St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City
The June 30, 2014 Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, a decision legalizing religious discrimination, signals a new reality in American religious life: the Roman Catholic Church, long the single largest religious group in America but less influential than Protestantism, has supplanted Protestant evangelicalism as the nation’s dominant expression of faith.
American evangelical Protestant Christianity, largely shunned by the millennial generation, is rapidly fading. Even the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, has now experienced an unprecedented seven straight years of decline. While the traditionally conservative, evangelical Christian Right remains powerful and visible by virtue of its alliance with the Republican Party, the movement’s Christian nationalist agenda has not staunched the attendance decline in evangelical churches.
Meanwhile, amidst a decade of Protestant evangelical struggles, the Roman Catholic Church slowly, persistently and strategically has grown in stature and importance in American religious life.
The rise of the Catholic Church has not been without friction. As late as 2000, Southern Baptist’s Al Mohler proclaimed on CNN’s Larry King Live that the Roman Catholic Church and the office of the pope are false and unbiblical. The same year, the Vatican reaffirmed that non-Roman Catholic churches are not true churches.
Despite mutually animosity, however, Protestant evangelicals and Roman Catholics shared a common enemy: an increasingly sexually-lenient American culture and society. Evangelicals and the Roman Catholic Church were in virtual lockstep in their opposition to divorce, abortion, sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality–issues of which sexuality was front and center. As the 2000’s progressed, evangelicals found it hard to ignore the sex-related commonalities they shared with the Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile, both evangelicals and the RCC looked to the Republican Party as the vehicle for defeating Democrats and forcing their sexual theology upon American culture and society.
Gradually admitting that working together would yield better results, evangelicals and the Roman Catholic Church began putting aside theological differences in order to influence sex in America. The working relationship that developed resulted in a 2009 document entitled, The Manhattan Declaration. Although the 150 authors were primarily prominent evangelicals (ministers and politicians), 50 sitting Roman Catholic bishops, archbishops and cardinals also signed the document.
The 2009 Manhattan Declaration was sexually saturated: billed as a pro-family, pro-life statement, the document declared opposition to abortion, divorce, sex apart from marriage, homosexuality and other sexually-related themes. Finally, the declaration served notice that the newly-expanded Christian Right community would fight for their sexual agenda under the monikor of “freedom of religion”–freedom for themselves, that is, against views they deemed heretical. The statement’s website even now quotes from Pope John Paul II, a conservative pope who followed Vatican teaching in not allowing Catholic individuals freedom of religion in terms of sexuality, including the use of contraceptives.
By the time of the Manhattan Declaration, the essential ingredients were in place to allow the beginning of a shifting of religious influence in America from evangelicals to the Roman Catholic Church, with opposition to contraception serving as a foundational element in the war against sex.
One significant constituency, however, was strangely missing from this alliance: Roman Catholic women. Not only were women missing from the signatories of the Manhattan Declaration–due to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church forbids women from serving as clerics–but surveys had repeatedly shown that as many as 95-98% of Roman Catholic women of child-bearing age use contraceptives. Roman Catholic women, in short (apart from nuns), soundly rejected the Vatican’s teaching on sexuality, paying little to no attention to the edicts of the male leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In the oddest of ironies, evangelical women were more receptive of the Vatican’s sex edicts that were Roman Catholic women.
Lay opposition to Roman Catholic teachings on sexuality was publicly recognized by the Vatican in 2013. The Vatican conceded that “a vast majority” of Catholics “reject” church teaching on sex and contraception, viewing church dogma as “an encroachment on the autonomy of conscience.”
The acknowledged lack of support from Catholic laity notwithstanding, the Roman Catholic Church, now allied with conservative evangelical Protestants, remains committed to forcing the Vatican’s sexual agenda upon seemingly all of America. Five men have enabled them to do so. Their names are Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas–all conservative Roman Catholics, and all serving on the United States Supreme Court. Appointed by Republican presidents, the five men provide the Roman Catholic Church–and by extension America’s Christian Right–a majority on the nation’s highest court.
On June 30, 2014 the Supreme Court’s conservative, male, Roman Catholic majority did exactly what the Vatican wanted by legalizing religious discrimination against those who disagree with Roman Catholic sexual dogma, while moving contraception front and center in the cultural, social and political debate over sexuality. In the Hobby Lobby decision, the new and radical doctrine of corporate personhood proved to be the vehicle for establishing judicial favoritism and privilege for Roman Catholic contraceptive doctrine.
Standing up in defense of the triumph of Vatican sexuality were Southern Baptist leaders who, forsaking their own faith heritage of church state separation and religious liberty for all and twisting religious liberty to mean religious privilege and favoritism for conservative Protestants and Catholics, celebrated the advent of formal religious discrimination in America.
The Christian Right, now led by Roman Catholics and their evangelical Protestant allies, is jubilant over having circumvented the Baptist-inspired church state separation enshrined in the First Amendment, and in having cracked open the door for business owners to religiously discriminate against their employees in any number of ways.
America has now entered a new era in which Vatican sexuality trumps freedom of conscience, civil rights and religious liberties of those who disagree. Business owners, the powerful and privileged, now have a license to force their religion upon workers, and are eagerly queuing up to do so. The First Amendment is in shambles. Roman Catholic women are left out in the cold. And shamefully, many Baptists, no longer remembering their heritage, are gleeful.
