Mankind’s first temptation remains our Achilles heel. Ever since the serpent deceptively whispered to Eve of the apple, “[W]hen you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil,” humanity has rebelled against truth and its source. We defiantly seek enlightenment, not from the light, but in our corrupted selves, groping in vain in the moral darkness.
Satan’s trick was not that Eve would objectively comprehend good from evil, but that she would erroneously and subjectively believe in her heart that apart from God she could distinguish wrong from right, substituting her own thoughts and feelings for God’s higher perspective. Our temptation remains to this day to turn away from the transcendent Source of truth and foolishly gaze inside ourselves for the answers—to alone determine good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error. We gaze in vain. The Apostle Paul explains our persisting god delusion as follows: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…”
Put simply, the “lie” is this: you are your own god and thus possess the requisite authority, information, and wisdom to properly determine what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, nothing objective or external to you has the authority to tell you how to live your life; not other people and, certainly, not God. But, rather than become truly “enlightened,” we have become morally stupid. In America, this cultural disease has run its dark course and is now so complete that we self-destructively call good “evil” and evil “good.”
But, let us be honest and call this what it is; this is not freedom, it is rebellion. And there is no more poignant example of the arrogance of the god delusion than so-called sexual liberty. Sexual liberty is not true freedom, but is actually little more than a small, spoiled, selfish, petulant creature throwing a tantrum and yelling at its Creator that He has it all wrong and that we, the allegedly enlightened creation, know better. Modern fabricators of “truth,” “equality,” and “civil rights” shamelessly shout into the whirl-wind, “Your moral boundaries do not define me God; I define myself!” As I once told a mega-church pastor, this “is Satan giving God the finger.” Narcissism has replaced truth and virtue in America and, like a bigoted social steamroller, is quite intolerantly crushing everything and everyone in its path.
So why all the recent fuss in Indiana and elsewhere about Christians and religious freedom? The conflict is quite simple. Authentic biblical Christians are people who have yielded and surrendered their right to themselves—their right to rebel. Real Christians worship the Creator and acknowledge His absolute authority to determine what is right and what is wrong. They seek to live their lives in submission and conformity with the Creator’s design for humanity, including His moral laws explained in Scripture. They have determined to die to themselves, pick up their crosses, and follow Jesus.
This is precisely why biblical Christians are more than a mere fly in the ointment to secular-regressive rebels; we are fundamentally counter-cultural anti-rebels. Though we are far from perfect, we represent truth in an age of unprecedented relativism, compromise, deception, and propaganda. Because we refuse to join the crowd in rejecting God and His moral laws, we are increasingly being branded social misfits—enemies of humanity and enemies of the state. Because we will not bow to morally-abased American idols, biblical Christians are a living rebuke to the neo-pagan god delusion of our diseased culture and its penultimate god, sexual liberty. Like salt on an open wound, we are a painful reminder that God exists, that He has prescribed moral laws for man, and that a day of reckoning and accountability is coming.
Yet, in a foolish fit of self-destructive rage, the elite purveyors of the god delusion casually ignore the deep wounds they are inflicting, not just on Christians, but upon themselves. As I explained in Why atheists should mourn the loss of religious freedom, this concept of the freedom of conscience, which includes religious freedom, is a uniquely American idea, based on the Christian notion that, since God himself does not compel belief, neither should the government. Authentic tolerance is a Christian ideal, not a fabrication of the secular enlightenment, as some would believe.
Foolishly, if those under the spell of the god delusion “kill” God and silence His followers in their fits of rebellion, they promise to simultaneously destroy the very foundation of our rights of conscience, and indeed all civil rights and, with them, our freedom. The only truly secure unalienable rights are those “endowed by [our] Creator.” Civil rights established and secured only by the inferior authority of the state, including black-robed justices, rather than by a transcendent God, are alienable because their foundation is weak and subject to the biases and whims of morally frail men and women.
Worshippers at the altar of sexual liberty hate Christians, but they hate our God even more. Perhaps as at no other time in our history, the American culture and courts have become a proxy of the spiritual war raging in the heavenlies. Do not be alarmed, beloved. The faithful are promised persecution and hatred. Fear God and not man. Do not disengage from the culture out of cowardice. Stand firm and continue to winsomely speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15).
Be encouraged! Our Creator, our good Father in Heaven from whom all truth, virtue, and unalienable rights flow, promises us that, no matter how dark it gets as the god-deluded rebels appear to succeed, He will return in power and glory to make all things new and bring righteousness and justice with Him.
Dean R. Broyles, Esq. is a constitutional attorney serving as the President of The National Center For Law & Policy (NCLP), an organization fighting to promote and defend religious freedom. Copyright© The National Center For Law & Policy. Reprinted with permission.