On 03 January 250, Emperor Gaius Messius Quintus Decius
Augustus performed the annual sacrifice to Jupiter, king of the gods of the Roman pantheon, and in an attitude of restoring Rome’s former glory – reviving the office of censor, repairing the
Collosseum, resisting the encroachment of the barbarian Goths in the Balkans –
issued a decree that all Roman citizens, wherever they were (with the notable
exception of the Jews), would be required to sacrifice to the traditional Roman
gods in front of a commissioner employed for that purpose, burn incense to
those gods and the emperor, consume the meat thus sacrificed and obtain a
written certificate signed by the commissioner and witnesses attesting to the
act. To Decius, part of Rome’s decline
was attributable to neglect of the old religion and traditions that had made
Rome so dominant in the ancient world: The cult of Mithras, imported from
Persia, was popular among the soldiers that defended the empire, druidism ruled
the Celtic tribes from Brittania, Gaul and Germania, and there was this pesky
superstition called Christianity that despite ruthless suppression, had managed
to spread across the empire in the millions.
Decius’ decree, therefore, would serve as a common denominator, a shared
platform of belief for all Romans and a foundation for future greatness.
The Christians, of course, saw it
differently. Having professed their
faith in Jesus Christ as God Incarnate and their personal Savior, they could
not then deny Him and sacrifice to idols and eat food sacrificed to those idols
as the edict required, but refusing to obey the emperor exposed them to arrest,
imprisonment, torture and death. What
could they do? How could any legitimate
government force them to violate the deepest convictions of their
conscience? In response, some Christians
fled for their lives, others gave in and complied with the decree and others,
standing on their faith, were martyred, and fortunately, Decius didn’t live
long enough to give his order full effect: Like his thirteen immediate
predecessors, he died a violent death, killed by the Goths at the Battle of
Abritus in June 251. Nonetheless, for
seventeen months, the Roman Empire with all its might and cruelty sought to
force Christians to abandon their core beliefs and swear allegiance to pagan
gods and it was a watershed moment – the first empire-wide,
officially-sanctioned effort to break the Christian faith.
In this country, the state of Indiana, of which I am a
native, has sought to give protection not only to Christians but to others who
hold deep religious convictions from legal action brought against them by the
state and by private entities. The
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, SB 101, allows citizens and businesses to
use their religious convictions as a defense if they are party to a court case,
in essence restating and affirming our Constitutional right under the First
Amendment which is by itself rather plain and unremarkable. After all, whose interest is served by
coercing people to violate their consciences? Who wins when a Christian
photographer is forced to cover a homosexual wedding or a Christian church is
forced to hire a Muslim secretary or a Christian business is forced to provide
insurance coverage for abortions? Is it really in the public interest to create
an adversarial relationship between Christians and the rest of society,
including their government?
For the radical Left, the answers to these questions are
unequivocally, “Mine, me and absolutely yes.” The idea that a bunch of
self-righteous snake handlers can refuse to acknowledge one of their favored
groups and hide behind “religious principles” is intolerable for them, though
they make an exception for Muslims on ideological as well as practical grounds:
Muslims are much more likely to cut off your head or burn you alive if they
don’t like you. For the Left, government
is their golden calf and they bitterly resent anyone who worships anything
else, anyone whose principles don’t change with the times – Paul Begala,
appearing on MSNBC on 01 April, stated that,
“People can have religious principles, they just can’t act on them,” the
most patently stupid remark in the history of patently stupid remarks and
emblematic of the Left’s attitude. As
far as liberals are concerned, all trust and confidence must be placed in a
faithless, autocratic engine of liberal dogma that consumes and dominates
everything, including freedom of belief, in an endless quest for “equality” and
“fairness,” which are defined as anything that the Left wants at any particular
time, and to have trust and confidence in something else, something changeless
and permanent and unmoving and not the work of human hands, say, the supreme
God of the universe, enfuriates the Left.
How dare you disagree with us?
How dare you refuse to recognize the supremacy of government over the
individual and of man over God? How dare
you refuse to validate the absurdity of homosexual marriage as normal, even
sacrosanct? In our outrage (not moral,
but an apish mockery of morality), we demand your surrender, we viciously
insult you, we threaten to burn your business and kill you because in our
pursuit of tolerance, we cannot tolerate disagreement, and we will do this
during Holy Week and as Al-Shabaab carefully, systematically murders 147
Christian college students in Kenya. We
don’t care – we hate you and if you refuse to obey us, we’ll put you to death.
Forty years ago, the idea that homosexuals could legally
marry each other was ludicrous, as was the idea that Christians would need
legal protection for voicing their opposition to it, yet here we are, and who’s
to say where we’ll be forty years from now? From homosexual marriage, we could legitimize polygamy, pedophilia,
groups of people marrying other groups of people, Christian ministers
being jailed for refusing to perform
such perverse unions, marijuana sold
over the counter at your neighborhood drugstore, and to enforce acceptance of
such practices, the government could establish a loyalty oath, administered at,
say, the local DMV. You’d raise your
right hand and while the ceremony was recorded by video monitors and
microphones, some bureaucrat would administer the oath, you and he would sign
it, your driver’s license would be updated accordingly and on your way you’d
go, having given the government your approval of whatever depravity they were
so inclined to sanction, and in exchange for your approval, you’d keep your
freedom. On the other hand, if you refused
such an oath and gave your Christian convictions as the basis for your refusal,
maybe you’d lose your license right then and there. Maybe your car would be impounded and you’d
have to walk home. Maybe you’d lose your
job or your house would be confiscated or your financial assets would be
frozen, or maybe it would get much worse than that. Maybe your children would be declared wards
of the state and forcibly removed a la
Elian Gonzalez, maybe your wife would be arrested and maybe you’d be declared
mentally incompetent and be committed to an insane asylum for “treatment,” and
after a year or two, you’d be given a chance to recant. And then, if you still refused, you’d be
declared persona non grata and be
internally exiled to Alaska because faith in an invisible, changeless,
righteous God is incompatible with the wishes of a corrupt, hard-Left and
dictatorial state, or, as has happened so often in the past and as happens so
frequently now, you’d just be shot: Tolerance, after all, has its limits.
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