The Dim Totalitarian Mind

California State Senator Ricardo Lara introduced a law designed to force religious colleges to practice official sexual ideology. Martin Castro, chairman of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, declared that “religious liberty” was a code phrase for “Christian supremacy” and “intolerance.” Civil Rights commissions in Massachusetts and Iowa have asserted control over church meetings.

Christians in my tradition are used to surveillance. In the late-1800s we were immigrants who fled state church harassment. Government “pastors” were sacerdotal bureaucrats who policed meetings they didn’t approve — such as home Bible studies. So we’re familiar with sermon subpoenas, official slander, and legal blackmail.

The new secular state church in the U.S. enforces a theological principle about the nature of worship.

Our shepherds admit that we have “freedom of worship.” We can go to church, synagogue, or mosque — “private” spaces in which we can preach, pray, and practice as we see fit. But everywhere else is “public” space. All schools, businesses, non-profit enterprises, media, and even church meetings “soliciting” public attendance must endorse the approved sexual ideology.

The secular state pastors insist that worship is “private.” They want this teaching to have the force of law, and they pretend that it is not theological.

The Protestant Reformation taught that every aspect of life is involved in the worship of Jesus Christ — not just church and family, but business, civic conduct, and public speech. The New Testament directs us to do everything in Christ’s name, “in word or deed” (Colossians 3.17). It is hypocrisy to give God lip service at church and ignore him in the rest of our lives. That is why we start schools, adoption agencies, hospitals, counseling centers, rescue missions, and pregnancy clinics.

Religious liberty creates a space where people of all creeds, not just Protestants, can integrate their beliefs with their way of life. This is why we don’t fine women who wear burkinis.

These principles are taught in basic history, political philosophy, sociology, and literature classes. The state shepherds need not have read John Milton’s Areopagitica to have encountered these routine ideas— though Milton would do them some good. They only need intellectual honesty.

Once more, we are looking into the dim little rooms of the totalitarian mind, furnished only with jargon, mendacity, and cowardice.