TV Program

Current Episode

The Heart of Freedom

2009-07-05

PRODUCTION #: 1070

SPEAKERS: Shawn Boonstra, Kevin Boonstra,

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

That was the first amendment to the American Constitution, and it runs deep in the makeup of American society.

After years of oppression, the early pilgrims wanted a place where they could be free to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience without the fear of persecution. But today, many are claiming that freedom has led to a situation where once again, Christians are being persecuted, and it has been suggested that Christians ought to seize the reins of government.

Today, we are going to look at what the Bible says about that.

In 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, because they were worried that their religious liberty was something the legislature was giving them as a privilege instead of an immutable legal right. They didn't want religious liberty as a favor. They wanted it as a permanent right.

When Thomas Jefferson replied in 1802, he didn't speak to their specific concerns, but he did write something that became a benchmark for religious liberty cases to this day. He wrote about a "wall of separation between church and state," in which he suggested that the state should keep their hands off the church, and the church should keep their hands off the state.

Now, since that time, people have been arguing, pretty strenuously, about what Thomas Jefferson actually meant. Some people are saying that he never meant that Christians shouldn't set the standards for the country, and others are saying that the church should stay out of civil politics completely.

Today, my guest is a lawyer with experience in the realm of religious liberty, who also happens to be a Christian and more than that, he's my brother.

INTERVIEW

SHAWN: Kevin, it's great to have you again on the program with me today.

KEVIN: Thank you, Shawn, it's good to be here.

SHAWN: You know, Kevin, I know that you've attended religious liberty conferences around the world. You have been involved in legal cases that relate to the whole realm of people's freedom to exercise their religious beliefs. You have your finger on the pulse of the whole religious liberty issue. What is your take on the climate today, the religious-political climate of the world we live in?

KEVIN: Well, when you are talking about those who are involved in religious liberty, there are primarily two streams of thought. There are those people who want to put boundaries around our churches and put boundaries around our homes and make sure that we are protected to believe what we want to believe, practice our religion as we want to.

The other stream of thoughts are those who think that some of these morals are going to be accepted in society, and if some of these morals are going to be accepted and made into litigation, then it ought to be Christians who do it.

SHAWN: OK. Now Kevin, you know I hear a lot of people get involved in the religious debate and they are very concerned because the world is not the way that it used to be. Moral boundaries seem to be moving and some things we used to say were right, now are wrong. And things that people used to say were wrong now seem to be acceptable, and people are afraid. A lot of the fear and a lot of the debate are ending up in the courtroom. And one of the arguments I hear Christians say is that they try to stand up for what they believe in or preserve some of the moral boundaries in society.

They want to go to the courts and they want to say, "Hey listen, the Bible says this, this and this." And besides that, it says on our money, "In God We Trust." And in Canada some people will say, "Hey, the constitution of Canada was founded upon principals that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law."

And so, many people say, "Listen, the Bible says it, that's good enough for me and that is why everybody ought to fall in line with my beliefs."

What are the challenges when Christians take that approach to establishing boundaries in society?

KEVIN: Well, when they go to court, they can't possibly win with those kinds of appeals. The judges are there with a purpose. Their purpose is to apply the laws that exist.

And even more fundamentally, there is a problem when you go to the government and say, "Here's the Bible, accept this as truth." Because as we know, there are many denominations out there, all with their different interpretations of the Bible. Whose truth is going to be accepted, if we are going to use the Bible as a legislative tool?

SHAWN: We want to be clear. We believe that the Bible is very clear. Personally, we believe the Bible says certain things, and we believe that this is the Word of God. That is not the issue that we are discussing today. The issue is how do I take my beliefs into the courtroom?

Can I say, "Your Honor, we ought to have a law against this, this and this because the Bible says so?"

And the reason the judge can't do that is, if I understand you correctly, is that he will say, "OK, but you are a Baptist and the Pentecostal, or the Catholic, or the Jew, or the Muslim says a different thing."

And so they can't operate that way.

KEVIN: Right, we have to live in a world where everybody can live by the laws that are out there. Appeals to the Bible just simply are not going to work in a court of law, as much as we might like them to work.

SHAWN: OK, there is an issue. I don't know what it is, per se, but let's just say there is an issue I believe in strongly as a Christian. This belief I have, I think that, not only is it good for me, but I also think it is good for all of society.

Let's just pretend that slavery has not been abolished yet. I believe that it ought to be and it's a moral principle. What do I do in the courtroom, when we live in a world where you can't say, "Your Honor, the Bible says." What approach do Christians take when take engaging in public debate?

