“Extreme, dangerous times” currently exist for religious liberty, Senator Ted Cruz recently stated at the September 26-28 Value Voters Summit (VVS) in Washington, DC. VVS and a September 29 Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL) panel fully validated Cruz.
While people today are unprecedentedly “forced to participate in genocide” through abortion funding, argued Liberty Counsel religious freedom advocate Matthew Staver, same-sex “marriage” (SSM) presents a religious freedom “zero sum game.” The “greatest threat to religious freedom in the United States of America today” is the “drive for gay marriage,” agreed Georgetown University Professor Thomas Farr at the CARL panel. SSM proponents have “such anger and vindictiveness that it’s frightening” to Farr.
“Aggressive secularists…want to take Biblical morality out of the public square,” Farr elaborated. While the religious “first freedom” in America’s constitutional First Amendment uses the verb “exercise,” this secularist view would restrict religion to private observance, something “you get…in Saudi Arabia, for the most part.” Yet “our faith goes with us wherever we go” on issues such as marriage, retired United States Army Chief of Chaplains Douglas Carver stated alongside Farr.
Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of the Oregon bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa, vividly vindicated Farr at a VVS marriage panel. Angry boycotts destroyed the Kleins’ business after their refusal to serve in violation of their Christian beliefs a lesbian SSM involving a previous customer. Now fines exceeding $150,000 in a lawsuit under an Oregon anti-discrimination ordinance threaten the Kleins and their five children with bankruptcy. Describing how she “would just feel so honored” to make the “perfect cake that just matched” a wedding couple for their “special day,” Melissa broke down crying. “Everything we did was…for the glory of God,” Aaron added.
A “well-orchestrated, flawlessly executed hit on traditional Christian values” also struck David Benham and his twin brother Jason for sharing the Kleins’ sexuality and marriage views. The brothers explained during their Friday evening VVS appearance that LGBT opposition had forced cancellation of a planned HGTV home improvement show involving the two entrepreneurs. “We are dangerous men” David joked, “we shop at Hobby Lobby, we eat at Chick-fil-A, we watch Duck Dynasty, and we graduated from Liberty University.” Like these politically incorrect adherents to traditional norms, the Benham brothers “will not bow” to a “radical agenda that has come in our nation,” David stated. While the “weapon of choice for the agenda in the Middle East is the sword, the weapon of choice for the agenda in America is silence.”
A “kind of self-imposed sharia law” respecting homosexuality also occurred to National Religious Broadcasters President and CEO Dr. Jerry Johnson. Appearing alongside the Kleins, Johnson noted how broadcast sermons faced censorship over matters like homosexuality in America’s northern neighbor Canada. “Use it or lose it” Johnson thus advised concerning American First Amendment free speech rights.
“The Left has a totalitarian mindset,” concurred political commentator Mark Levin in a VVS conversation with Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins. While leftists “talk about race and genitalia,” they “are not going to win the battle of ideas, because their ideas are goofy.” “Anytime anyone wants to silence you, you know that they are up to no good,” pro-life activist Ryan Bomberger also observed while noting condemnations of VVS by leftist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. But “silence is never an option,” Bomberger stated while being thankful for a FRC that “does not cower to cultural trends” and a “tsunami of moral relativism.”
This environment produced more attacks on religious freedom than Kelly Shackleford had seen in his 25 years of work at the Liberty Institute (LI), a religious freedom legal foundation. These threats had grown “exponentially,” Shackleford stated at a press briefing following his VVS address. LI’s first annual written religious freedom report had documented 600 cases of religious freedom threats, but the 2014 report presented by Shackleford four years later contained 1,600.
Yet “when we stand up on these cases we win,” Shackleford stated the theme of LI’s later VVS panel in light of LI’s success rate of over 99%. There Schackleford’s LI colleague Jeff Mateer elaborated upon threats facing conservatives, whose religious views often mean they “can’t work in corporate America anymore.” VVS attendees also “may be on a list now” comparable to terrorists like Al Qaeda, given that President Barack Obama’s administration often listens to groups like SPLC.
LI client Eric Walsh discussed on the panel how a “firestorm broke out” over his sermons in church while working as a Pasadena, California, public health director. The controversy ultimately led to the loss of a new job in Georgia. Given an “impeccable” work record, Walsh found it “really scary” that religious “things could be carried into the public arena and you could be fired.” “I was really blown away that this could happen in the United States…..This just isn’t the America that I grew up in.”
Stanford University student and LI client Brooks Hamby likewise discussed his successive efforts to win high school approval for his salutatorian graduation speech. “You used the word ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ too many times” and Hamby’s “proselytizing…could be offensive,” were among the school official comments upon three successively rejected Hamby drafts. The “word ‘God’ and some Scripture” appeared in Hamby’s fourth draft for which he had no time to receive school approval, but school officials remained ready with a mute button during the speech nonetheless.
LI client Pastor Telsa DeBerry also discussed his trials in establishing a Southern Baptist church Holly Springs, Mississippi. An ordinance there demanded that any proposed house of worship on the town square receive approval from the mayor and 60% of property owners within a quarter-mile radius of the construction site. Among other things, this ordinance required finding approval from owners of businesses exempt from the ordinance, including liquor and cigarette stores, some raided in the past for drug dealing. After LI won on appeal, DeBerry’s church construction is expected to go forward.
A preceding American Family Association panel presenting the video A Time to Speak, a shorter version of the film One Generation Away, and accompanying materials indicated the need for Christians and others in America to take action. “You will be made to care” by leftists on issues like abortion and marriage, Redstate writer Erick Ericson warned following the Benhams to those Christians who think “you can sit on the sidelines” of America’s culture wars. “If you believe in the resurrection, you must go forth” and “be willing to care” and “get into the culture…into elections.” “Christianity is a religion of persecution” he noted to the fainthearted, yet “no one can separate us from Christ. That should make us bold.”
“Get ready to do very difficult things” for an America and Western Civilization in “deep trouble,” conservative activist Gary Bauer likewise called out to VVS attendees. VVS conservative choir members “have a responsibility to go out and sing solos” to society, Senator Rick Santorum similarly argued. “To simply play defense” on social issues like life and marriage has failed as a Republican Party strategy. “That is how we have been losing elections,” National Organization of Marriage President Brian Brown concurred while describing Republican neglect of the social leg in conservatism’s proverbial three-legged platform. Social liberals “are willing to fight” despite being outnumbered by conservatives, Santorum elaborated. Conservatives “let it happen,” Santorum says of recent liberal social advances, for “we are the determiners of history,” not just observers of some independent force called “History.”
“Our culture is changing” and “increasingly secular,” Carver stated at the CARL panel in seeing spiritual roots to political problems. There was similarly “no mistake” about a “growing secular society” for CARL’s Torchbearer Award recipient, Representative John Fleming. Some people entering the American military today have never read the Bible, Carver noted, reminding him of the Exodus’ account of Jews living in Egypt under pharaohs who did not remember Joseph’s past help to the Egyptian kingdom. “America needs…revival” against a “full-blown spiritual crisis,” Senator Rand Paul had stated at VVS, foreshadowing Carver’s “praying for revival.”
While stressing the need “to wake up to” a “radical agenda,” Staver remained optimistic that “for every Pharaoh, there is a Moses, for every Goliath, there is a David.” Purim, Passover, Christmas after Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and Christ’s resurrection after crucifixion all show in the Bible victory emerging in the face of defeat. “I believe that revival will be sparked” among America’s youth, Fox News reporter Todd Starnes predicted at VVS. “These are difficult days. But I still believe that there is hope for America.”
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