The hoof beats of antichristian persecution are now heard in a land which once recognized that human rights do not come from kings, courts or tribunals, but from the Creator, now that in Obergefell v. Hodges the Supreme Court has stepped outside its authority and redefined marriage. Morally coherent Christians who seek to live a unity of life, and believe that their faith is meant to inform every aspect of their life, are at the beginning of a time of persecution. One front where the persecution is well underway is in Christian participation in commerce. Christians who take their faith as a guide for every area of their life may soon be precluded from certain trades and professions.

But what about the First Amendment? Doesn’t that protect Christians?

What about the First Amendment?

It should, but it doesn’t anymore. The First Amendment to the Bill of Rights recognizes religious freedom as a fundamental human right. Remember, it begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”  The first part is called the Establishment Clause and the second the Free Exercise Clause. The rest of the amendment protects freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to assemble, and freedom to petition the government.

The Establishment Clause was intended to protect against the establishment of a national church and a forced adherence to its doctrine by all citizens. It is more aptly understood as an anti-establishment clause. It frees people to exercise their faith without interference from the federal government.

The courts’ interpretation of this clause has devolved into a notion of “the separation of church and state” that is hostile to religious institutions, discriminates against people of faith and censors religious speech and expression in the public square. It’s now used as the reason for establishing secularism by driving religion from the public square.

The Free Exercise Clause was intended to protect religious institutions and people of faith in their vital role in speaking and acting in an authentically pluralistic society. Our nation’s founders presumed that the values informed by religious faith serve the common good.

The clause is now understood to permit “freedom of worship” but not freedom of religion in how we live our lives, particularly when exercising that freedom conflicts with other peoples’ “rights” as the courts insist we understand them.

That includes newly minted “rights” the Supreme Court has fashioned on its own authority — “rights” with no roots in the Natural Moral Law or the text of the very constitution the justices claim to be interpreting. Bakers who are evangelical Christians, for example, aren’t allowed to exercise their religious freedom in their business decisions, when doing that results in what the courts consider “discrimination” against a group of people the courts have decided to protect.

There’s a big irony here. On the issues having to do with homosexual practice and same-sex “marriage,” biblical, creedal Christians aren’t making explicitly Christian arguments. The truths we proclaim are grounded in the Natural Moral Law. They are not “religious” in the sense of coming from a revelation that only certain religious people believe. They express the moral understanding that all people share — even if some deny it on a particular matter like same-sex “marriage.”

We can’t rely on the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom as we once could. We know what the First Amendment says, but the courts have reinterpreted it so that it no longer protects people of faith who exercise their faith in the public square, especially in their businesses. There now exists a judicially mandated separation between faith and life which is overtly hostile, especially to Christianity. Though the Christian faith may be deeply personal, it is profoundly public.

Christianity as a New Way of Life

We still have to protest. The Constitution is on our side, even if the courts don’t see it that way anymore. But though we must expose and oppose the growing assault on the rights to the free exercise of religion, free speech and free association, that is not enough.

We must pray, band and act together, forging new alliances for mutual support and mission. We must also offer a compelling witness to a new way of life, the Christian Way, as an alternative as this age spirals out control by rejecting the truth which sets all men and women free (John 8:31).

The Acts of the Apostles is our history. For Christians, it’s even more important than the history of our country. What does it tell us about living with persecution? Before the new followers of Jesus were called Christians in Antioch (Acts 11:26) they were called the Way. The name reveals a profoundly important aspect of how the early Christians understood themselves.

They did not simply do “religious” things. They lived a new way of life, joined to Jesus, and in Jesus, with one another, for the sake of the world. Their Christianity was not about “me and Jesus” but “us together in Jesus.” They knew that as members of His Body they were joined with each other and were called to continue his work. They knew that meant loving each other and those outside the church as Jesus had loved them, and that the world would treat them the way it treated Jesus.

The Way is the Way of the Cross.

This hasn’t changed. Jesus is the Head and we are the Body. Do we understand the implications of this truth as our forefathers in the Faith did? Has it infiltrated the way we live our daily lives? Do we know what it means that the world still opposes Him so it opposes His followers?

What our world needs most in the beginning of the third millennium of Christianity is the radical witness of Christianity as a New Way of Life. Lived out with faith in God, it will have the same effect in this hour as it did at the very beginning of the first millennium. In the seventeenth chapter of Acts we read these words describing the early Christians, led by an apostle named Paul, a man who had once persecuted the people of The Way: “These men have turned the world upside down.”

Are we willing to live that way, The Way, the way of the Cross? If we are, we can turn the world upside down again.