Not long after the Supreme Court decision on the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, I wrote an article examining the issues involved from the perspective of New Testament interpretation. I quickly sent it off to a popular Christian publication hoping to enter into the public debate.
Well, I am now 0 for 3 at article submissions being accepted by this brand of magazine. Or maybe I should say that I am 3 and 0 at being rejected. Alas, such are the trials of a would-be popular author.
So, rather than submit myself to another 4 – 6 week waiting period, I have decided to make the article available here on my blog. I hope you will find it informative and stimulating as we all continue to think about the best ways to display our kingdom citizenship to the watching world.
Wedding Cakes, the New Testament and Ethics in the Public Square
by David Crump © July 2018
The recent Supreme Court ruling on the Masterpiece Cake Shop vs. Colorado 
Civil Rights Commission case has pumped equal amounts of fervor into both sides of the latest battle in America’s culture wars. The court admitted that it was making a narrow, not a landmark, ruling which offers little in the way of precedent for future civil rights vs. religious liberty cases. Consequently, cheerleaders on both sides – evangelical Christians applauding for Masterpiece Cake Shop and civil liberties activists lamenting the ruling’s implications for gay rights – are getting ahead of themselves as to what this decision means for similar battles in the future.
As Eugene Volokh, law professor at UCLA, wrote on the day of the decision, it “leaves almost all the big questions unresolved” (Reason. 6/4/18).
Mr. Phillips claimed that decorating a cake intended for a gay wedding would violate his Christian conscience. His opponents recall the systematic,
racial discrimination of Jim Crow laws that only started to be overturned during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. That post-Civil War era of legalized racism was commonly justified on religious grounds. White southerners opened their Bibles, too, and cited proof-texts demonstrating that desegregation would violate their Christian faith.
Only two days after the Supreme Court decision was announced, South Dakota state representative Michael Clark (R.) was already waving the banner of a segregationist revival – though he later recanted. “He [Mr. Phillips] should have the opportunity to run his business the way he wants. If he wants to turn away people of color, then that’s his choice,” said Rep. Clark (Dakota Free Press).
Jeff Amyx of Grainger County, Tennessee has posted a “NO GAYS ALLOWED” sign in the window of his hardware store for the past 3 years.
He argues that discriminating against homosexuals is integral to his Christian faith and witness. In response to the Supreme Court decision, Mr. Amyx told local reporters, “Christianity is under attack. This is a great win…”
Even though the Supreme Court’s ruling explicitly disavows any attempt to
make it a justifying precedent for future discrimination cases, the logical possibilities are clear. At least, they seem clear to people like Michael Clark and Jeff Amyx. We will have to wait and see how the courts eventually sort out these questions.
In the meantime, the evangelical church should stop and take some time to examine whether or not there is a solid scriptural foundation beneath Mr. Phillips’ appeal to religious conviction. Is there, in fact, a sound Biblical argument under-girding the claim that decorating the cake for a gay wedding violates Christian morality? To put it more broadly, do Christian business people compromise or deny some part of their faith in Jesus Christ when they provide personal services to others outside the church who are entrenched in lifestyles that the church considers sinful?
I believe the answer to that question is a resounding no. Mr. Phillip’s scruples in this case are not a model for others to follow. Just the opposite.
Let’s examine the issues one step at a time.
The apostle Paul put a premium on maintaining a clear conscience. Mr. Phillips appears to understand that. Paul’s discussion of whether or not Christians can eat meat originally sacrificed to idols (pagan temples were the most common butcher shops at the time) reveals that believers are sometimes free to disagree. At times, personal consciences may vary (1 Cor. 8:7-15). What is right for one person may not be right for another. But everyone is expected to maintain an unsullied conscience free of guilt. So, Paul says in Romans 14, “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind…If anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean…and everything that does not come from faith is sin” (verses 5, 14, 23). In other words, don’t do things that you believe are wrong, things that will leave you nursing a guilty conscience.
