Southern Baptists to the Progressive Christians: We Support Your Right to Preach Heresy

What’s going on in North Carolina?  The very progressive United Church of Christ in that state and the extremely conservative Southern Baptists there actually agree on a religious issue.

When the state voted overwhelmingly in 2012 to outlaw gay marriage, their legislature went on to impose a criminal penalty on anyone performing a wedding without a license. Since gays and lesbians couldn’t get licenses, clergy who bless their unions would face a $200 fine and up to 20 days in jail.

This past week the United Church of Christ (in which I am an ordained minister) filed a landmark lawsuit challenging this law, arguing in particular that it denies these officiating clergy their First Amendment right to “free exercise of religion.”

They found unexpected support from the President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in the state.  Rev. Albert Mohler, who has called homosexuality a “cancer” and used his pulpit for homophobic tirades against gay marriage, surprised even himself, I think, when he considered the UCC case in the light of a principle very dear to Baptists hearts, free expression of religion.

Calling the criminalization of clergy doing their job “dubious and dangerous,” Mohler said, “The guarantee of religious liberty means the freedom of heretics to teach heresy.” 

The UCC has long supported gay rights, ordaining an out gay man in 1972, and voting in 2005 in support of marriage equality. They have filed amicus (supporting) briefs on gay rights cases, such as last year’s Supreme Court gay marriage cases. This week’s lawsuit is just one more strategy in their public witness for gay rights.  They become the first Christian denomination to file a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of gay marriage. 

The secular legal strategy for gay marriage rights has until now been for gay couples, not institutions to file the lawsuits.  And these couples have argued their cases on the principle of equal protection, the Fourteenth Amendment; they are due the same rights and benefits of marriage as straight couples. 

But this lawsuit  - so different and groundbreaking that The New York Times put it on Tuesday’s Page One - argued that it was not just gay couples that are harmed by these laws, but clergy.  And the case was based not just on the Fourteenth Amendment, equal protection, but also on the First Amendment, free expression of religion.

That’s where Rev. Mohler comes in.  He wrote in his weekly blog,  “Evangelical Christians must both understand and affirm our understanding that religious liberty for us means religious liberty for all and that means that even as we advocate for religious liberty, we have to understand that the guarantee of religious liberty means the freedom of heretics to teach heresy.  If we deny religious liberty for others, very soon others will deny religious liberty to us.  That’s fair warning and this case bears close attention.”

This reminds me of the famous quotation attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The First Amendment is best known as the Free Speech Amendment; it has inspired other unlikely partnerships, like the American Civil Liberties Union’s defense of the rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to exercise their Free Speech rights with public marches.

For years conservatives have used the First Amendment to defend the free speech rights of clergy to refuse to officiate at gay weddings where they are legal. But the UCC turned that prevailing wisdom upside down.

Instead they drew attention to the First Amendment’s equally powerful prohibition of any government interference with the free exercise of religion.  Since the UCC has long supported gay rights as theologically faithful, to prohibit clergy from performing such weddings violates their free expression rights.

I don’t expect to read Mohler’s name on an amicus brief or see him sitting behind the plaintiff’s table.  But the American religious landscape and denominational alliances got a bit muddier this week.  Or maybe clearer.  What would Jesus do?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter