When I first scribbled down the idea for this article I inadvertently wrote: "Why Religious Discrimination Laws Are Completely Absurd." Oops. Freudian slip.
Now that I've tipped my hand, allow me to explain what I mean.
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In the past year, more than a dozen states have moved to pass laws that essentially allow religious people with businesses to deny services to people of the LGBTQ community based on "sincerely held religious convictions".
Now, we're not talking about laws protecting Christian churches or universities from being forced to hire people that do not share their convictions. That's an entirely different issue. What we're dealing with here are laws allowing people to deny services to a particular minority group on purely religious grounds.
Maybe we need to take a look back in history to get a clearer perspective on why this is a discrimination issue.
For example, if you go back to the Jim Crow laws of the earlier 1900s, you have laws that provided freedom for white people from having to share public spaces with African Americans. On the other side of history now, we can see that these laws were discriminatory and wrong to the core. Hindsight is 20/20, but it seems that our vision may not be so clear in the present.
When freedom for one group means discrimination against another, is freedom truly being upheld?
The fact that Christians support these "Religious Freedom" laws at all blows my mind. Putting the discrimination issues aside, consider for a moment that Christianity is supposed to be about following Jesus, a man who, by all accounts, was radically loving and would never refuse to serve anyone. The one on whom our faith is based actually went out of his way time and time again to serve the outcasts of society in love.
How then can we as Christians refuse service to those who are often treated as outcasts in our society? Such a refusal is at best a missed opportunity to show the love of Christ to those who probably don't expect to receive it. At worst, it's an absolute failure on our part to live out our calling to love a broken world for Christ's sake. I would imagine that it's something we might have to answer for before God some day.
Even if you are legally excused from having to provide service to someone whom you don't wish to be seen in support of, do you think that excuses you from the command to love your neighbor as yourself?
I understand (or at least I hope) that people don't do this out of bad intentions. In fact, I'm pretty certain that most of the time those who support religious freedom laws are actually trying to do what's right in their minds, following what they perceive to be their religious duties. But we're not ultimately called to follow a religion; we're called to follow Jesus.
Maybe it's time to bring back the 90s 'WWJD' bracelets and ask ourselves sincerely, "What would Jesus do?"
As far as I understand things, he would take every opportunity to show God's radically inclusive love to those who least expect it.
