Dr. Ryan T. Anderson — Beyond Religious Liberty Being Heard Today

Transcript (edited for readability).

And what I want to do in this second lecture — or, you know, what I was asked to do, which is also what I want to do — I think the title is something like "Communicating Beyond Religious Liberty." And the idea being that a fear that I have is that during the Obama years, we had so many religious liberty violations. Think about the Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby, the baker, the florist, the photographer. So both the federal government and the state governments were increasingly violating religious liberty, that a lot of new religious liberty groups sprang into action, a lot of religious liberty law firms sprang into action. And I think a lot of Christians learned the wrong lesson, and the lesson they learned was, "Oh, religious liberty is all that we should care about. If they just leave us alone, that's all that good citizenship, faithful citizenship requires of me."

And so it could also lead to kind of the, "Well, look, just leave me free to believe my bigoted beliefs in the privacy of my home and the privacy of my chapel, and then you do what you want to do." And I think that if that strategy — that all we communicate to our neighbors, to our friends, to the outside world is, "All we want is religious liberty," but we're not actually then going to use our liberty to defend that what we believe is true — it will be a disaster for the church, right? Because part of our common mission here is evangelizing and making converts, right? And that's going to mean actually defending that what we believe isn't our idiosyncratic, bigoted belief that we want freedom to believe in the privacy of our chapel and home, but we think these are public truth claims. And we think other people should believe them. And that means we have to use our liberty to actually then defend the truth. But that also means on certain issues, we should also think that the law should reflect the truth. Right?

And so even as a legal matter, as a policy, political matter, religious liberty isn't all that we should care about. An unjust law is still no law at all. And I want to talk about — I mean, the way that Martin Luther King Jr. in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" described this was that a manmade law that's not in conformity to the natural law and the eternal law is an unjust law. And so he wasn't just asking for religious liberty so that his church wouldn't be racist. He wanted to get rid of all racist laws, right? He wanted to see that our manmade laws squared with the natural law and the eternal law, right? And we should do the same thing, whether it's with abortion, whether it's with marriage, whether it's with transgender issues, et cetera, et cetera.

So let me give you the outline of what I want to do in this talk. And there are more parts of this one. The previous one only had three. This one has five. But none is shorter, I hope. I first want to say a little about why religious liberty is important, right? If the thesis of the talk is "communicating beyond religious liberty," I don't want to make it seem like religious liberty isn't important. So I want to say a little bit about why religious liberty is important. But then I'm going to say why it's not enough, right? So religious liberty is important, but it's not the only thing that's important. So part one, religious liberty. Part two, I want to say a little bit about the moment that we find ourselves in right now, as faithful Christians in the United States. There's something distinctive about this moment. Three, after saying about religious liberty, saying about the moment, I want to then highlight why religious liberty isn't going to be enough for this moment. Four, I want to say a little bit about why now — you know, why in a 250-year history of the United States do we see these challenges now? And then part five, I'll say a little bit about what to do.

All right. First thing is to say religious liberty. So part one. Religious liberty is as American as apple pie, but so too is religious persecution, right? And we'll celebrate some of this, you know, a week from yesterday with Thanksgiving. If you think about the American settling, when the Pilgrims come to our shores, what they're doing is they're fleeing the wars of religion in Europe, right? So you have all of this religious persecution, religious liberty violations going on in Europe, and so you have Christians fleeing Europe to come to America, to have freedom to practice their faith the way they understand it. And then what do they immediately start doing? They immediately start persecuting other Christians who aren't practicing their faith the way that they think it ought to be practiced, right?

And so you can see, like, some of the legal scholars refer to this as the Puritan mistake. That the early Puritans, they come here and then they start persecuting non-Puritan forms of religion. And you see this. I mean, think Massachusetts Bay Colony, the city on the hill, under Governor John Winthrop. He sends Roger Williams into exile. Roger Williams goes on, defying the colony, to Rhode Island, right? And then there they started having religious tolerance, but then over time Jews weren't allowed to vote. And so it's a checkered history. When you look at the settling of our country, it's both people fleeing from persecution to find a safe haven, but then they start persecuting other people.

I'm from — I grew up in Maryland. I'm also Catholic. Maryland was founded as a Catholic colony. But by 1690, the Church of England was the established church, and Catholics couldn't worship publicly, right? So it's a checkered, a mixed bag. Now, there's nothing distinctively Puritan. Like, this isn't some, you know, reformed theology, Calvinism is to blame. This is about human nature, right? So the Puritan mistake, it just so happened historically at the time of the founding, it was, you know, a certain flavor of reformed Christians that were engaged in it. Today, the Puritans are progressive Puritans. So the progressive Puritans, they're the ones trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraception. They're the ones trying to force Catholic hospitals to do sex change surgeries. They're the ones shutting down Christian adoption agencies. They're the ones harassing the baker, florist, and photographers, right?

