from laws on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs” AND who are engaged in fear-mongering about Muslims and sharia law. I suspect it’s pretty large.
My point is simply that this isn’t an argument for allowing exceptions for sincerely held religious beliefs–it’s an argument for treating members of some religious groups better than others. So, this is an argument that “we” are entitled to better treatment by the government than “they” are.
And that argument usually comes down to a no-true Scotsman argument. All real Christians have this political agenda (which is, I think, how they think they’re avoiding the antinomianism problem). If you don’t have that agenda, you aren’t a real Christian. Suddenly, sincerity isn’t a measure–anyone who disagrees with them isn’t sincere. And, so, since they read the Hebrew Bible as advocating all political power being invested in people of the correct religion, they think that the Christian way to behave politically is to ensure that people with their religious beliefs (the in-group) should be held to different standards, given more power, and have their religious beliefs preferred, even centralized. They advocate a system in which people like them are treated differently from others. They think the laws should favor them.
Jesus also faced an issue of laws. He was in a tradition with an emphasis on certain behaviors, and he said he wasn’t saying those laws should be rejected (although he also said certain ones should) but/and he said that intention mattered. Breaking the rule about the Sabbath was fine if you were part of doing something good, for instance. Breaking laws about touching blood was possibly good. Appearing to follow the law could be bad if your heart was in the wrong place.
Paul, similarly, advocated breaking various laws, and insisted on abiding by others that fundagelicals don’t follow (assuming you read Timothy as a genuinely Pauline text), such as women teaching in church. Very few Christian churches follow what Paul said about sex. He advocated celibacy as the best practice, after all. And he doesn’t advocate non-procreative sex, so were all Christians to follow all of Paul’s rules on sexual behavior, they would try to be celibate, and, if that wasn’t possible marry, and not engage in any birth control. And, really, even the Catholic church has given up on that–they allow birth control, just not effective birth control–which they call “artificial contraception.”
Everyone agrees that you need to take the major messages of Scripture, and stick with passages that reinforce those, and reject the ones that are just “cultural.” You would be hard-pressed to find a Christian, even one citing Leviticus on men lying with men, who doesn’t have a garden with mixed seeds. And let’s talk about cattle breeds.
So, how do we choose what laws to follow?
You could do it numerically, by what themes are most common. Bible verses that insist you honor God are pretty common, perhaps dominant; ones that ask you have a personal relationship (whatever that means) with Jesus are a much rarer than current Christian discourse might lead you to think. (Ones about Hell as a place of eternal punishment are up there with fig trees being bad, by the way.) Verses that ask that God smite your enemies are pretty common (along with killing babies, usually of the enemy), but I’d like to emphasize the large number that have to do with God asking that we take care of the marginalized—the poor, the widows, and orphans (who would have had no method of support in that economy). So, it seems to me, there are an awful lot of verses asking that we take care of those whom the market would ignore. The Hebrew Bible demands ethical treatment regardless of economic situation, and insists that the rich care for the poor.
The Hebrew Bible could be read (if you turn your head this way and kind of look at it that way) as only insisting on ethical treatment of in-group members. That’s how various Christian thinkers justified slavery—some argued that the rules regarding slavery only applied to fellow Hebrews, so enslaving Christians was wrong. Then, when one argument for slavery was that it made heathens in Christians, the argument shifted to those rules meaning that … argle bargle…they don’t apply to US slavery. Jesus explicitly (and, probably, deliberately) rejected that interpretation. Jesus said, quite clearly, ethics means treating all people the same, regardless of group membership. That’s the whole point of the good Samaritan story—you care for the people not of your religion, just as you would people of your religion.
And that was, and is, radical.[1]
When Jesus said “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” he didn’t say, “unless they’re out-group.” He didn’t say, “Look out for your tribe first.” He didn’t say, “Do unto others, except like really really others…” He said ethical behavior transcends group membership. Jesus calls us to treat Muslims as we would want to be treated. And, certainly, people who can call themselves Christian can find things in the Hebrew Bible to justify treating Muslims badly, and I could dispute those readings, but I don’t need to, because they can’t find any way to get past what Jesus said: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
People who want their kind of Christianity to get special treatment can find texts in the Hebrew Bible that they can work to support their claim (I’d say they’re misreading, but that’s a different point), but they can’t get past what Jesus said.
[1] But it wasn’t necessarily new, and Christ was not establishing the only tradition to follow the rule that an ethical behavior means treating in- and out-groups the same way—look at the long tradition of Jewish activism on behalf of other groups.