Your Other Right

The main problem with becoming a lawyer is not lawyer jokes;it is going to law school. I remember my fears. Most college seniors who wanted to get into my school were rejected. Those who got in nursed the general suspicion that they might not be as smart as the rest of the people who made it. The unspoken goal was to appear smarter than you were.

One casualty showed up the first day in a huge classroom of new students. As the professor was yelling out names I managed to respond "Present" to "Cameron." Moments later, when the professor shouted out "Cohen" three guys responded "Present." One of them, sitting right in front of me, immediately amended his answer to "No-Chase."

I figured the guy was so nervous he couldn't get his own name right. That made me feel better. At least I could correctly recognize and recite my own last name. When this nervous fellow and I later became best friends, he told me that he had recently changed his name from Cohen to Chase. But when the pressure was on, he reverted to his old name.

Pressure is like that. It strips away pretense. It reveals what you are really thinking and tests the fundamentals. Have you ever helped someone learn to drive? Both my automobiles and I have survived this process with my two children. With the pressure on, I'd direct a right turn. As we began to slew left, I'd yell out, "Yer other right."

"Yer other right" is something the regular readers of Liberty need to consider somberly. For years Liberty magazine has been warning against, and at times seeming to heap abuse on, the Religious Right. In tune with the secular press, Liberty has often been overly wary of conservative evangelical leaders who believe they have an obligation to God to try to promote godly principles in the public square.

Since Liberty is published by a church that is theologically conservative and at times stridently evangelical, the obvious question is "What is going on?" "How does this make any sense to be part of an attack on Christians who have very similar religious beliefs?"

What is "going on" is that Liberty fears that the Religious Right will at some point trample the rights of those who disagree. Now, as the United States enters a new era of "pressure," let me challenge Liberty readers by calling your attention to "yer other right." Let's consider the fundamentals again.

Since September 11, United States citizens have been under pressure from an external source. That, however, is not the only source of pressure. The week of February 17, 2002, USA Today ran a series of special reports on what the paper calls a "values gap" in the United states. Those who attend church often tend to vote Republican, and those who don't tend to be Democrats. According to the February 18, 2002, edition of the paper, a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows that the country remains "evenly divided on politics and fractured on values issues." How big is the divide? The poll revealed that of those who planned to vote, 44 percent planned to vote Republican and 42 percent planned to vote Democratic.

This represents a huge shift that has happened during my lifetime. The USA Today series was based on an eight-month examination and recent polling. If the paper is right that the fissure in the country between Republicans and Democrats is partly a division between values, then isn't that precisely what has historically concerned the readers of Liberty?

And what kind of candid statements does this division produce? The February 18, 2002, edition of USA Today quoted well-known Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Bob Shrum as writing that the September 11 attacks create "a moment of opportunity for Democrats" and went on to describe how this "opportunity" involved equating conservative Christians with Afghanistan's Taliban fundamentalists.

In response, that same article quoted Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster and strategist, as saying about the Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum team that "they directly compare fundamentalist Christians, or conservative Christians, with fundamentalist Muslims."

Stop just a minute to consider this claim. Here are prominent political strategists; strategists who have enjoyed access to government at the highest levels-who believe a winning political strategy is to equate conservative Christians with the Taliban.

What is the United States currently doing to the Taliban?

Talking about something, getting a polite reception for your ideas, having your ideas discussed as a viable political strategy, is the first step toward actually implementing those ideas. Everyone, especially serious Christians, should be sobered by suggestions from the other side of the values divide that conservative Christians are the functional equivalent of the people that we as a nation are killing. To those who have long been warning about the danger to our freedoms from the Religious Right, I say look more closely at "yer other right."

I began writing this article right after I returned from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention. If there is any group that reflects the Religious Right or Evangelical Right, this is it. These are the conservative Christians who own the radio and television stations. These are the book publishers, these are the Internet giants of the Christian world.

John Ashcroft, the attorney general of the United States, addressed those attending the NRB convention. Ashcroft, as the principal law enforcement officer of the United States, is currently under the most extreme pressure because of the continued threat of terrorist attacks. If any single person in the U.S. government personifies the Religious Right today, it is John Ashcroft, a man who hosts Bible studies in his office each morning.