KEVIN: One of the wonderful things about the Bible is that it reflects truth. And what that means for us is that if it says it in there, it's going to be good for humankind. And so, almost always, if there is a principle of moral behavior in the Bible, there are going to be other things you can point to that establish the right way to structure your society.

So with the slavery debate, which was your example, the Bible talks about slavery and it talks about freedom. But we can also say, "Look all men are created equally, all men and all women should have equal rights and shouldn't be within the chains of slavery."

We don't have to resort to biblical quotations in order to implement biblical principles.

SHAWN: And again, that doesn't mean we don't believe the Bible personally. You and I both strongly believe what the Bible says. I believe this is the Word of God. But in the courtroom I need to look, if I'm hearing you right, I need to look at the principles underneath the issue. And if God ordained the principles, there is going to be a good reason for them every time.

KEVIN: Absolutely. I don't think there is any question about that.

SHAWN: And I think of the Book of Romans, where it says people can figure out what's right just by studying nature. It says right in Romans, if people don't even have a knowledge of the Bible, they can come to the conclusion that certain things are right and wrong for humanity based upon an observation.

So, if I hear you right, we ought to be taking our observations into the court. We ought to be thinking through what God's Word says.

KEVIN: It's just like the rules of physics dictates what an airplane is going to look like, so rules of human nature dictate how we should be structuring our society.

SHAWN: As a Christian, I can sit at my desk, reading my Bible, and get very excited, saying, "Wow, this is what God wants for my life!? And as I read it I say, "My life would be better if everybody lived by the following guidelines." And so as a Christian, what do I want? I wish there would just be some laws that everybody had to follow, it does more than protect my way of life, and everybody ought to live like this. Why don't we just legislate Christianity for everybody?

KEVIN: Well, I'm not sure that you can legislate a religion. You can legislate laws that are based on somebody's idea of morality. We have rules that prohibit murder. Well, that is based on the Ten Commandments. But you can't legislate a religion. And God never intended to require people on earth to worship Him.

The Garden of Eden was the first religious liberty story in the Bible. God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and said, "You can choose to worship Me or you can choose to do something that's contrary to my will. It's your choice."

And if God is prepared to give people that choice, then we as Christians have to give people that same choice.

SHAWN: You know what, I think that's true. And the Garden of Eden, that is a very interesting study. God says, "You are free to follow Me, and you are free to turn against me. And here are the consequences of doing all those things."

And then He allows people to make those decisions and accept the consequences. It's also interesting to me that Jesus said, "Let the wheat and the tares grow together." And that parable where people are saying, "Why is there so much trouble around us?"

Jesus doesn't say to squash out that which is evil. He says, let it grow together, it will be sorted out in the end.

The issue is, where do we draw this line between legislating morality and religious imposition? How do we know which laws are not a religious imposition on people? You stated murder, for example. Is that not an imposition of my religious beliefs on you?

KEVIN: Well, part of it is going to be what rules will the majority of people in society accept? If you pass a law based on your morality and nobody is prepared to accept it, it won't be honored. It won't even be enforced.

Think about the prohibition laws in this country in the early part of the 1900s. There is no question, they were not obeyed. And eventually, they had to be scrapped. It was based on somebody's concept of morality, but it just simply wasn't accepted by society.

SHAWN: Actually, with prohibition, alcohol consumption went up when they tried to outlaw it by law.

KEVIN: Exactly.

SHAWN: So let's get more specific about something. Let's talk about some real issues, and these are not easy issues to talk about. But let's talk about abortion, for example. Now, a lot of people are approaching the whole issue of abortion from a Christian, religious perspective. Maybe of they are not even Christian, there are other religions that have issues with this whole abortion case. Do you think abortion should be outlawed or not? Is this something that falls into the realm of natural law or is this something that is just merely a religious belief and a religious preference? What about abortion?

KEVIN: Well, personally, I think that abortion should be, if not outlawed, severely restricted, compared to what we have in our society today. I come at that from a religious perspective. I am a Christian. I believe in the sanctity of life. I believe what God teaches about there being a human being at the time of conception. I believe all of that.

But that alone isn't necessarily a reason to implement it as law. What you are talking about is a human life. There are many reasons to pass laws contrary to abortion that don't derive strictly from the Bible.

SHAWN: I think that is an important point, because as we said before, you can't go into a court of law and say, "Your honor, the Bible says?"