You remember the old Looney Tunes cartoon where you had an angel on this shoulder and then a little devil on that shoulder? That's what the Puritan mistake is about, right? It's not about, you know, either progressive or, you know, theology. It's about a human nature where the line between good and evil runs through every human heart and soul, end quote. And so the good side, the good angel — we want to be free to respond to God's truth as we understand it, right? "Here I stand, I can do no other," right? To quote one Christian leader here. So that's the good side, right? We want to be free to respond to God as we understand what God demands of us. But then we have this devilish side where we want to coerce other people to live out their faith as we understand it, right? And that could be true whether you're engaged in progressive ideology or you're engaged in a form of Christian orthodoxy.

What takes place between the two Puritan mistakes that I mentioned — the original Puritans and then the progressive Puritans, the settling of the country and today — what takes place in between is the founding of the nation. And the founders, I think, actually achieved something fairly important, because what the founders wanted to do was, they had constitutional protections for Jews, for Catholics, for Quakers, right? Three religious minorities that had been persecuted during the colonial era. No religious tests for office, no oaths, you know, a variety of mechanisms to protect religious liberty.

And so there are two famous documents I want to briefly read. One's from 1790: George Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. And I'm going to oversimplify history a little bit, but the history of the Jewish people in Europe was that they were either actively persecuted or they were begrudgingly tolerated. And so the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island sends President Washington, our first president, a letter: "What are you guys, how are you going to treat us in these new United States of America? Are you going to actively persecute us or begrudgingly tolerate us?" And Washington says, neither. "We're going to respect your inherent natural rights. You have an inherent natural right to be Jewish."

So the letter he writes says: "The citizens of the United States have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy, a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. It requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

So what Washington's getting at — one, he's taking a dig at John Locke. "It's now no more that toleration is spoken of," right? Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration." At the time, that was cutting edge. Locke was saying, "Look, we can tolerate each other." Washington said, "No, no, it's not like we're gonna tolerate you as if you're something evil or bad. We're going to respect your inherent natural rights." The reason why is that we're separating orthodoxy vis-à-vis the church from orthodoxy vis-à-vis the state. What is required to be a good citizen is different than what is required for being a good church member, right? So it's no longer — when he says, you know, all that we care about is that they demean themselves as good citizens and giving the Constitution their effectual support. Citizenship is about how you support and defend and uphold the Constitution. Church membership is whether or not you actually believe the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, et cetera, et cetera. And that's gonna be an important separation.

The reason why was explained five years earlier by Madison. This is the famous "Memorial and Remonstrance." Madison the theoretician — if Washington's the statesman, Madison is kind of the scholar. This is what he says: "Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man, and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable because what is here a right towards men is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society."

That one paragraph for Madison contains more intellectual content than, like, an entire hour-long debate that you could watch on either side of the political divide. I mean, it just shows you how much our statesmen used to be able to think about these things. So I'll unpack it just in a couple minutes. First, he says, look, religion, to be authentic, needs to be free. Coerced religion is no religion at all. If you're gonna have authentic religion, it needs to be directed by reason and conviction, not by force and violence. Then he says there's a vertical relationship, a relationship between creatures down here and the Creator up here, and that relationship is a relationship of duty. Each of us as a creature has a duty towards the Creator, and the duty that we owe to the Creator, and the manner in which we discharge that duty, needs to be directed by reason and conviction, not by force and violence.

So then that vertical relationship, which is a dutiful relationship, creates the horizontal relationship. All of us vis-à-vis each other, and therefore all of us vis-à-vis Uncle Sam, have a relationship of rights, right? Because we have a duty to the Creator, we have a right, vis-à-vis each other and the government, that none of us can coerce each other, and the state can't coerce us. And then he says that this duty to the Creator takes precedence, both in order of time and in degree of obligation. The duty that creatures owe to the Creator took place before there was a United States of America, right? Before the social compact started this country, we still had a duty to the Creator, and the duty to the Creator is more important than the duty to Uncle Sam. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but to God the things that are God's." And so what Madison's getting at here is it's an entire, like, philosophical theology, a natural theology, of how do we understand the creature-Creator relationship, what does this mean for the free exercise of religion, what does this mean for a duty, a vertical duty that then creates horizontal rights, and then what's the purpose of the state? It's to protect those rights. That's Madison's argument.

All right. And so I want to mention that just by the way of saying, we should all defend religious liberty. It's disconcerting that you see some people giving up on religious liberty. People on the left put it in scare quotes: "so-called religious liberty," right? The ACLU used to defend religious liberty. They're increasingly giving up on religious liberty. And now there are some Christians who even seem to be skeptical of religious liberty. We should be in favor of religious liberty, but it's not the only thing we should be in favor of. Because there are truth claims at stake here. Religious liberty doesn't protect people who aren't religious but believe the same things we believe about the natural law, right? Atheists for Life, atheists against pediatric gender transition, right? They don't get protected by religious liberty. So there are people who aren't protected by religious liberty.

