Same shit with white supremacists.
Not… Really.
We (Christians) would be happy to live independently and avoid having to deal with the policies of non-Christians, without wielding power over them.
It’s true that nobody in America is really going after Christians just for being Christians.
And yet it increasingly seems like it’s difficult, even if we condemn ourselves to completely isolated poverty, to not be forced to do all kinds of stuff we don’t want to do.
Essentially, it seems that you’re OK with Christianity or any other religion as long as the religion is a mere confession that gives no moral or ethical guidance.
What are you forced to do that you don’t want to do?
If it devolves to “paying taxes that pay for programs/policies I find immoral” or “having to put up with the cultural presence of people who do things that I find immoral,” well, welcome to the club, that’s what it means to live in a heterogeneous modern society, no one gets to avoid that.
If you have some other kind of thing in mind, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
“Putting up with the cultural presence” by itself is not really a problem. We have always been doing that – putting up.. and calling for repentance.
“Paying taxes for bad stuff” is… well… the sort of thing that gives me dreams of a vast campaign of civil disobedience, but it’s also not the biggest thing we point at.
Specifically government stuff:
- The wedding cake. Which nobody has shut up about ever. While the court case decision is on the right side, it doesn’t establish a firm rule that people have the right to refuse to provide services they are forbidden to provide. With things up in the air, we still don’t know if the Federal government is going to force everybody to provide types of services they are unwilling to provide if they provide a category of services at all.
- Education policy that make it difficult to avoid having your kids indoctrinated by the Enemy unless you are able to either pay the extreme cost of private schooling or the extreme time investment of homeschooling, combined with the erosion of existing rules meant to prevent indoctrination in sex-related education
- While nondiscrimination law is supposed to do just that, its side effect is that its difficult to operate other than the smallest mainstream businesses under religious principles.
- Employment-related law that makes it impossible to avoid giving approval to evil benefits.
- Signs of development of policy (not really actually here yet in the USA) that make the state-sponsored gender ideology the only permissible way of knowing when gender of children is concerned.
Remember that most of this governmental stuff will get you hammered if you seriously resist it, even though the overall size (not severity) of the encroachment isn’t very large.
Not government, but still matter:
- Broad sense that religion is Totally OK As Long As It Never Involves Any Ideas Or Practices.
- Specifically Catholic Example: use of people who confess a religion but ignore its rules to the point of expulsion, or people who confess but barely practice, as a wedge.
- Expectations of keeping religion extremely private – this is not something we do except in desperate situations, it suffuses our whole lives.
- (fairly mild but still matters) Biased attitudes in who is allowed only to do the things absolutely obligatory (if even those) and who is encouraged to make a fuller expression of their religious practice.
- Creepy attitudes of obligation in the LGB community
An awful lot of this stuff should be understood as “please give us an alternative to a rebellion that will damage both of us”.
I do thank you for taking the time to spell this out. It’s a conversation that matters.
That said…
* It’s very hard to plausibly link any of the “not government” stuff with “being forced” to do anything. (I would have more sympathy if you were claiming that your religious practice/creed/politics would get you fired from mainstream jobs, and I am sympathetic to the extent that this is actually true.) Like…yes, if you are going to exist in a society while professing norms and practicing customs of which most people disapprove, you are going to face a lot of disapproval. Disapproval is the cost of being weird in public. And having to pay that cost sucks, but it’s a lot lower than the cost of total social exit, it’s hard to support a demand that others subsidize your total social exit, and even then we would have individual autonomy issues at stake.
* Whatever else you want to say about it, the cake thing is both real and an imposition on practice (taking stated beliefs at face value). I assume that sort of thing actually touches very few people, which does matter when evaluating the scale of the problem.
* Employment, and especially education, 100% fall under “cultural presence.” You don’t have to do anything even slightly un-Christian in those arenas, the government won’t make you, you just have to deal with the fact that people doing and saying un-Christian things will be around you and your job and your kids. And if what you’re asking for is a wall to keep such influences out, well, this is not a very compelling demand.