Fortunately, future Supreme Court decisions could undue this travesty. And faithful Baptists can serve as light and leaven during these troubling times by calling for America to return to her founding principles of church state separation and religious liberty equally for all.
About Bruce Gourley
Bruce Gourley is online editor. In addition to managing Baptist Today’s web presence, Bruce is the executive director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society (baptisthistory.org), general editor of the Baptist History & Heritage Journal, editor of the Baptist Studies Bulletin, creator and author of the "Baptists and the American Civil War Project" (civilwarbaptists.com), and author of seven books. Bruce is also an avid hiker, owns the Yellowstone Net website (yellowstone.net), and is an award-winning photographer (brucegourley.com). A graduate of Mercer University (B.A.), Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and Auburn University (Ph.D.), he and his family live near Bozeman, Montana.
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It would be hard to imagine a greater distortion of fact, theology, reality.
“The First Amendment is in shambles. ”
All because the court ruled that the government can’t force a businessman to purchase birth control for his employees if it violates his conscience to do so?
Really, Mr. Gourley, you’ve flipped your lid! ROFL!
I would like to consider Mat 7:12. “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them….”
Perhaps you or one of your children or grandchildren will work under the shadow of this SCOTUS decision. What if their employer was a Scientologist, Jehovah Witness, or Muslim and they would now be subject to whatever might be a violation of their employer’s religious conscience.
Also, is now OK for a Quaker owner of a closely held Corporation to withhold a percentage of their Federal Tax that goes towards Defence because it is a violation of their religious conscience?
Thanks for the reminder concerning our heritage of Church/State Separation. Some of the comments thus far indicate to me that either Baptist History or basic English has been neglected for too many Baptists these days.
I see it as you do, Bruce. I cry when I see the breaking of a sacred wall in pursuit of popularity and conservatism.
Watching the antics of the SBC makes me glad that my definition of “Conservative” includes the conserving of Separation of Church and State and what it means in plain English. I was born in 1946 as the first son of a wise and faithful Southern Baptist, Dr. C. E. Scarborough. He hitch-hiked to Mercer and chose a religion major and then on to Andover-Newton for his theological degree.
The women in his little Moon’s Grove Baptist Church near Danielsville and just outside Athens begged him not to go or they would ruin him. Most of those little ladies knew little about the English language nor intelligent faith. They remain captives today of Conservatism which does not see the importance of staying out of politics.
My daddy would be in tears today to see what “stupid conservatism” has done to take the SBC back into the Dark Ages. The barbarians seem to have once more broken down the gates and now are welcoming incest between church and state back into society. When there is no room for personal choice, it ceases to be Baptist, in my view.
Gene,
I’m not sure being an expert on Baptist history qualifies one to write about Church history. They aren’t the same thing. Also, the founding fathers’ morality make the SBC look like Philistines! Are you actually suggesting that simply standing against sodomy makes one a legislator of morality?! C’mon, you know darn well George Washington would sooner kiss his horse than allow two men to kiss in public.
For me, this reduces down to Who was sent by God to be offered as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of humanity. There never has been, nor can there ever be a ” religious name” associated with the life/death/resurrection of Christ and His redeeming power. To do what has been discussed, screamed, blasphemed, and cursed for the name of Jesus Christ, is false teaching.
Our work on this earth is bring honor and glory to our Father. Religion “never” was part of Christ’s ministry or God’s plan for humanity. The vanity, crushing need for power and control over this race shows why God sent His Son to us in the first place.
I have no doubt that when each of us stands before the Son, our debates of which “religion” is the correct one, will not be in the conversation.
I make no claim to be a scholar of biblical/religious history, other than spending my life in humble service to my Lord. That’s all He wants from us. Everything else is burned up in the purification process.
May the Holy Spirit do a “work” on each of us. May He become the “Living Water” that John speaks of in his gospel. Therein lies the truth of who our Savior is, and what He expects from each of us.
I came into the Christian faith 20 years ago as a then 40 year-old man. I entered the Eastern Orthodox Church, and am a member of an Antiochian Orthodox communion. I entered Minor Orders recently where I serve at altar as an Acolyte. This fall, I took an evening class at the Southern Baptist Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary. It was the only traditionalist conservative seminary in my area, be it evangelical Protestant. I found faculty and classmates (with a few exceptions) to be cordial and inquisitive about the EOC. Several of my young classmates were especially interested in patristics, the Great Schism, polity, my Septuagint LXX, iconography, and other beliefs. I’m pleased that younger evangelicals are open to the heritage of the ancient and unchanging faith of Eastern Orthodoxy. I conducted myself in a respectful manner, as if I was a guest in their homes. One faculty member rails against Theosis and calls the EOC a heretical cult. I’m not planning on taking a class from him. He, and other evangelical leaders, are 100% wrong about the EOC. There’s also the Calvinist students and faculty. Appears to be more prevalent in the Southern Baptist denomination. Amusing story, but true story, I recently had a man from a local baptist bible college come into my workplace. I asked him about his school. He asked me if I went to church. I told him I was Eastern Orthodox, and I showed him an icon of Christ I had on my IPhone. He proceeded to tell me that his bible college used the Bible! I told him we Eastern Orthodox use the Bible in both public worship and private devotions. He scowled and wanted to argue that we didn’t use nor believe in the Bible. Wow! And evangelicals wonder why they are disliked.