Because that's just not an argument the world is prepared to accept. And so if we have a fundamental belief that terminating the life of an unborn child is wrong, that there is an issue there, what does a Christian do? What are the principles that say, "Hey, this is something we ought to stand up against or this at least should be restricted," as you were explaining.

KEVIN: I think science is with Christianity and other religions that are opposed to abortion on this issue. Because the more we understand about life before birth, the more we know that there's a human being in there. And protection of a human being is something that is important in our society, quite apart from religious beliefs.

Religious belief feeds into it, there is no question. And a lot of people are going to be opposed to abortion because of what the Bible teaches and that's fine. And they should be allowed to express their views. But there are many good reasons to oppose abortion without necessarily referencing the Bible.

SHAWN: So again, what we do as Christians is, we study the Word of God. But as we do it, we become thoughtful Christians and we ask, "What are the principles behind this? Why would God say the following?" And then the principles are what we take to the public arena.

KEVIN: Exactly.

SHAWN: OK, let's get more specific again. Let's talk about another things. There is a law, this is something that is from a century past, or actually a few centuries ago that we don't deal with today, but it's an interesting religious liberty case.

We used to have Out of laws in certain spots of North America. What were Out of laws? They were laws that forced people to stop working on Sunday. Back in the 1600s, actually in the state of Virginia, they actually whipped people who worked on Sunday. They deprived them of food. They imposed huge fines. There were even some people who were killed for working on Sunday.

And in some places in North America, you go into some communities and they still have Sunday closing laws left over from those days. Here is my question to you. As a lawyer and a Christian, what about Sunday closing laws? I mean, how does that fit in? Is this something that is a religious liberty issue?

KEVIN: It is, absolutely, such as in Canada, which is where I practice. We actually had a piece of legislation (covering the whole country) called The Lord's Day Act. And it required closing on Sunday throughout the country. And that was brought up in the courts, made a constitutional issue, and that law was struck down as being contrary to freedom of religion. What the court said, and I think quite rightly, is that when you are doing something strictly to impose your religious beliefs on your society, you are preventing others from engaging in their own religious beliefs properly. And so the court struck that down.

There is no question. The Ten Commandments include, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy." And people are going to have different perspectives maybe on which day that is, but the key is, you cannot use the legislature to dictate that the law should be kept.

SHAWN: OK, I am a Christian, I'm studying the Bible and I go into the court the right way and I say, "Hey, I'm not going to go in there and say, we ought to close on Sunday, because my belief in Sunday is the Lord's day," for example.

But what if I take a principle and I say, "You know what? Everybody ought to have a day of rest. This is for the good of everybody. This is for the working man and woman. Sunday ought to be a day of rest that we legislate for everybody." Is that the best solution?

KEVIN: Well, that's what happened in my country next, after The Lord's Day Act was struck out. Different provinces tried their own retail holiday acts, in which they said no more Sunday shopping. But this was for a secular rest day.

What the courts did is they looked at it and they said, "Well, what you are doing is you are requiring Jews and Seventh-day Adventists, and Muslims who have a different holy day to now close two days a week. They would normally close on Friday, or Saturday, or whatever the day might be. And you are compelling them to close on Sunday, as well. And that imposes a cost on those other religious groups."

So even then, even when you have a secular based Sunday closing law, there are religious liberty issues that you have to face.

SHAWN: OK, let's turn it around a little bit. I am somebody who believes that the seventh-day Saturday is the Sabbath. I am a Seventh-day Adventist. What should society be doing to protect that? What is the answer? Muslims want Friday. Seventh-day Adventists, Jews and even other Christian groups want Saturday. Others want Sunday. What do we do?

KEVIN: Well the answer is in the free exercise of religion, an accommodated people. If somebody believes that their relationship with their Creator dictates that they should worship on a Friday, or a Saturday, or on a Sunday, society should be structured in a way that allows them to honor their relationship with God.

So, as somebody who worships on Sabbath, who believes that Saturday is the day intended in the Ten Commandments, I should be allowed by my society to worship my God on that day.

SHAWN: So we don't dictate what day people have off by law. What we do then is we guarantee everybody the right to his or her religious exercise so that my employer cannot require me to do something contrary to my religion.

KEVIN: Exactly.

SHAWN: Now listen, when we talk about Sunday closing laws and people who worship on different dates, we are touching on the Ten Commandments and that's another hot topic in society today. There have been cases here in the United states, somebody is required to yank the Ten Commandments out of a the courthouse. And the big debate is, should those laws hang in the courthouse, or should they not? And I'm thinking, of course, about Judge Roy Moore who has been in the news a lot lately.