Mr. Phillips says that he was resolving this very debate within himself when he declined to decorate a wedding cake for David Mullins and Charlie Craig. Doing otherwise, he said, would have violated his Christian values. So, he chose to safeguard his conscience, and the Supreme Court affirmed Mr. Phillips’ freedom to make that decision – particularly in light of the open hostility expressed towards his faith by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
However, the apostle’s acknowledgement that church members in Corinth and Rome were able to eat meat sacrificed to idols without violating their consciences, if they chose to do so, suggests that Mr. Phillips’ decision need not apply to anyone besides himself. The pressing question is: does offering services to a gay wedding fall into the same category of moral ambivalence as eating meat sacrificed to idols? Was Mr. Phillips’ conscientious objection a paradigmatic stance required of all Christians or was it an idiosyncratic opinion binding only on Mr. Phillips?
We should recall that, when it comes to matters of ethical debate, Paul describes the narrower conscience, the more easily offended conscience, as “the weaker” one revealing a more feeble faith (Rom. 14:1-2; 15:1; 1 Cor. 8:7, 9-12). Paul gives no indication that he valued the maintenance of a weak conscience. In fact, his description indicates that a weaker faith ought to mature. I suspect that this is why Paul previews his pastoral advice with an explanation as to why those exhibiting a stronger conscience are theologically correct (1 Cor. 8:4-6).
The implication is clear.
Those exhibiting a weaker conscience by refusing to eat meat sacrificed to idols would do well to absorb Paul’s theological explanation, for it reveals how their position derives from a misunderstanding. Disciples showing signs of a weaker conscience would therefore benefit from the advice of a mature mentor, someone who could offer patient instruction and sound Biblical instruction to clarify where, how and why outgrowing a weak conscience is preferable to remaining offended over debatable matters.
If decorating a cake for a gay wedding is comparable to eating meat sacrificed to idols, then Mr. Phillips has earned a few lines in the annals of religious liberty litigation, but he is not a model of how mature disciples should navigate the cross-currents of Christianity’s relationship with society.
Which leads us back to our original question. Do Christian business people – or any Christian, for that matter – compromise or deny some part of their faith in Jesus Christ by providing personal services to people outside the church who are entrenched in lifestyles that the church calls sinful?
Remember, this is not a question about the morality of homosexual activity or gay marriage. On this, I believe that we all ought to agree with Mr. Phillips. I am convinced that the New Testament defines a gay lifestyle as immoral, including monogamous gay marriage. Followers of Jesus Christ are forbidden to live that way, along with many other prohibited lifestyles (1 Cor. 6:9-11; 1 Tim. 1:9-10). Homosexual activity is condemned alongside greed, drunkenness, slander, theft, murder, adultery and lying, among other evils. But having said this, there is no indication that homosexuality is considered the supreme sin, worse than all others. It is simply listed as one among many unacceptable ways for Christians to live.
Which makes me wonder if Mr. Phillips has ever decorated wedding cakes for people whose lives were shackled by greed, dishonesty, selfishness, theft or fornication, to mention only a few of the other lifestyles condemned by Paul. Of course, those issues are much harder to detect during a brief conversation in a cake shop, but that does not make them any less problematic for someone fearful that providing his professional services would tacitly endorse sin in another person’s life.
Romans 1:26-27 does describe homosexuality as paradigmatic of the way sin has disordered God’s orderly creation. But this section of Paul’s argument comes after his description of idolatry as the quintessential example of human sinfulness (verses 18-25). In light of Romans 1, then, it hardly seems likely that sharing a meal with your neighbors where the main dish came straight out the back door of Zeus’ temple after it was butchered by pagan priests as the offering in an idolatrous ceremony, would be any less problematic for Paul than decorating the cake for a gay wedding. In the words of Jesus, reaching that conclusion would be a bit like straining at gnats while swallowing camels (Matt. 23:24). I suspect that Paul would agree.
If a healthy, mature Christian conscience has no trouble eating meat butchered in idolatrous sacrifices with the neighbors next-door, then decorating a gay wedding cake for people outside the church should be an easy afternoon stroll through the green grass of Christian morality, by comparison.
