In one of his speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” On June 15, 2020, this arc bent a little bit more when the Supreme Court of the United States in a 6 to 4 decision ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected LGBTQ persons from employment discrimination.
Although the individuals involved in the three cases before the Court were not employed by religious organizations, the decision was met with strong opposition and dire warnings about its consequences in various religious quarters. The religious arguments against the decision are centered around the right of religious freedom. Over the years, religious freedom has emerged as the major argument for the right of religious establishments (churches and affiliated organizations), individuals and non-religious entities to apply religious moral standards in various activities, including employment practices.
It must be said that the right of religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment, and as such it is a powerful, justifiable and legitimate right to be defended. It is the scope of this right that is in dispute, especially when it collides with someone else’s rights. The argument of religious freedom has been increasingly used to deny services (like decorating a wedding cake) or employment to people of a particular lifestyle, in this case, their sexual orientation or gender identity. Given, however, the different moral values and standards held by different religions, what happens when they choose to apply them in dealing with others? Permission to apply diverse moral beliefs on instances that affect people’s lives outside their practice of religious duties would imply that laws work differently across different legal entities within a country.
In an early case, Reynolds v. United States, 1878, the Supreme Court recognized the difficulty of placing religious belief over the Constitution and stated: “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto herself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.”
What is of interest, however, outside the realm of law, is to ask: What informs the position of religious establishments and religious-minded individuals to invoke the right of religious freedom to deny a person employment or services because someone’s lifestyle is deemed to fall short of a particular moral standard? A related question is: Can religious beliefs be trusted to the point that it gives them the authority to define the rights of others? As provocative this question may sound to religious people, it is a question deserving probing and answering.
If moral beliefs were immutable truths, one could say that a clear demarcation of right from wrong would exist and could possibly be the basis for discrimination in the allocation of rewards and punishments by religious authorities. History, however, suggests that moral values and beliefs are anything but immutable. They evolve with knowledge, social environments, political power, and natural conditions.
Although Christianity proclaimed all persons to be equal before God, it nonetheless went along with slavery in the secular world. In the American South church people even gave godly reasons on behalf of slavery. Likewise, women were placed behind men with respect to various rights not only in the secular but also the religious world. The view that the earth rotates around the sun was once a belief enough to send you to the stake. Likewise, if one held religious beliefs that ever so slightly deviated from official church dogma. For a period, the Church thought people, especially women, were bewitched by Satan and sentenced them to death. The theory of evolution and the cosmological evidence that our universe has existed as such for only a finite period were denounced as immoral beliefs, before they were accepted with considerable delay and consternation. Other religions have made similar revisions of their moral beliefs.
In these and other cases, religion usually claims it is God’s word that has set on this and that side what is right and what is wrong. Luckily, religious views about God’s will have evolved toward a more tolerant stance. Robert Wright calls this the evolution of God in his book with the same title. Of course, what is evolving is not God; it is our sense of what is moral and ethical that is evolving. Even better for humanity, and despite occasional periods of stepping backwards, we seem to move to beliefs that allow more justice for ever more people. I suppose this is behind Martin Luther King’s metaphor of the arc of moral history.
Given the history of evolution of moral standards, it seems to me the right thing religions ought to do is apply special skepticism about the absolute moral “truths” they hold lest the future bending of the arc proves these “truths” to have unjustly punished people under the standards of the day. The Eastern Fathers of the Christian Church, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, had the wisdom to develop an apophatic conceptualization of God, by arguing that humans cannot conceive the essence of God. If so, why would then Christians, or anyone for that matter, claim with full certainty knowledge of God’s will and word?
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated: “But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.” In other words, Justice Gorsuch (a conservative person himself) recognized that in prohibiting discrimination on the base of sex, the drafters of the Civil Rights Act ought to be understood as extending this right to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Imagine if those Christians opposing the rule of the Court were able to find the wisdom and tolerance to also understand that Christ’s grace, that same grace that was extended to the Samaritan woman and the reviled tax collector was also meant to be extended to people regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.
It is in that sense I chose the title to imply that religious freedom exercised with a magnanimous view of the original religious message, especially when its messenger preached mercy and love, should never limit another person’s rights because of choices society no longer accepts as a moral or civil lapse.
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