Second, it doesn't protect other goods, other interests that are at stake when there are bad laws, right? An unjust law doesn't just threaten religious liberty, but it also threatens the privacy of girls who are forced to share a bathroom with boys. It threatens the equality of girls who lose races to boys competing as girls. It threatens the right to life of the unborn child, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not just that it doesn't protect non-religious people. It's also there are other victims besides religious liberty. And then lastly, religious liberty doesn't actually get to the root of the dispute, right? We don't have a dispute about religious liberty. We have a dispute about marriage. We don't have a dispute about pediatric medicine. We have a dispute about our embodiment as male and female. And if our response is only religious liberty, we're not going to be getting there.

Okay, so part two, where do we find ourselves right now? I think the easiest way to describe this is that for the past 50 years, secular progressives have advanced the sexual revolution through aggressive government mandates. And this should be a familiar story: a movement that claims merely to want the freedom to live and let live. First it repeals laws that it claims limit their freedom. Then it uses government to subsidize their preferred choices. Then it uses government to mandate that other people subsidize their preferred choices. And then finally, it uses government to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

So I'll give you two examples. Judicial activism in the name of personal freedom overturned abortion laws protecting unborn babies, and created a right to abortion. The right to abortion then became a demand for government-funded abortion. Then it became a regulation forcing Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters to pay for abortion-causing drugs. And now it's a movement to punish pharmacists and others who won't dispense abortion pills or assist in performing abortions. Judicial activism redefines marriage; the so-called right to marry becomes the duty to bake the cake; and now we see adoption agencies and Christian schools spending years in court to see whether or not they'll be free to live out their convictions, right? So you can see how it goes. First you repeal a just law, then the unjust law becomes government-funded support for the new belief, then a regulation that other people support that belief, and then a law that'll punish the dissenters. And we've seen, as with abortion, we're seeing with gay marriage, or in the middle of that process, on transgender issues — although I'm much more optimistic that in the short run, we will win on the transgender issues.

All right, where do we see this playing out? Charities. I'll mention a couple. Adoption agencies. Everything I argued in the previous lecture: children have a right to a mom and a dad. Those sorts of agencies are being told, "You can no longer care for kids." The Philadelphia adoption agency case that went to the Supreme Court three years ago. There were 30 adoption agencies in Philadelphia. Only two of them wouldn't do same-sex adoptions. One of them caved when the city said, "You have to do it." And that was unfortunate. It was a Christian adoption agency that caved. One of them got shut down, and then they sued, and eventually they won at the Supreme Court. But it wasn't good enough that 28 out of the 30 adoption agencies would place children with same-sex couples. The government said, "If any of the adoption agencies want to find children a home with only a mother and a father, we're going to go after them."

Another charity, homeless shelters. There are currently evangelical battered women's shelters being sued because they wouldn't let an intoxicated male in a nightgown spend the night in the homeless shelter. Now, these homeless shelters are not like a night at the Ritz-Carlton. Imagine this chapel, take out all the pews, and put like a cot every three feet. And you know, that's what many of these shelters are like. It's just, you know, it's a big open space, there's a lot of beds. And it's understandable why — I believe it was the pastor who said to, you know, the guy showed up drunk as well, the intoxicated gentleman in a nightgown, and he's like, "No, you can't spend the night here." He called a taxi company and sent him to the men's shelter, and then he got sued for a human rights violation.

Healthcare — you know, we're seeing healthcare debates over abortion, abortion-causing pills, pharmacists, things like the Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby. We're also seeing debates over sex reassignment procedures. There are government mandates that say that if you perform a double mastectomy in the case of breast cancer, you have to perform a double mastectomy in the case of an individual who wants to identify as a man. There are several states that will prohibit you from helping someone identify with their body. They call it conversion therapy, right? This is Orwellian doublespeak. If you give a gender-confused teenage girl a double mastectomy, that's gender-affirming; if you help a gender-confused 18-year-old girl identify as a girl, that's called conversion therapy.

Schools — you know, they're going after faithful Catholic schools, faithful Lutheran schools, faithful Jewish schools, faithful Latter-day Saints schools, right? This is the type of thing where it doesn't matter what our confessional disagreements are when it comes to theology; if we share a common understanding of human nature, those are the issues that they're most upset about vis-à-vis school. And so it's a very interesting phenomenon. The wars of religion used to be about things like soteriology, justification, sanctification, ecclesiology, right? That's what the European wars of religion were. Now what they're saying is, "Look, we don't believe any of that nonsense. You can believe whatever you want to believe about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, who cares," because that's not — "but we really care about LGBT stuff. We really care about abortion," right? That's where you'll see Jews, Protestants, Catholics, LDS, they share a common human anthropology, and that's why our schools, our charities, are coming into trouble. Professionals: the baker, the florist, the photographer, the therapists, the counselors, right? So we're seeing religious liberty threats all over the place.

