In the discussion over so-called “religious liberty”, the point has been made that I should be more tolerant of the views of Christians who are more socially (though arguably NOT biblically) conservative than I.

I’ve been wrestling with that because the argument is compelling, at least on the surface. But let’s consider the story below, excerpted from the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“When Bob Huskey’s health began to deteriorate, his husband, Jack Zawadaski, knew time was short. Jack made plans with the funeral home to transport and cremate Bob’s body. He prepared himself for the inevitable. He signed the paperwork. He said goodbye. But the day Bob died, the funeral home refused to transport his body. It told Jack it doesn’t ‘deal with their kind’.”

Now I’m being asked to be tolerant of the actions of the funeral home because they claim that their behavior is rooted in their Christian faith. We’re going to examine that assertion in a moment, but for now I’m wondering if that logic would hold for other variants of belief, Christian and not. Would I feel the same instinctive revulsion under other circumstances? For example:

If an atheist funeral director denied a Christian the same services that were denied to the gay couple in the story?

If a racist Christian denied service to a black customer, presumably of any faith?

If a Democrat told a grieving Republican that she was not welcome in his business?

Part of me wants to say that the market should be allowed to correct this over time. People who behave like this are asses who lack the compassion we expect as a part of the social contract. But macro-answers aren’t adequate for the individual wounds this practice would cause in the meantime. The more basic question at hand is this:

Does being tolerant include being tolerant of these cruel kinds of acts?

I don’t think it does, at least not from my understanding of Christian faith. From a Christian point of view there is no valid expression of our faith that calls for incivility toward those we perceive as faithless or (more on point) enemies.

Much has been made of the bakery that denied service to a gay couple. In practical terms, there is nothing about denying someone a cake with a rainbow on it that rises to the level of “freedom of religion”. Worse, you can bet those bakers aren’t denying too many pastries to customers who are gluttons, something with a lot more biblical proscription behind it.

No matter what one believes about homosexuality, there is nothing even tangentially Christian about being a jackass to gay people. In fact, there is an overwhelming biblical witness that argues precisely the opposite, including words from the savior of the universe himself. I have to say that the real intolerance on this issue is using the gospel of Jesus Christ to defend one’s refusal to bake a cake with a rainbow on it.

And that’s the root of the problem for me. I can understand committed Christians who struggle with homosexuality on biblical terms, but those same biblical texts are absolutely crystal clear on how people of Christian faith are meant to interact with others—the Bible calls them “neighbors”—who hold different or even opposite views. Let’s look at what the Bible actually says, not about any individual sin, but about how we’re meant to treat each other.

Matthew 5:43-48 seems pretty on-point, with Jesus saying the loving one’s enemies is a God-like behavior he’d like us to have.

In Luke 10:25-37 Jesus turns our ethical models upside-down when he uses a culturally unacceptable person (a Samaritan) as the hero in a story about understanding who our neighbors really are.

In John 4:4-14 Jesus meets another Samaritan, this time a woman (another cultural no-no) and shares a drink of water with her.

These are not miraculous stories of Jesus, rather they are prescriptive texts for Christian behavior. Each of them (and others) demonstrates that faith in Christ calls us to tolerance for the other—and frankly, it doesn’t sanction shrill calls for tolerance of us when we fail in our Christian ethics.

That’s important, because what we have now is a group of Christians who are failing in these most basic Christian behaviors, and asking the secular government to protect them in the name of “religious liberty”.

Now I would never say such a thing, but I can imagine Jesus asking just who in the hell they think they are.

For now, though, we’re left with this accelerated erosion of Christian witness in the public square. Don’t get me wrong—it happens plenty on the left, and the point of this whole blog is to call out both when needed. But today and under the current Administration, it is the Christian right wing that is embarrassing the faith. It is the conservative wing of the church that overwhelmingly supported a cruel and thoughtless man for president, and is using him to further non-Christian objectives in the name of Jesus himself.

I take it back. Who the hell do they think they are?