Issues
Facing Missions Today 31: Post-Christian Culture and Changes in the
Workplace
In this post, I would like to compare the
challenges facing Christians in the workplace around AD 200 and today. Both contexts involve Christians living as a
minority group within a larger society.
The former period is represented in the writings of Tertullian, who
advised Christians how to live in a pre-Christian society. Does Tertullian give us some food for thought
as we increasingly realize in the West that we live in a post-Christian
society?
The Christian author, Tertullian, addressed the
issue of how the minority Christian group should maintain its convictions in
the pagan workplace. He wrote in an era
of idolatry and persecution. In On Idolatry, Tertullian discussed
certain types of work that he believed Christians could not do because they
involved a compromise of their faith. While
some occupations were acceptable to Christians, others were clearly not.
Obviously, Christians were not to participate in
idolatry. Yet certain areas of work not
directly a matter of idolatry would nevertheless involve supporting
idolatry. Christians were not to make
idols, and any new believer insisting he or she had no other means by which to
live was to be dismissed from Christian community for being complicit with
idolaters (ch. 5). Tertullian lists other
examples of work that persons should not do.
The builder should not construct an idol’s house. Painters, marble masons, bronze workers,
engravers, carvers, and gilders all had jobs that potentially involved
complicity with idolatry (ch. 8). Imagine
a builder building a house and being asked to construct an area in the house
for the household god, let alone being asked to build a public shrine to a god
or goddess. Another example of a
‘minister of idolatry’ for Tertullian was a person handing wine to another
sacrificing to some god (ch. 17).
Persons can, he argued, engage in work that could in theory expose
someone to idolatry if in fact they take care to avoid this. One might, for example, avoid procuring
animals for idol sacrifices or avoid assigning persons to clean temples or
oversee tributes given at the temples.
And a person might avoid putting on entertainment related to idolatry.
Tertullian also examined whether a Christian might
have anything to do with the military.
While a soldier might be involved in idolatry through oaths and
sacrifices--and therefore Christians should have no part in this--he also ruled out any Christian’s involvement in the military because it involved killing (ch. 19). In another work, On the Crown, Tertullian stated that Christians could not be
soldiers because the Lord proclaims that all who use the sword will perish by
the sword (ch. 11). This was not the
belief of Tertullian alone in the first three centuries—before the Emperor
Constantine encouraged Christian participation in the military. In fact, the early Church was decided pacifist (see George Kalantzis, Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service Once the Church was accepted and approved, even becoming a majority force within the government’s activities, concerns such as
Tertullian’s faded. Thus began the long era
known as Christendom in Europe and the Americas. Another area where Tertullian found Christians facing a compromise of their faith was in taking loans. Christians, Tertullian stated, should not borrow money from non-Christians because pledges were made in the name of
the pagan gods (On Idolatry, ch. 23).
During the period of Christendom, when the West
imagined (it regularly failed) that it lived by Christian rules of justice, Christians took on some
activities that no Christian of the first three centuries would have considered
options for believers, such as military service. In the present period of post-Christianity,
believers and unbelievers are having to work out new lines and ways of
disagreement. The rules are presently
focused on Christian ethics more than Christian faith. Christians are not being forced to deny Christ and sacrifice a chicken to the Emperor! But they are finding direct challenges to their moral convictions, including challenges from state and federal governments.
All this is happening at a time when the primary moral virtue championed by the Enlightenment, freedom, is subtly being replaced with a postmodern ethic of tolerance and non-discrimination. The progression is logical, but also antithetical. One might, for example, argue that protecting a person’s freedom goes hand in hand with being a tolerant society that discriminates against no one. That logic existed up until the recent past because of the Enlightenment. In a postmodern context, however, an ethic of tolerance trumps personal freedom.
All this is happening at a time when the primary moral virtue championed by the Enlightenment, freedom, is subtly being replaced with a postmodern ethic of tolerance and non-discrimination. The progression is logical, but also antithetical. One might, for example, argue that protecting a person’s freedom goes hand in hand with being a tolerant society that discriminates against no one. That logic existed up until the recent past because of the Enlightenment. In a postmodern context, however, an ethic of tolerance trumps personal freedom.
So, for example, a ‘Religious Freedom Restoration
Act’ became federal law in the United States in 1993. The law restricts laws that ‘substantially
burden’ a person’s freedom to act according to his or her religion. Because the Supreme Court confined the limits of this act
to laws that the federal government
made, not states,
a number of states have passed their own ‘RFRA’ laws. This week, the state of Indiana became one of a number of states to pass such a law. The law in Indiana intends to extend the federal law to the state's law (although some have tried to argue that it is different--I do not believe that it is). The federal law in 1993 was
virtually unanimously approved by all parties, but the present Indiana law has been vigorously
opposed. The reason for this opposition is that the Indiana
law has been seen as a way in which persons or businesses might refuse services to homosexuals. So, people might argue, because I do not want to, in Tertullian's words, put on entertainment for a celebration I disapprove of because of my religious convictions, I should not be compelled to do so.