Right. So that's the moment that we're living in, right? So we have religious liberty concerns; religious liberty matters, it's being threatened. But it's not enough. And I want to say a little why. Start with education. It'll be great if we win all of the religious liberty battles so that Concordia can be authentically Lutheran, and so that Thomas Aquinas College can be authentically Catholic, and so that Yeshiva can be authentically Jewish. It'll be great if we can win religious liberty battles so our K-through-12 schools can be authentically religious. Here's the sad reality: 90% of America's children go to public schools, government-run schools. We should care not just about the freedom to opt out of the government schools — although we should fight for school choice, vouchers, education savings accounts, we should fight for religious liberty — but we should also care about what is going on inside of the K-through-12 schools that the vast majority of our neighbors are sending their kids to. And chances are, you know, for those of you who are pastors, many people in your pews are sending their kids to that school because they have no choice, right? Financially, if it's a single mom and she's working, if both parents are working but they can't make ends meet, you don't have money to send a private school tuition if you don't have a school choice program.

We should be concerned if they're using the Gender Unicorn to indoctrinate kids in a false understanding of their bodies. I hope tomorrow's presenter will probably talk about the Gender Unicorn in the transgender section. We should care if there are various forms of indoctrination when it comes to LGBT issues, when it comes to critical race theory, a whole host of issues. We should also care about the high school athletes in Rhode Island who lost their track championship races to boys identifying as girls. We should also care about the UPenn swimmers who had to share a locker room for an entire season with a fully intact man who walked around naked in their locker room, right — both for their privacy and for indecent exposure, right? Religious liberty — I don't know if those athletes in Rhode Island are religious or not. I don't know if the baby in the womb will turn out to be religious or not. It's unjust what's going on, and we should care about that. It's beyond religious liberty.

Likewise, I mean, take the Hobby Lobby case, the Little Sisters of the Poor case. It is wonderful that the Green family doesn't have to pay for abortion-causing drugs in its healthcare plan. Here's the sad reality: even after the Trump administration broadened the religious liberty exemption from the contraception/abortion-pill mandate, the mandate still exists. We still have a federal healthcare mandate that says every employer-provided healthcare plan needs to provide cost-free coverage of four drugs and devices that can kill an unborn baby. And that's an unjust law. It's an unjust law whether you're religious or not, whether the babies are religious or not, whether the employer is religious or not. And it's an overreach of government, right? Why should the government be mandating something that's unjust to begin with? Religious liberty doesn't address that.

You know, I mentioned earlier the adoption agency case. It's great that the one adoption agency in Philadelphia that doesn't want to do same-sex adoption is now free to do it. But if you find yourself in need of adoption, something has gone wrong in your life, right? God's design for your life — something has gone wrong, that your mother and father can't care for you. What that child deserves is something that, as closely as possible, resembles their family of origin. What they deserve is a married mother and father. And yet 29 of the 30 agencies are saying two moms or two dads is just as good as a married mom and dad for those kids. That's not a religious liberty issue. What we should care about for those children would be that they deserve what we would want for all of our children and our grandchildren, that they have a happy, joyful childhood being raised by their mother and father.

And then, you know, I mentioned some of the religious liberty concerns, you know, mandates to perform sex reassignment procedures, prohibitions on good medicine — and then I mentioned the sports case, I mentioned the bathroom, the locker room case. The people who we should most be concerned about, though, are increasingly the young high school and college-aged women whose bodies have been mutilated based upon a false ideology, right? The people who our hearts should break the most for are, you know, people who are confused about their identity, who then had grown-ups, adults in their lives, tell them that "your way to happiness is to take puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and then having a double mastectomy." And unfortunately, we're now in a situation where we have a small handful of young women who transitioned in their teenage years, who are now in their 20s and regret it, and they're suing the doctors who did this to them. This isn't a religious liberty issue. And just speaking about religious liberty, just advocating for religious liberty, isn't sufficient for our vocation, right? Our vocation is to be advocates for justice, advocates for the widow and the orphan, and that's going to require more of us.

All right, fourth part. So I'm making good time. Fourth part: why now? If you think about what I said — you know, we had the original Puritan mistake, we now have the progressive Puritans, in between we had the founding, where things seemed to have been going pretty good. Why do we now see, after, you know, at least 100, 150, maybe 200 years of the ability of faithful Christians to flourish in the United States — why in the past 50 years have we seen, and increasingly — you know, if you want to say the sexual revolution happens in 1968, the end of the '60s, the religious liberty violations really are past decade, past 20 years, right? Why this ramping up of the hostility? And I want to give you three historical reasons, because then, corresponding to the analysis of what went wrong, it'll then help us think about what we all need to do in different callings, right? Depending on the calling that we have, we might be plugged in differently.

First, historical changes, changes in religion in the United States. And the changes in religion in the United States happen both internally and externally. And I'll start with the external changes. We have changes from secularization. I used to work for and live with a former Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest, Richard John Neuhaus. And Father Neuhaus wrote a famous book, back when he was a Lutheran pastor, titled "The Naked Public Square." And his argument was that the forces of secularization and secularism had said that religion is merely a private matter, right? Because religion is personal, that means religion is private, and that means you have to force religion out of the public square, and this had left the public square naked, right? That was his argument. Well, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. And so what's happened instead is a different ideology has clothed the public square. You can call it wokeism, you can call it critical theory, Marxism, whatever you want, to describe what has now become the dominant force there. But one of the challenges has come from outside of religion, which is the marginalization of religion, the privatization of religion. This is where you see people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry talking about the freedom of worship, right? "You Lutherans, you can do whatever you want to do inside of your chapel. But you don't get the free exercise of religion. You don't get to bring your religion into the public square, into your charities, into, you know, things that actually matter as the world sees it." So that's one.

