Last Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi reintroduced the Equality Act for the Congressional Democrats.
The Equality Act is a bill that aims to eliminate discrimination against
LGBTQ people in the same way that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination against African-Americans.
Predictably, the Religious Right is up in arms denouncing the bill as another assault upon religious liberty in general, and Christianity in particular.
But is it any such thing? Personally, I don’t see it.
I am old enough to remember the 1950s and 60s. A southern block of religious conservatives then described Dr. Martin Luther King as a communist tool of the devil. They fought to kill any hopes of passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Furthermore, they staunchly defended racial segregation as an expression of their Christian faith, just as so many religious conservatives are now condemning the Equality Act as an attack on their Christian views of human sexuality and marriage.
Andrew T. Walker of The Gospel Coalition has an article entitled, “The Equality Act Accelerates Anti-Christian Bias.” He warns that “the bill represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America.”
Monica Burke at the Daily Signal writes that the bill will cause “profound harms to Americans from all walks of life” under the heading “7 Reasons Why the Equality Act is Anything But.”
But even if some judicial tweaking is required as our society navigates the social effects of this new legislation, I have yet to see anyone explain away the fundamental parallels between African-Americans in need of the 1964 Civil Tights Act and gay/transgendered Americans in need of similar protections in 2019.
Christianity in America was not destroyed in 1964, despite the explicit warnings of Christian racists.
Neither will American Christianity come to ruin if gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings are granted similar civil rights protections in 2019, despite the apocalyptic warnings coming from the doomsday, propaganda mills of the Religious Right.
Instead, what this debate reveals is something much more dangerous now deeply rooted in the heart of American evangelicalism/fundamentalism: an insistence that the Christian religion (as defined by highly politicized, partisan, social conservatives) deserves preferential treatment in America; indeed, that this politicized, culture-warrior view of Christianity must become normative for acceptable social behavior in the public square.
I discuss this misunderstanding of Christian citizenship at length in my 
book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018). This country’s politicized brand of Christianity is a tangled mess of confusion over what is required from citizens in the kingdom of God living as citizens in a secular society.
Mr. Walker throws out the predictably fawning, meaningless sop intended to distract his critics by saying, “To be clear, Christians reject all forms of invidious discrimination. We believe all persons, including those who identify as LGBT, are made in God’s image and deserve respect, kindness, and neighborliness.”
Well, good for you, Mr. Walker.
But pledges of personal affection are no substitute for legal guarantees.
The entrenched racism of the Jim Crow south also declared, ever so kindly, that they loved their black folks and always treated them with nothing but love and kindness, often insisting that their contented “Negroes” were just fine with the status quo.
Then the Civil Rights movement came along.
Turned out that African-Americans weren’t as contented as the white people imagined.
Unfortunately, the conservative Christian church has lost its ability to speak with any moral authority on issues of justice and equality, because its pronouncements are generally selfish and self-centered.
The misguided case of the Masterpiece Cake Shop (for more thoughts on that debate, read my “Wedding Cakes, the New Testament and Ethics in the Public Square“) exemplified all the problems of the current Equality Act
debate:
- Conservative Christians confuse the church with the world and the world with the church – which is odd given their tendencies towards intellectual and social isolation. New Testament morality is directed at kingdom citizens filled with the Holy Spirit, not the world at large, however beneficial its approximation would be. (I discuss this issue at length in I Pledge Allegiance.)
- Too many would-be Christians simply do not want to love (not really, not with actual tolerance and loving-kindness in person, face-to-face) the
people they don’t like, or don’t agree with, or see as the unclean enemies of their beloved Christian civilization. Let’s get real – many evangelicals are homophobes (though I do not like that term). They don’t want anyone telling them that they must accept gay/transgendered people as equally human with the same dignity as anyone else, whether in the workplace, at school or anywhere else. - They fail to distinguish personal preference from public accommodation. The Equality Act addresses issues concerning “public accommodation.” Read the entire bill here. The core of the legislation simply requires equal treatment, saying:
The Department of Justice (DOJ) may bring a civil action if it receives a complaint from an individual who claims to be:
- denied equal utilization of a public facility owned, operated, or managed by a state (other than public schools or colleges) on account of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity; or
- denied admission to, or not permitted to continue attending, a public college by reason of sexual orientation or gender identity, thereby expanding DOJ’s existing authority to bring such actions for complaints based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The bill revises public school desegregation standards to provide for the assignment of students without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity.
The bill prohibits programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance from denying benefits to, or discriminating against, persons based on sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
Most of the protests I have seen are in reaction to the protection of transgender rights and its various implications for public space/accomodation.
On this score, the conservative church must get to grip with two problems.
One, we have to enter the age of modern research science and recognize that many (a majority?) of gay people are born gay. For them, there is no therapeutic cure. Insisting otherwise discredits us and guarantees that we will never really understand the struggles of our gay friends and neighbors.
Two, there is a good chance that similar genetic issues are in play for people suffering gender dysphoria. I have no idea how it must feel to spend my life tormented by the sense of being trapped in the wrong body. I doubt very much if anybody decides or chooses to live such an existence. There is obviously a great deal yet to be discovered in this arena. The church needs to stop prejudging such people, their histories, situations and motivations while accepting that transgendered people merit the same legal protections as everyone else.
The Equality Act will not affect the policies or operations of churches and other religious institutions unless those facilities accept federal funding. The obligatory cries of religious persecution, or the loss of religious freedoms are actually laments about the possible loss of federal dollars. It’s about the money, folks.
Losing one’s tax exempt status is not anti-religious discrimination. Actually, I have long believed that the tax exemption for churches is actually
discrimination against the surrounding community. Why should the church’s neighbors be required to pay more for their community services (which is what happens) in the way of a public subsidy for the tax-exempt churches, which most of them don’t attend anyway?
The same logic applies to religious schools, colleges, hospitals, etc. These types of institutions will only be affected by the Equality Act if they accept federal financial support. Far too many of these groups want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to benefit from public money (supplied through our tax dollars) while enforcing their own, private sectarian policies.
That is hypocrisy.
You can’t have it both ways and hope to remain anywhere within the ethical ballpark. Remember when Bob Jones University went to court because it insisted on collecting federal money while continuing to refuse admission to black applicants? (I don’t know why any African-American would want to go there. But, to each his own.)
I do.
If a religious institution believes that it cannot abide by the Equality Act, then let them surrender their federal grants, subsidies, or what-have-you. Yes, this will also mean that students receiving federal scholarships or other tuition assistance will either lose their grants or be required to look for another college. This is one of those arenas where details would need to be worked out in the courts, perhaps.
Let’s face it. Way too much of the energy invested in these types of fights by Christian social organizations basically boil down to a fight for comfort and/or money. Christians want to relax in a culture that accommodates itself to them. We don’t want inconvenient types, like gays, or lesbians, or transsexuals, the kinds of people who challenge our conservative expectations in the moral, social order to raise questions or challenge the status quo. A status quo that allows us to remain relaxed and in control.
It is long past time for American politicized Christianity to stop acting as if (a) fighting for a Christianized public square were the same thing as (b) being an faithful citizen of the kingdom of God in public. The two are not the same thing. In fact, they are two very, very different things.