The development from 1993 to 2015 seems to be that
freedom has, for many, been replaced by not only tolerance but an activist
interpretation of what tolerance entails: persons must
tolerate others (actually, certain others). In such a world, Tertullian’s Christian
builder would be required to build
pagan temples, or the Christian metal worker or wood worker would be required to fashion idols if customers
requested them to do so. American
society is presently asking whether the government should enforce a certain practice of ‘tolerance’
by compelling the baker to bake cakes, the photographer to take pictures, or
the florist to prepare flowers for homosexual weddings. [Update in 2022: the Supreme Court continues to insist that Christians may not be compelled to do such things. Freedom of speech is antithetical to compelled speech, and the separation of Church and State protects religious freedom. Lawsuits continue against Christians, not only in the US but also in England and Europe.]
The governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, asks in
response to opponents of his state’s new law, ‘Is tolerance a two-way street or
not?’ Another way to ask this question
is whether individuals have freedom, particularly religious freedom, or whether
society can compel persons to act against their convictions in order to ensure
a particular practice of tolerance. In
antiquity, Christians were periodically required
on pain of death to sacrifice to the emperor. Many Christians were martyred. Christians also found themselves, as Tertullian explains, having to
disengage from various types of jobs because of their Christian convictions. The similarity today is that
Christians are once again having to determine which jobs are not open to them
in the wider society and are once again being persecuted for refusing to
perform certain acts required by the government to which they are opposed because
of their faith. The difference is that
pagan society was protecting its religious tradition against Christians,
whereas today religion itself, of any sort and particularly Christian, is
viewed as the enemy of the so-called tolerant society.
Another issue arises in the present debate in American society. The understanding of religion is largely that it is a matter of private belief--like a philosophy--without implications for practice and activities. The privitization of religion was largely what made the deistic version of American religion work in the public square: people could hold whatever thoughts they wished--even speak about them publicly (freedom of speech), but all that was just a private matter of belief. This is not, of course, religion--not of any sort. What Christians are being expected to do in the present climate is to keep their beliefs to themselves while engaging in all the activities of society at large. However, beliefs are not convictions if they do not make a difference in one's actions and practices.
Another issue arises in the present debate in American society. The understanding of religion is largely that it is a matter of private belief--like a philosophy--without implications for practice and activities. The privitization of religion was largely what made the deistic version of American religion work in the public square: people could hold whatever thoughts they wished--even speak about them publicly (freedom of speech), but all that was just a private matter of belief. This is not, of course, religion--not of any sort. What Christians are being expected to do in the present climate is to keep their beliefs to themselves while engaging in all the activities of society at large. However, beliefs are not convictions if they do not make a difference in one's actions and practices.
Just how Christians are to proceed in this climate
is complicated. Yet one thing is clear:
compromising our faith is not an option, even if society will not protect our
freedom to live according to our convictions and will insist that we perform
certain acts against these convictions.
The challenge that we ourselves increasingly face is to begin to sort
out what professions are no longer open to believers.
We have lived a cozy life with the larger society and governments for
centuries. In some cases, exceptions to
our faith were allowed, even encouraged. The pressure to make compromises is increasing quickly in a post-Christian society. Now, the difference between the Christian life and the larger society is increasingly
more obvious. This will—it already
has—led to rethinking what it means to be a Christian in such society.
Instead of asking in such a climate, ‘Would it not
be better if the President were a Christian?’ we might now find ourselves asking if a president, a commander in chief, can ever be a Christian. We might begin to discover that views of justice and morality sympathetic to the Christian faith will never receive majority approval in a democracy. We
might ask whether the mission of the minority
Christian community is to take the Gospel rather than guns to the
world. We might need to ask whether our
jobs are directly or indirectly supporting an agenda that actually opposes the
commandments of God. Can Christian
colleges continue to take federal loans and have government work-study
programmes if the government forces the colleges to act against their Christian
values? Should Christian counselors mute
sharing their Christian convictions in the counseling context lest they be
perceived to be abusing the authority they have as counselors? Can faithful Christian pediatricians join
pediatric practices that include doctors who perform abortions? More and more, Christians are having to
realize that their faith limits their options in business in a post-Christian
world, and perhaps they will begin to see that what they had deemed acceptable in
a pseudo-Christian world really never was an option for Christians in the first
place.
Christians may find themselves disagreeing over
some of the conclusions reached on these issues. I, for one, tend to side with
Tertullian. Jesus prayed, 'I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one' (John 17:14-15). Christians do need to ask how to live according to this prayer, to live in the world but not of the world. This is particularly important in a climate where even the ethic of freedom championed
in the Enlightenment—an ethic that brought some protection—is now undermined by
a pro-active ethic of ‘tolerance’ that, ironically, excludes Christian convictions and
practices while particular, non-Christian social agendas are advanced.
2. Indiana
General Assembly Senate Bill 568. Online
(accessed 30 May, 2015): https://iga.in.gov/legislative/2015/bills/senate/568.