So I've been thinking more about Beto, taxing the churches, and all that jazz.
Made me think of Roger Williams. He spoke up in Massachusetts Bay Colony that they should treat the Indians better. That they were stealing land and mistreating them. This isn't me projecting my 21st century sensibilities on a colony in the 1600s. This was a Christian in tune with God in the 1600s proclaiming the truth to the powerful. He spoke as a pastor. And just about as effective as speaking the truth to the powerful these days, on October 9, 1645, he was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Roger Williams went on to start Providence as a place where people could have religious freedom. Puritans came. Jews came. Quakers came. The first Baptist church was started there. Religious people of different orientations could live together in peace and not be banned for disagreeing with the state.
What Beto and others are asking for, without maybe even recognizing it in themselves, is a return to the totalitarian ways of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Europe our American predecessors fled from. In this particular instance, Beto is encouraging taxing churches who don't agree with him on gay marriage. But that is giving control of church teaching over to the state. Either you conform, or you pay. This is a dangerous change.
This seems to be the toxic fruit of an idea that I hear regularly: Religion should have no influence on the state. The idea goes on to say that separation of church and state flows both ways. The state can't influence the church. And the church can't influence the state. As seen in Beto, they would rather err on the side of the state forcing the church to do things.
This concept holds that religious principles that shape a religious person's worldview are inferior to secular principles. Due to this, religious principles have no room in the public arena. Do you realize that this approach would have made Martin Luther King Jr. not happen? One of our national heroes could not have done what he did in this hostile toward religion framework. He was a pastor, emboldened by his religious convictions, trying to change the state. Christians throughout history have spoken truth to the power of the state, and I don't want that principle to end to this new totalitarian view that the religious should be silent in regard to the state.
If Beto's proposal or any like it were to move forward, the secular victory would be weak anyway. The church would just move to house churches that aren't legally churches so the state can't say what we can and can't say because I, and I believe most remaining Christians, would never let the state tell us what we can and cannot teach. We have a good, solid history and lots of examples to inspire and encourage us to not conform to the state. Whether that be heroes like Martin Niemoller in Germany, Corrie Ten Boom in Denmark, Dirk WIllems in the Netherlands, Telemachus in Rome, or these other people - Jesus, Peter, and Paul in the early church era. Conforming to society goes against a core principle of the church: The church is to be a separate kingdom with an alternative way of living. If we just conform to the wishes of society, what are we? We definitely aren't the church.
Freedom of speech and religion are principles that we should still enshrine as an Americans. Principles that goes back the early days of Roger Williams in Rhode Island and of William Penn in Pennsylvania, which we didn't really get into here. Principles that our founding fathers enshrined in the Bill of Rights because they knew that the tendency, as exhibited even these days, of the state is to take them away. Principles that have made the world better. Principles we shouldn't dispose of just to get the political outcome we want.
Conformity is not freedom. Freedom is messy.