But then the second change of religion is internally. Like, what we've witnessed in the past 50 years is just an implosion of orthodox Christianity. And that's on us, right? This is what Neuhaus referred to as, like, the mainline churches became the oldline churches and now they're on the sidelines. The idea here being that, you know, the Episcopalian church in the United States, there's very little daylight, culturally speaking, from the New York Times editorial page, right? That the mainline churches have imploded. Something similar has happened to the Catholic Church, right? The spirit of Vatican II, these synods on synodality, it's a huge problem splintering the Catholic community. And what we saw a generation ago with the mainline churches, we're now seeing something similar with the evangelical community, right? There's a divide going on amongst, kind of, the next generation of evangelicals. And what we're left with is what the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith called a moralistic therapeutic deism, where the average theology, the real beliefs — whether the person is churched or unchurched, what does the person really believe? They believe, "Yeah, there might be a god up in the sky, and he's more or less like my therapist, and he just wants me to be happy, and mean people suck." Right? That's it. Don't be mean, don't be judgmental. And so it's moralistic, it's therapeutic, and it's the God who wound up the clock. It's not a personal God. It's not a God that places demands on me — like none of that, right? And so those are changes with religion. That's part one.

Part two: there have been changes in the state, changes in government. And what I mean by this is that what we have seen in the past 50 or 60 years is just an explosion in the size and the scope of the state. An explosion in the number of regulations, an explosion in the alphabet soup of the agencies. I mean, things that never existed prior to the New Deal and the Great Society. There wasn't a Department of Health and Human Services, right? I sometimes joke that if James Madison, Thomas Jefferson came back from the grave and heard about the Hobby Lobby case or the Little Sisters of the Poor case, their response would not be, "Oh, but the First Amendment." Their response would be, "What is the Department of Health and Human Services, and what in the Constitution authorizes it to issue a contraception mandate?" Right? And so the first offense would have been limited government, would have been, you know, keeping government limited to its proper constitutional purposes. As the government does more and more, it's more likely that it will violate both religious liberty and it will violate the natural law.

All right? The last thing I will say here is that we used to have a presumption of liberty, where the government had to justify their regulation. You'll notice what we now have is a presumption of government regulation, where you need to justify your liberty. So think about the burden of proof here. You, as faithful Lutherans, have to go to court to get your exemption from the unjust law, rather than the government having to justify what justifies the law in the first place, right? It's turned it upside down, what the founders' conception is.

And then lastly — and this is kind of the hot-button change — we've had a huge change in conceptions of human nature, most of which are centered on human sexuality, right? Where does the ACLU still defend religious liberty? You know, if you're a Native American who wants to ingest peyote, that's fine. If you're an Orthodox Jew who needs to eat a kosher meal in prison, that's fine. But abortion, contraception, gay marriage, transgender issues — those are the cases where you have to bake the cake, you have to dispense the abortion pill, you have to pay for the sex reassignment procedures, right? And so what's happened in the past 60 years is that, whereas we used to have an understanding of the virtue of chastity, we used to have a certain common understanding about fidelity, about marriage, about exclusivity — what we've now come to is that the only kind of common cultural norm is consent. Consenting adults, and now increasingly consenting teenagers, consenting children, should be free to do whatever they want to do. And then if you have a totally different worldview, a totally different ethic about human sexuality — that we're created male or female, that men and women are created for each other in marriage, much more than just consent is required — you're looked upon as if you're the one imposing your foreign beliefs on everyone else.

Now put these three things together. Religion has been marginalized, it's been sidelined, it's been privatized. The government is now regulating more aspects of our lives. And there's a new ideology that's clothing that formerly naked public square. And it's an ideology of the sexual revolution. That's where you now see so many of, you know, what some people will refer to as religious liberty debates, but what I want to encourage you to see as — there's a deeper anthropological disagreement at stake, and that's what we have to be engaged in.

Okay, so part five, the last part of what I want to say tonight. If you think about — and I hope, I'm fairly certain, this is common ground between us — if you think about our vocation as citizens, or just our vocation in general, our calling in life in general, it's to transform all of creation in the light of the gospel. What we're meant to do is, whether it's our families, our businesses, our schools, our charities, our hospitals, or our polities, we're meant to transform them in light of the truths of the gospel, respecting their proper nature, right? We're not supposed to turn a school into a church, or a hospital into a church, or the government into a church, right? There is, properly understood, an institutional, jurisdictional separation of church and state, right? These are separate institutions, with separate jurisdictions, with separate authority structures. But we are supposed to, as citizens, make sure that our schools are teaching the truth, make sure that our hospitals are actually focused on healing and the wholeness of human nature, not distorting human nature, not trying to transform human nature. And we should be concerned that our polities, our cities, our states, and our national government create manmade laws that are derived from the natural law and the eternal law. The jurisdiction of the church and of the ordained clergy is over the church. The jurisdiction of the state — and therefore, in a representative democracy, that means we are the state, right? As citizens, we get to elect our leaders, and then we actually have a calling, a vocation, to see to it that what they do is in keeping with the truth of morality. And the gospel can enlighten us on this.

