Mohler an Enemy of Religious Liberty?

In his Dec 1 Briefing Dr. Mohler accuses proponents of same sex marriage in Australia of being “intellectually and morally dishonest”, but it is Dr. Mohler who is being dishonest by defending an absolute, unlimited version of religious liberty for conservative Christians but denying it to everyone else.

Savor the absolute hypocrisy of Mohler’s position in this passage from his Briefing:

“... essayist Stephen McAlpine says that he can understand secular politicians who are quite ready to sell out religious liberty to sacrifice it on the altar of sexual liberty, but then he goes on to say that he can also understand, although he says in an altogether different way, ‘those liberal, progressive Christians who have no interest in protecting their traditional brothers and sisters who hold different convictions than they do.... None will bat an eyelid or raise a voice for the sake of their brothers and sisters.  I completely understand that orthodox Christianity and its progressive iteration are basically different religions. They hold diametrically opposite viewpoints on human origins and endings, sexual ethics, biblical authority, the centrality of the cross, the means of grace and how one is justified before a holy God, if God even is holy, or even is God.’”

The bitterness of McAlpine and Mohler against liberal Christians is palpable. They disdainfully characterize progressive Christianity as a different religion with different beliefs from “orthodox Christianity”, but it never occurs to either of them to “bat an eyelid or raise a voice” in defense of their liberal brothers’ and sisters’ liberty to celebrate and practice marriage as their religion mandates, a mandate which includes same sex marriage.

This is a fundamental contradiction, a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Dr. Mohler’s purported crusade for “religious liberty”. It is in fact nothing of the kind. He says this is a battle of religious liberty against sexual liberty, but in fact there are religious liberty claims on both sides of the same sex marriage issue, because people’s religious beliefs differ about it.

But the claims on the two sides are not equal. On one side you have a liberty claim that is central to a person’s life:  the freedom to choose, in consonance with the moral guidance of their religion or secular worldview, whom they will marry, raise children with and live out their lives with . On the other side is the liberty claim of a baker who doesn’t want to sell a cake, or a government official who says she can’t, in good conscience, issue a perfectly legal document to a same sex couple. To protect the latter liberties Mohler would deny the former. This makes absolutely no moral sense.

That is because the issue for Mohler is not religious liberty at all. If it were liberty, he would recognize both sides’ claims. He would realize that a claim of religious liberty does not require that the religion be a true one. Liberty includes the freedom to make mistakes. No, the issue is not religious liberty, it is religious hegemony for conservative Christianity – the ability for conservative Christians to tell everyone else how to live, and to do that by law, and to dictate the rules on who is a cultural transgressor. Those powers of conservative Christians to control the culture and people’s lives are slipping away, and Mohler is understandably outraged and appalled that his view of the one true religion should be so flouted and ignored. But it is fundamentally dishonest of him to frame his grasping for the last vestiges of power as an interest in religious liberty, when his chief desire is to suppress the liberty of others.