{"id":3220,"date":"2017-06-16T16:19:49","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T16:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/?p=3220"},"modified":"2017-06-16T16:25:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-16T16:25:28","slug":"religious-speech-conscience-and-political-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2017\/06\/16\/religious-speech-conscience-and-political-office\/","title":{"rendered":"Religious Speech, Conscience, and Political Office"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Amari opines<\/a> that progressives are targeting conscience by censoring leaders with unpopular religious opinions. \u00a0This is a key front in today’s culture wars, and as usual, both sides fail to appreciate the question’s difficult nuances.<\/p>\n

I think Amari is right to note that there are issues conservative religious people should be able to raise in the public square without vitriol. \u00a0Hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage remain subject to reasonable debate. \u00a0Many, many religious people have views about those issues that are not palatable to progressives, and the progressives don’t have the only morally defensible views.<\/p>\n

But one of the missing nuances is that the problem folks like Amari raise is about political censure, not legal punishment. \u00a0The politicians highlighted in Amari’s article are not in any danger of criminal prosecution for their expressed opinions. \u00a0Rather, they are unwelcome in progressive political circles, and progressive politicians criticize them in the public square.<\/p>\n

It would be better, I think, if we could debate issues like abortion and gay marriage without overheated rhetoric from either side, but we’re still free to debate. \u00a0Of course, one of the subtexts in pieces like Amari’s is that legal censorship and the suspension of freedoms of speech and association is just around that corner. \u00a0There’s room here for an appropriate call for vigilance, but not for alarmism.<\/p>\n

A much more difficult missing nuance is that neither Amari nor anyone else really believes that\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>religiously motivated speech should be expressed without any political censure — or indeed, without any legal censure. \u00a0Amari is offended that Bernie Sanders publicly questioned President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, over a blog post in which Vought said that Muslims \u201cdo not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.\u201d \u00a0Amari suggests “Mr. Vought\u2019s was a particularly stark summary of the basic Christian teaching that faith in the God-Man is essential to salvation.” \u00a0Amari finds Sanders’ rebuke of Vought as Islamaphobic “depressing” because he thinks “Mr. Sanders implied that a devout Christian can\u2019t hold fast to his faith\u2019s most demanding claims and at the same time exercise public authority with decency and honor. If you disagree with someone\u2019s theology, in other words, it must mean you hate him.”<\/p>\n

But what if Vought were writing about Jews? \u00a0If Vought’s theology is consistent, he must think the same about Jews as he does about Muslims. \u00a0For Vought, it must be the case that Jews\u00a0\u201cdo not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.\u201d \u00a0I suspect that many serious Jewish people would — rightly — be horrified by such a statement. \u00a0I also suspect that in a civil society after Auschwitz, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who claim in the public square that all Jews “stand condemned.”<\/p>\n

Now, Vought, I presume, would say that his statement about condemnation is taken out of context because he is referring to a particular doctrine of justification for sin and not to the political sphere. \u00a0I suspect Vought’s understanding of prevenient or common grace, justification, eschatology, and so-on is confused, that he’s misusing some Pauline language here, and that he’s forgetting Romans 2. \u00a0 Most Christians in fact don’t<\/em> hold these views as starkly as Vought or Amari suggest, even while still maintaining the salvific uniqueness of Christ (see, for example, the Roman Catholic Vatican II document Nostra Aetate and related statements<\/a>: \u00a0“The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.”). \u00a0But, fine — Vought can hold some kind of quasi-hyper-Calvinist view about all this if that’s what he thinks. \u00a0Yet the observation that such extreme or at least poorly explained theological views can have serious implications when expressed by a public figure is not out of line.<\/p>\n

Imagine, for example, that a political leader opined that<\/p>\n