Now, what's weird is that at this moment in time, we're being told that every other ideology — if you're a Kantian, a utilitarian, a Marxist, a cultural Marxist, a critical theorist, you can bring your values into the public square and advocate for what you believe justice and the common good require — unless you're religious. This is why they're going after the new Speaker of the House so much. Because he says, "Well, look, my belief system" — he's a very, you know, orthodox Baptist, Southern Baptist, and he's saying, "Look, my belief system is informed by the Bible. And I want to be able to bring my understanding of morality into the public square and advocate for laws that I think will enact justice and the common good." You guys do it all the time, right? There's no moral neutrality going on here, right? The left has a vision of justice and the common good. It's a faulty vision, but they have a conception of it. They have a vision, and they are advocating for laws, as citizens, in a self-governing republic, in accordance with that vision. And then when Mike Johnson suggests he wants to do the same, he's called a Christian nationalist. And that's what many of us, if we want to advocate in the public square not just for religious liberty but for just laws to begin with, that's what we're met with.

Anthony Kennedy — a Catholic, to my great chagrin, Supreme Court justice — he wrote the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, the decision 30 years after Roe v. Wade, 30 years ago, that upheld Roe v. Wade. And this is the passage that he wrote that Scalia loved to mock. And Justice — so Anthony Kennedy's phrase was, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," right? It's the passage that Justice Scalia always referred to as the "sweet mystery of life" passage, because he thought it was, like, silly, kind of like sophomoric, you know, a late-night bull session where you're, you know, doing your own thing, and somehow this, like, shows up in a constitutional opinion of the court.

Now, the historic understanding, and the American founding understanding, was that God defined existence and meaning, as God created the universe and human life, and the heart of liberty, as contrasted with license, was to order our actions in accordance with God's reasons. And this historic understanding of liberty, and of meaning, and of the sweet mystery of human life, it's not foreign to the American constitutional tradition. As I mentioned, MLK Jr., when he's in the Birmingham jail prison, who does he cite? He cites St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to explain that an unjust law is no law at all. And how do we know the difference? A just law is a manmade law that's derived from the natural and the eternal law. That's — I mean, that's what I want to encourage all of us tonight to see as our citizenship vocation, right? It's not just to advocate for religious liberty, but it's to actually advocate for the fullness of the truth, as it bears on a political issue, right?

I don't think baptism bears on a political issue. So I don't want to see that — like, there is a certain type of Christian nationalism that says that, you know, Christians should have more civil rights and more civil liberties and more political authority than non-Christians, so that if you're baptized, you have — that's not what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about, there are moral questions, questions of the truth about human nature and about the common good and about justice, and we should be advocating for the truth. The reason why — I mentioned earlier that ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences, bad ideas have victims, there are human costs to getting human nature wrong. So think about the human costs of the sexual revolution. Millions of unborn babies, made in the image and likeness of God, who have never seen the light of day. Millions of kids who have grown up without a relationship with their father. Millions of women who have been used and abused by men seeking sexual satisfaction. Millions of men who are addicted to pornography, like living in their parents' basement, the so-called pajama boys who never actually mature. And now we have a generation of young people who feel alienated from their own bodies. None of those are religious liberty issues. Everything I just mentioned there — I don't know whether those victims are religious or non-religious, and it doesn't matter. These are human nature issues. These are human flourishing issues.

Next thing to say: we only get the religious liberty issues when we get the law wrong on all of those questions in the first place. If we don't have pro-abortion laws, we don't get religious liberty violations vis-à-vis right to life. If we don't have the redefinition of marriage, we don't have laws forcing the baker to bake the same-sex wedding cake. If we don't allow transition procedures in the first place, we don't have female athletes being denied a fair competition, and we don't have young people having their bodies mutilated, and then we don't have the religious liberty violation. And so you see how each of these things — it's only because we got the law wrong in the first place that we then got the religious liberty violation. So it's actually, like, the best protection — if all you did care about was religious liberty, and I hope you don't only care about religious liberty — the best protection of religious liberty is not asking for an exemption from an unjust law, it's preventing unjust laws to begin with.