We know that Paul supported himself by making tents (Acts 18:3), a skilled craft every bit as personalized as cake decorating. The apostle would set out his tent-maker’s stall in the public marketplace and take orders for the assorted types of tents his customers wanted. Paul’s business relations with the milling crowds of unredeemed humanity looking to buy and sell in the 1st century, Greco-Roman agora would have seen him pressing the flesh with the full spectrum of unwashed, pagan masses. Idolaters, magicians, pederasts, adulterers, and every stripe of common criminal were all potential customers. Homosexuality was extremely common in this Greco-Roman world, including long-term relationships comparable to gay marriage.
We cannot say for certain how Paul handled these interactions while conducting his business. But I very much doubt that he interviewed each potential customer before taking their order so as to ensure that he only made tents for people who agreed with his Christian, moral sensibilities and promised beforehand that they would never use his tents for activities he did not approve of. That would make a great recipe for watching the competition take away all of your business. Paul could not have supported himself for very long. Although I admit to making an argument from silence here, I am confident that it is a sound argument, especially in light of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 5:9-13. He says:
“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people — not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”
Apparently, some members of the Corinthian church had misunderstood Paul’s previous advice on maintaining church discipline. His warning about not associating with “sinners,” which would include refusing to do business with them, was strictly an internal affair concerning personal relationships within the Christian community. Paul could not have stated his ethical position more clearly: “Judging those outside of Christ’s church is none of my business. It’s God’s business, not mine. So, I won’t do it.”
Applying the community standards of Christian church discipline to the believer’s social or business relationships outside of the church is an obvious example of something called a category mistake. For instance, I am guilty of a category mistake when I offer a detailed description of elephants to the blind person who asked me to describe a goldfish. It doesn’t make sense.
To the misfortune of both the church and American society, moralistic category confusions have become a distinguishing feature of the Religious Right. TV and radio preachers popularize these confusions day in and day out as they rally their followers over the airwaves to defend Christian America from the deadly advances of secular humanism.
I suspect that it was within this hothouse of popular confusion that Mr. Phillips’ solidified his views about Christian ethics. No one’s moral compass is calibrated in a vacuum. I very much doubt that Mr. Phillips settled on preserving his weakened conscience all by himself. He represents – as the Christian media frenzy applauding his victory shows – the largest part of American evangelicalism today, churchgoers with nothing more than a superficial grasp of scripture who view themselves as culture-warriors holding the line against a godless society.
Here we reach the animating force behind Mr. Phillips’ stance insofar as he represents evangelicalism’s current captivity to the unending melodrama of its so-called “culture wars.” Worries over Christianity’s fight-to-the-death with secularism undoubtedly motivate hardware-store owner Jeff Amyx’s fretful lament that “Christianity is under attack.” To his mind, and others like him, fighting against godlessness transforms a hideously ungodly “NO GAYS ALLOWED” sign into a battle standard for religious liberty.
Yet, how exactly does recognizing that unredeemed sinners will continue to sin ever threaten the church? (After all, don’t even redeemed sinners within the church continue to sin?)
How does doing business in the public square with other sinners for whom Jesus died ever threaten my freedom to follow Jesus? How does doing business with folks who do not (yet) want to conform their lives to Jesus’ example threaten my decision to be like Jesus, the same Jesus who partied with tax-collectors, prostitutes and other sinners?
It doesn’t.
The problem today – as I discuss at length in my book I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans
2018) – is that large portions of the American church have turned their backs on Jesus’ model of suffering servanthood in order to fight for control over the secular levers of social, political power and control. Evangelicalism has exchanged the gospel of grace for an idolatrous nostalgia over something that never was – an American Christendom.
Christendom seeks to erase the border between church and state. Christendom confuses the body of Christ with society at large, with damaging results for all parties. Its propagandists demand that Christianity “reclaim” its place as America’s de facto state religion. Among Christendom’s many mistakes, perhaps the most egregious is this wish to impose the norms of church discipline upon everyone else in society, regardless of their own religious affiliation.
In this way, the rhetoric of Christendom sounds much like the preacher who insisted on telling a herd of elephants that they must all live like goldfish.
Mr. Phillips’ case is only the beginning in this latest round of religious freedom/civil rights litigation. Sadly, having forgotten that God’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), American evangelicals have decided to exchange their suffering Savior and his New Testament teaching for front row seats on the White House lawn and amicus briefs utterly irrelevant to the Kingdom of God.