I am thinking about the pressure that has been put on Los Angeles County to take the cross out of their seal. What's your view on cases like that?

KEVIN: Well, first of all, I think it's a bit offensive to treat religious symbols like it's environmental tobacco smoke, that you can't have anyone subjected to it. I think that is wrong. I think that human beings are capable of seeing a symbol for what it is.

But on the other side of it, my maintaining that cross in the seal of the city or maintaining the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall, what are you really accomplishing for the Lord? What is it that serves the kingdom of God by having the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall over somebody's head?

It says in Hebrews 10…

SHAWN: Let's take a look at that. I think that is an important text you are going to. I think I know the one.

KEVIN: Hebrews 10:16. It says (Hebrews 10:16):

"This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord. 'I will put my laws into their hearts and in their minds and I will write them."'

What God is saying is: What is important is that these laws be written, the Ten Commandments, for example, be written in the hearts and in the minds of people. Whether or not they are posted on the wall is secondary.

SHAWN: Right. They have been on the wall for centuries in many societies and it didn't make everybody good. What makes people good is when they love God's law. Not when it's hanging on the wall, but when it's hanging on the heart.

So I don't lose heart as a Christian. Personally, when somebody says, "Hey, that's got to come down out of the courthouse." Like you, I'm a little concerned that, well, why is that offensive? Why is it offensive to have a list that says, "Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery…?"

The key is, I don't lose heart when it comes down off the wall of the courtroom or out of the classroom, because the most important place is in the heart. That's where it begins to change you.

Let's leave the realm of the law for just a moment. Let me talk to you as a Christian. One of the things that fascinates me is the whole story of sin in the first place. And the reason I'm thinking about this is that the Ten Commandments is a definition of what sin is.

God had a law originally. Lucifer broke that law and the wages of sin is death. And what's interesting is that God did not eliminate all the fallen angels at the moment they sinned. What does that tell us about God's view on law and liberty?

KEVIN: Well, I think it tells us that God is allowing us to make decisions. God wants to have a relationship with everybody individually. He wants people to recognize His laws and to honor them, but He's not going to force anybody to do it. Lucifer made a mistake. He continued down the path. He deliberately disobeyed God's laws and continues to do that. God is permitting that to happen, because the story of God and Lucifer is a story of God's love.

SHAWN: I think God is saying, "OK, let's let sin play its hand out. That way, I can preserve the freedom to choose and have a people that won't choose sin again. Because they've lived with the results."

Kind of like a kid burning their hand on a stove. Not going to do it a second time.

I think if God would have just stomped out Lucifer, other angels might have thought, "Whoa, what was God scared of?"

KEVIN: Exactly.

SHAWN: I think that's a good issue for Christians, isn't it? We don't have to be scared of anything. If we know this word is truth and we live by it, even if all of society turns against us, this word is still true.

KEVIN: That's exactly right and that's what I mean. And the story of Lucifer is the story of God's love.

SHAWN: Kevin, I'm really glad that you were here today. It's nice to catch up with you a little bit. I pray that God will bless, that He's going to give you wisdom and courage as you continue to face some of these issues of religious liberty and how to stand for what's true in the public arena. I hope God blesses you in that.

KEVIN: Thank you.

SHAWN: Just like you, I worry when I see moral foundations being moved. And I know that moral anarchy isn't the answer, but I sometimes wonder how much of our beliefs we should be forcing on others through legal action. I'm not sure anybody knows exactly where to draw that line, but one thing I'm sure of, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Immorality is a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. It's a symptom you find in a world that has lost its grip on God, and that's the real problem.

What the world needs more than new laws, and I'll admit it probably needs a few of those, but what it needs most of all is to find the love of God. And then the desire for a moral life will begin to fall into place because the Spirit of God is working on hearts.

Kevin, why don't you offer a prayer for people who are just struggling a little bit with where to draw lines and how to stand up for what's right and true.

PRAYER:
Heavenly Father, I want to thank you for the opportunity we have to study your Word. Lord, I want to thank you for the boundaries that you put in our lives, that you have given us your Word, so that we can understand. We can study it, Lord, and we can understand what your will is for us. Lord, give us wisdom as we tackle these sorts of issues in our society. Help us to understand how to approach people and to make sure that your love ultimately shines through. For Jesus' sake, amen.

Scriptures Used in “The Heart of Freedom”

"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."
—Exodus 20: 8-11

"This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord. 'I will put my laws into their hearts and in their minds and I will write them.'"
—Hebrews 10:16

"Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s."
—Exodus 20:14-17