…Yes, there is hypocrisy here. It’s a bit much to hear that it’s vitally important for Chip and Joanna Gaines to reject two gay dads (and their children!) from Christians who are also all in on Donald Trump. A gay couple on reality television is a bridge too far, but supporting a thrice-married man who was featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and was once good friends with Jeffrey Epstein is not?
But in another way, they’re not hypocrites at all: They’re budding authoritarians, and for authoritarians, a principle like “tolerance for me and not for thee” is entirely consistent. Authoritarians, after all, are supposed to rule.
When you possess a burning sense of certainty in your moral vision, intolerance is always a temptation. If you give your opponents a platform, won’t that lead some people astray? If error creates injustice (or worse, leads people to the gates of hell), why should error have any rights?
Think of the sense of entitlement here. On one hand, evangelicals say, “How dare you discriminate against us in the workplace,” and then turn around and tell a fellow evangelical couple, “You’re betraying us unless you discriminate against gay men at your job.” Evangelicals aren’t a superior class of citizen. We don’t get to enjoy protection from discrimination and the right to discriminate at the same time.
In times of religious and political conflict, I turn to two very different historic figures — the Apostle Paul and James Madison. In what might be some of the most ignored verses in the New Testament, Paul warned early Christians against imposing the same moral standards on those outside the church as those inside.
“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “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.”
“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” Paul asks. “Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”
One of the fundamental problems with the American evangelical church is that it so often gets that equation exactly backward. It is remarkably permissive of abusive Christian individuals and institutions — especially if those individuals or institutions are powerful or influential — even as it can be remarkably hostile toward those people outside the church.
Evangelicals then compound the problem by viewing with deep suspicion and mistrust those people who blow the whistle on church misconduct while revering those people who are “bold” and “brave” enough to focus their fire on everyone else.
Paul’s words represent basic Christianity. Jesus himself admonished his disciples to remove the planks from their own eyes before trying to remove the “speck of sawdust” from someone else’s, and he warned that “you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others.”
This doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t make moral judgments, but rather that we should do so with extreme humility, focusing on addressing our own flaws first.
But that’s a command to believing Christians. How should we all deal with disagreement on fundamental matters?
In Federalist No. 10, Madison wrestled with the question of how to create a lasting republic that would invariably include a broad range of competing factions. It’s easy for us to look back at the founding and dismiss its diversity by comparison to our own. After all, the founders were mainly a collection of relatively privileged Protestant white men.
That statement is true, but incomplete. Early America was remarkably diverse by the standards of the day. The religious complexity of early America was its own small miracle. When Europe encountered similar divisions, it descended into the Wars of Religion and drenched itself in blood.
The Wars of Religion are ancient history to us, but they were much more present in the Colonial era. The Wars of Religion were as recent to James Madison as World War I is to us, and they were destructive on a vast scale. The challenge of genuine religious diversity was very much on the founders’ minds.
How do you live in a pluralistic republic without abandoning your core convictions? Madison admonished us not to yield to two related temptations. Don’t try to diminish liberty and don’t try to establish uniformity of opinion.
Instead, he said, the answer was to “extend the sphere” of the republic, to “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” In this circumstance, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
The sphere of the American republic extends to conservative evangelicals and to gay dads. It includes people who believe every word of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and those who think it’s no more credible than a comic book. One of the beauties of our culture at its best is that no side of the American divide has to abandon any of its core convictions to enter the public square or to engage in the stream of American commerce….
Multicultural Meanderings 