So John Ashcroft, the most prominent government representative of the Religious Right, was speaking to the media leaders of the Religious Right. Under the intense pressures of the day, there was no need for pretense. No reason for pretense.

John Ashcroft started his discourse by speaking about the constitutional basis for our freedoms in the United States. But the U.S. Constitution, Ashcroft continued, is not ultimately the source of our liberty. He quoted the preamble to the Constitution, which points to the "Creator" as the ultimate source of human freedom. This God-based, Bible-revealed, foundation for religious freedom, according to Ashcroft, guarantees the right of every citizen to freely choose their own religious beliefs-even beliefs that Ashcroft personally rejects. In the clearest possible terms, Attorney General Ashcroft painted a picture of a God who gives each human the complete freedom to accept or reject Him.

When John Ashcroft bottoms our religious freedom upon God-given and not human-issued rights, what stronger lockbox could we have?

And how did this group of Religious Right leaders respond to this kind of talk about the rights of citizens to reject the very religious beliefs they were earnestly promoting? They not only applauded Ashcroft's declaration of a God-based right to religious freedom; they gave him a standing ovation.

I heard not a murmur of dissent anywhere in the audience. No one I spoke to later at the NRB convention expressed even the slightest concern about Ashcroft's declarations of religious liberty.

What I observed at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention and what I read about leading Democratic strategists trying to portray conservative evangelicals as another type of Taliban reflect a broader movement in this country. Which side of the political spectrum most appears to consistently attack free speech on college campuses-with "speech codes" that prohibit "offensive" ideas? Which side of the political spectrum promotes the idea of hate crimes-the concept that the unusual punishment for terrible crimes is not sufficient if the criminal had some political or ideological basis for the crime?

The time may have come to consider again the fundamentals of Christian belief and pay better attention to the direction in which we are heading.

We need to be very careful about aiming and firing our weapons at fellow Christians. The teaching of 1 Corinthians 6:1-7 is that we should not air our disputes with fellow Christians before the world. It does nothing for the cause of Christ for us to be attacking fellow Christians. Instead, the apostle Paul tells us, such disputes defeat the goals of Christianity.

Luke 9:49 records that the apostle John discovered a man who was not one of the disciples of Jesus "driving out demons" (NIV)* in the name of Jesus. John became quite exercised about this and tried to stop the man. It didn't work, so John went to Jesus to get help in stopping this fellow. Jesus refused, saying, "Do not stop him . . . for whoever is not against you is for you" (verse 50, NIV). This is advice worth heeding. Just because a fellow Christian may not be "one of us," if they are working in the name of the Lord and are "not against" us, then Jesus says to leave them alone.

Standing down our weapons against fellow Christians is the first step. The second step is to stand down our weapons against government officials. Too many Christians loved to hate President Bill Clinton. His obvious character defects made him an easy target. Is it possible that the Carville/Greenberg/Shrum strategy of equating Christians with the Taliban arises in part from the public beating that some Christians gave Bill Clinton? If so, it is very regrettable.

Jesus and His disciples were very concerned about arousing the wrath of the government against them. Peter admonished us to "show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king" (1 Peter 2:17, NIV). Needless to say, the Roman leaders were far more corrupt than any of those who ran the country under the Clinton administration. Yet Peter calls on us to show "proper respect" and to "honor the king."

While there is a substantial difference between the rights of Christians in the United States today and the "rights" of those who lived under the Roman Empire, the practical side of this advice to refrain from poking government officials in the eye still remains. There is neither any "upside" for Christians attacking government officials nor any need. Paul reminds Christians in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 that we do not "wage war as the world does" (NIV). Instead, our weapons are "divine power to demolish strongholds." It is foolish to think that publically attacking the moral failures of government officials is the best way to convince others to avoid that kind of conduct. Instead, Christians have available to them divine power to help convert the hearts of those around us.

The real power of Christians lies in turning away from attacking each other and relying instead on the divine power available to us to change the hearts and minds of those around us. That, too, is "yer other right."

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*Texts credited to NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright