Welcome to Part 3 of our Celebrating Religious Freedom blog series!

I am pleased to introduce to CBFBlog.com readers on this Fourth of July the following post titled “Why Religious Liberty” from Jason Hines. Jason is an attorney and Ph.D. candidate in Church-State Studies at Baylor University and a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Connecticut.

Jason writes for Spectrum Magazine and is associate editor for ReligiousLiberty.tv and also blogs at HineSight, where he writes about issues at the intersection of religion and politics. You can connect with Jason on Twitter at @Jason_A_Hines.

by Jason Hines

About ten years ago, a friend of mine and I started traveling the country conducting weekend seminars in churches on the importance of religious liberty. On one such trip to Cambridge, Mass., (an area I knew well from my time in law school) we were rudely interrupted during the Saturday afternoon session.

The lady, who incidentally had walked out of our Friday night session looking extremely agitated, demanded to know, “What exactly is religious liberty? Why are we talking about this?”

Interestingly enough, I find this question to be totally valid.

I have found, generally as Christians and certainly in my faith tradition—the Seventh-day Adventist Church—we have not done a good job of establishing religious liberty as a spiritual as opposed to a political issue. I think this oversight has led us to a certain complacency about the importance of religious liberty, not just for the state, but for the church as well.

Simply put, religious liberty is the conduit by which the church is able to fulfill its primary role, the sharing of the gospel message. The Great Commission creates an obligation for us to go and make disciples, baptize them and then teach them what Christ has taught us. (Matt 28:19)

Implicit—and at times forgotten—in this call to action is that people must choose to be disciples and therefore act accordingly, through a free mind and a free heart.

Religious liberty is the broad principle that encompasses this important prerequisite. Religious liberty as freedom is not just a political concept, but also a spiritual one.

2 Corinthians 3:17 says that “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” I have found, in my experience, that we often try to interpret this text so that freedom means something more restricting than freedom, but that is not the case. It is true that Paul then admonishes us in verse 18 to use that freedom “with open face behold as in a glass the glory of the Lord…changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” However, that change is a process that takes place because there is the freedom granted by the Spirit to do anything else we choose.

As with freedom, choice is not only a political model, but it is a biblical model as well. The Bible is filled with both explicit and implicit messages about the importance of choice.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, Moses, in his last speech to Israel, gives them this counsel, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live…”

Joshua in his final words to Israel says, “If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Jos. 24:15)

In the test at Mt. Carmel, Elijah queries the people, “How long will you hesitate between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; but if Baal, follow him.”

Even God Himself implicitly supports the idea of choice when He says in Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”

God is not a god of force or compulsion. God, in His infinite wisdom, knocks. The choice remains to us whether we open the door.

This is the danger of the religio-political movement that seeks to enforce the rules of Christianity through the force of law. It attempts to skew the process by putting its finger on the scale. The power of the Holy Spirit is now no longer enough to engender behavior in line with biblical precepts. We now need fines and jail time in order to make the world more like how God would want it to be.

But, I believe, that God’s way does not involve the use of legal force in order to produce righteous living. Instead, the sharing of the gospel and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the only sure way to change minds and hearts—not the spectre of lighter wallets and loss of freedom.

Religious liberty—at least as I envision it—is the watchman on the wall, not only to ensure that the state does not interfere with the business of the church, but also to make sure that we live in a world where the gospel can go forth in full freedom, and that people can make an honest and unencumbered decision to follow the example of Christ.