All right, very last thing I'll say, and then I'll wrap up and we should have time for questions. If you think about the history of the church, right? So I first gave you a little, like, history of America, the three changes: the change of religion, the change of the state, and the change of the sexual revolution. Now I want to do, like, a 2,000-year history. Think about the debates of the early church. The early church debates, the early heresies, all focused on the nature of God, right? There were Christological and Trinitarian heresies. Think about the debates of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation — and, you know, we don't need to take sides in those debates tonight. What they focused on was the nature of the church and the nature of salvation, right? I mentioned earlier the wars of religion were about ecclesiology, about soteriology, sanctification, justification. Today's debates are not primarily about the nature of God. They're not primarily about the nature of salvation. Today's debates are about the nature of man, right?

And the person who, you know, to my mind, kind of encapsulated this and brought it home, at least for my community, was John Paul II. The way he had described it was, you know, there were two world wars, there were totalitarian regimes, there was Auschwitz, there was the Gulag. In the 20th century, modern secular man thought, by getting rid of God, we'd be elevating humanity. And the lesson from history is that by getting rid of God, we have degraded man, we have pulverized man. And so I think what this requires of us today is to realize that today's heresies are not primarily Trinitarian heresies and Christological heresies that Augustine was wrestling with. They're not primarily justification, sanctification, ecclesiology heresies that, you know, Luther, Calvin, Counter-Reformation theologians were wrestling with. Today's heresies are primarily about human nature. And that means, for those of us with vocations to the intellectual life, we're going to need intellectual defenders of orthodoxy, including an orthodoxy of the human person, the person made in the image and likeness of God, the imago Dei. But then we're also going to need responses to all of those areas that I outlined earlier. We'll need people responding to the sexual revolution. We'll need people responding to the change in government. People rejuvenating religion, clothing the public square.

And then the very last thing I'll say is that, you know, having mentioned the importance of the intellectual life — as someone with a PhD who writes books, who does this — there's a phrase from Pope Benedict. And so, you know, as a Catholic, I have to close with quoting a pope at you guys. You know, Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, was a world-class intellectual. And I think people, regardless of, you know, our theological disagreements, recognize this. And there's a phrase of his that I really love, where he says, it's not the arguments of the intellectuals, but the holiness of the saints and the beauty of the artists that win converts. And I think that's going to be true. So regardless of what our calling is — like, you know, I can see some of you are wearing clerical collars, you're theologians, you're pastors, you'll be doing — you don't just, like — but all of us can embody the truth. And I think that's what Ratzinger, Benedict, was getting at, that all of us, the beauty of holiness, can be our best defense, our best witness, and ultimately something that I think will bring people to Christ and will defend the church's teaching in a way that the books that I write will never do so. The most important thing that I will do will be what my wife and I are doing with our family, with our kids, in living out these truths. And I think that's something that all of us can aspire to. All right, so with that, I'm finished. We have 11 minutes or so for questions. I've been watching the clock. I, you know, at some point the organist arrives, so I know you guys have prayers, I don't want to… Any questions for Dr. Anderson?

Here's one. You mentioned the trans lawsuits. I'm wondering if you see what's going on, what happened in Europe, right? The lawsuit shut the clinic down. Do you see that going that direction here, possibly?

Yes, possibly. And the important thing here is to point out that the same change in the composition of the judiciary that gave us the Dobbs decision could also help us have favorable rulings in some of these cases. If this was the judiciary from the eighth year of the Obama administration, and then had we had a Hillary Clinton administration, and now if we were in the second term of a Hillary, I would say no, right? But I actually do think that what we've seen now is that we have several states — Alabama passed a law prohibiting pediatric gender transition; it was struck down at the trial level, but now it's been upheld on appeal. And now the question is, like, will the bad guys want to appeal to the Supreme Court, because I think they must know that if they take it there, the Supreme Court's probably going to uphold it. The state of Florida, what they did was, rather than having the statehouse prohibit it, their Board of Public Health held hearings and then said, "Nope, there's no evidence to support this." So we have two examples there. There have been other states — Tennessee, and its law has been struck down, but, you know, they're going to appeal. So I'm actually fairly optimistic that by the time the laws that have prohibited sex change on children get to the Supreme Court, if it's the current composition of the court, they get upheld. Who knows what happens if we have four more years of a Biden administration, or a Harris administration, or what's his name in California — Newsom, yeah, Gavin Newsom. Because Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito aren't getting any younger. And, you know, we could wake up one morning to the news that, you know, one of them has passed away — just like, you know, it was in the afternoon that we learned that Justice Scalia had passed away. So, you know, that's a huge — and, you know, what happens in 2024, the election is, you know, anyone's guess, and, you know, it's not pretty no matter where you come down on these things, right? So that's one.

The other is the medical malpractice lawsuits. And here what I'm actually somewhat optimistic for is that, look, medical malpractice lawyers and, like, class-action lawyers, they're kind of sharks, and they smell blood in the water, and they're looking for a big payout, and there are some very good lawyers who sense that they can make a lot of money. And so they can do well while doing good. And I think what they know how to do is to pick the right jurisdiction, right? Don't bring these cases in California or New York or Massachusetts. Bring them in some deep red states where you know you have a sympathetic judge, and, you know, try your cases there. So anyway, so I — I'm ardently, not just hopeful — which is a theological virtue, we should all be hopeful — but I'm also optimistic. You know, optimism is more of a question of optics: how do you see it? So, yeah. Yes, question back there.

