My religious freedom in public, it's an interesting thing. Last week Kansas passed a law that allows business not to serve customers if it violates their religious freedom. This is heartbreaking news because if someone is or is not something that someone violates their religious belief (interracial marriage, LGBTQ in particular) a business can refuse services.
I wonder who's religious freedom we're going to operate under? I mean I have various tattoos on my body that are expressions of my faith journey. What happens if a business owner in Kansas wants to state that tattoos are against their religious beliefs? Who's religious freedom is the winning hand? What if I choose to have a meal/coffee/go to a movie with a female friend? What if someone asks a questions about us - could we be lesbians? Could our possible lesbian appearance offend someone else's religious beliefs yet be something that's a fine to my sense of religion? Who's religious freedom rules the situation?
What I see is the underlying issue is "personalization." Faith is something that is both public and private - communal and private. People of any faith have their own personal beliefs and ways of expressing them. Faith also has a communal aspect - you have belief in something. Religious freedom is a guaranteed right by the United States constitution. But like with other rights one person's rights go as far until they infringe on someone else's'. Every person has the right to express their faith in a way that's personalized. God knows that I don't express my Christian faith the same way as others. But my expression of my personal faith needs to stop when it infringes on another person. When my faith does not allow someone to go to a restaurant, shop at a store, attend a public meeting, my personal faith as gone to far.
I don't like the way other people express their faith. If you have questions about that, watch a TV Evangelist with me and you'll see. But what I do my best (I'm not perfect at it) is to try to honor their expression of faith as that - faithful. There are countless texts that I and someone else will read and interpret a different way. This shapes our faith and our expressions of it. But it is also not my position to force others to believe the same way I do. What is my job is to respect someone else's faithful expressions. But slapping religious freedom on a governmental issue of legislation is not respecting others religious freedom. It is a way of pushing an agenda - both sides do it. It is a way to openly discriminate and go against what I believe is the "Jesus Way" of living and understanding Christianity. The U.S. has a long history of using personalized faith as a rule to discriminate. Eventually these personalized faith laws have been and are being changed. I hope that this ruling in Kansas will be overturned and that religious freedom can mean something different than justification of trumping someone else's religious freedom.
In a conversation with a more conservative Christian then me (take in mind I call myself a bed-wetting liberal and I’m also a big time Process Theologian) the person started rambling off scripture quotes (proof texting really) to make a point. I have never claimed to be a great memorizer of anything. And even though I have read the Bible many times and own many copies of the Bible, I am still not a person who can just pull out scripture references in mid conversation. I do have several verses that I turn to and love dearly but I can’t tell you word for word what John 2:5 or Ruth 1:4 says. This got me thinking, why do Christians really feel the need to qualify their faith based on the amount of scripture that they can recite from memory? While it may be very handy to be able to quote scripture in a variety of situations, I believe that this can be dangerous. Proof texting (pulling scripture, from any religion, to support an argument without careful and learned consideration for its cont
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