Yeah, my name is Kevin Voss, director of the Concordia Center for Bioethics here on campus. I've got a question for you. Actually, I got my PhD at St. Louis University, so I was exposed to the Roman Catholic tradition. Do you think Pope Francis is doing a good job of proclaiming the natural law, as did his predecessors Benedict and John Paul II?

Is this being recorded? Unfortunately, no. I mean, like, I'll be honest, I do not think we have had the same clarity — and not just on the natural law, but on the gospel. I just do not think Rome has been as clear and as consistent as it was for the entirety of my life, up until the past decade. And, you know, that was something I got to take for granted, because I was born in '81, and John Paul II became pope in '78. And, you know — I mean, we're in Milwaukee, right? Rembert Weakland, the former archbishop here, Catholic archbishop, was a heretic, right? But you would have bad priests, bad bishops, you always had clarity in Rome for about a 40-year stretch, and we haven't had that clarity. I don't personally think Pope Francis is a heretic. I think he's surrounded by some bad advisors, and I think a lot of these, like, ad hoc interviews that he's given on airplanes where he says one thing and walks it back — it's almost like the intentional sowing of confusion is itself the problem. But if you look at what he has said about abortion, he's like, "It's like hiring a hitman," right — that's the analogy he used on abortion. He refers to the transgender stuff as transgender ideology. Like, he's actually been pretty good in his deliberate moments. Even on gay marriage, I was in the room when he said a child has a right to a mother and a father. And so, like, when he's deliberate, it's like — but then I think some of his ad hoc things, and then some of the advisors, are highly problematic. And, you know, it's a source of lamentation.

Other questions. Pastor Worm.

Hi, I'm River — Matt Worm, from Brookings, South Dakota. Are you familiar with the case over in Finland with Bishop Pohjola and Päivi Räsänen of the Parliament?

Okay. Then I won't ask you a question. I want to ask you your opinion. But it was religious freedom in Finland and our Lutheran church — this was the case that was decided yesterday.

Yes, I am familiar. Sorry, yes. I didn't know the name, but I — yes.

Gotcha. Yeah, we're friends with him. Do you have any opinions or parallels, or kind of insight you see from that case in Finland to us in America, and kind of similarities between laws in Europe and over here?

I mean, so, yes and no. I have not followed it closely enough, partly because — I mean, his lawyers are just outstanding. He had ADF International, so Alliance Defending Freedom is a US-based law firm that has, you know, defended the baker, the florist, the photographer. They opened an international office, like, a decade ago, and that's who was defending him there. And so the biggest thing I will say is that many nations do not have a First Amendment like we do. And the free speech protections that we enjoy in the United States are more robust than more or less any other nation. And so, and especially with the current crop of Supreme Court justices, I think our free speech protections are actually really good. Last year, the case 303 Creative was a website designer who didn't want to have to create websites for same-sex weddings, and that was a 6-3 ruling in her favor. And so we have some good precedents, because if you can't force the website designer to do it, how could you force a bishop or a priest or a pastor, et cetera, et cetera?

All of that said, we can have the best legal protections for speech and still have a terrible culture for speech. And I think that's the commonality that we're experiencing, right? When I was introduced, it was mentioned that Amazon refuses to sell one of my books, right? That was meant to have a chilling effect. It backfired, but what they were trying to do was both to discredit me and to send a signal to book publishers: if you publish books on the wrong side of the transgender issue, we won't sell them. And if you lose access — Amazon sells, like, 80% of all new nonfiction books in the United States. If you lose access to that market, good luck making a profit on your books. And book publishers are in the business of making a profit, right?

So that's what I — and then, I mean, imagine that you have children who aren't going to Concordia, but they're going to the Ivy League, or they're going to the big state university. How do they feel the campus culture respects freedom of speech, right? So even if we have the best law that says, like, "Yes, you can say that on a college campus," our children are censoring themselves because they're afraid of what the blowback would be. And I've challenged secular liberal audiences on this, albeit at Harvard. I was like, "How many of you would feel comfortable saying that you think gay marriage is okay?" and they all — I was like, "How many of you think your classmates would feel comfortable saying it's not okay?" And they kind of have this aha moment that, "Oh, hmm, yeah." But they don't want to do anything about it. I mean, look at what's going on right now on campuses in the aftermath of October 7th, right? And so anyway, so it's — that's a bigger question of, like, how do you address kind of the intimidation that's going on on campus? I have Jewish friends that, you know, have literally been, like, surrounded and hounded on some of these elite college campuses. And again, that violates the law, and yet it's happening, right? So we can have really good jurisprudence with really good precedents and still have a culture that says, "You have to think our way. And if you don't think our way, we'll make life miserable for you." And I think that's where we are.

One more question. Or not. You've answered every question that could possibly have occurred to us. Thank you so much for your very engaging presentation. Very helpful.

Thank you, Dr. Anderson.