Richard Land is President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Note to our readers: Many Christians – both Catholics and evangelicals – have expressed profound concern about the Obama administration’s decision to force employers to include abortifacients in all health care insurance plans (including those who have religious objections to being required to do so). Although the House of Representatives passed a measure to allow for moral exceptions to this requirement, the Blount amendment failed by just a few votes in the Senate this week. Richard Land, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC, provides a Christian perspective and reflects on First Amendment rights to help our readers grapple with this important issue.

Let’s begin by making one thing crystal clear. The debate generated by the Obama administration’s requirement that virtually all health care insurance plans provide free contraceptives, abortifacients (abortion-causing drugs) and sterilization services is not a debate about contraception or “reproductive services.”

This debate is about coercion, not Catholics; conscience, not contraception; and freedom, not fertility.

We believe as Americans that every human being has a God-given right of freedom of faith and conscience. Due to our forefathers’ persecutions, persistence and insistence, this freedom is acknowledged and recognized in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The “free exercise of religion” goes well beyond the “freedom of worship” concept so often used today by those who fail to understand, or reject, the Constitution’s religious freedom protections. For them freedom of worship is restricted to church and home, to the space between your ears and the space between your shoulders. But free exercise of religion is far more robust and includes the rights to share one’s faith and to live out its implications in the social and economic spheres — in other words, the freedom to exercise or act and the right not to be coerced. We must not stand by and allow our God-given rights to religious freedom, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, to be atrophied, confined and restricted into mere freedom of worship.

The Obama administration’s recent actions, as Cardinal Dolan said in his Feb. 22 letter to his fellow Catholic bishops, “have attempted to reduce this free exercise to a ‘privilege’ arbitrarily granted by the government as a mere exemption from an all-encompassing, extreme form of secularism.” Cardinal Dolan has hit the proverbial nail on the head. This controversy is about conscience, not contraception. In America our First Amendment freedom of religion does not depend on government benevolence or toleration. Typical of the secular mindset dominating the media and the higher precincts of the Obama administration is the misguided declaration of New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristoff who wrote in a recent column (Feb. 22): “The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them when we can.”

Given this secularist mindset one could argue that the HHS mandate violates not only the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, but the establishment clause as well. When the federal government asserts the right to universally mandate actions, trample religious convictions, and then grant exemptions to those it chooses, the government is behaving perilously like a secular theocracy granting ecclesiastical indulgences to a chosen few.

Our forefathers knew how tenuous, unreliable, and intolerant such government toleration could be. Roger Williams, a 17th-century Baptist minister and the founder of Providence Plantations (later Rhode Island) asserted that, “Man hath no power to make laws to bind conscience,” and went on to say that forcing a person’s conscience was “the rape of the soul.”

Thomas Jefferson, chief drafter of the Declaration of Independence and our nation’s third president, argued in 1779 during the campaign for the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” Jefferson, in the last year of his presidency (1809), looking back on the accomplishments of the American Revolution, declared, “No provision of our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprise of the civil authority.”

The great 18th-century Baptist leader John Leland, friend and colleague of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who help framed the First Amendment free exercise clause, declared “that religion is a matter between God and individuals, religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government nor in any way under its control” (1791).

Indeed, at the time of the American Revolution, when our forefathers took on the world’s first superpower, the British Empire, the Continental Congress (1775), needing every able-bodied man to fight off a powerful invading force intent on crushing the rebellion, granted exemption from military service to the Moravian and Quaker colonists whose religious convictions included the renunciation of participating in war. Of course this tradition has been continued with the government granting conscientious objector status from a military draft for those with similar religious convictions throughout our history, even when the government was under dire threat. In modern times Pope John Paul II correctly identified religious freedom as the “first freedom” and as “the premise and guarantee of all freedoms that ensure the common good.” In his 1999 papal letter, “Respect for Human Rights” Pope John Paul II explained: “Religion expresses the deepest aspirations of the human person, shapes people’s vision of the world and affects their relationships with others; basically, it offers the answer to question of the true meaning of life, both personal and communal. Religious freedom therefore constitutes the very heart of human rights.”

People of all faiths — and no faith — should rise up and demand that the Obama administration rescind its HHS mandate that insurance-subsidized and free contraceptives, abortifacients and sterilization procedures be required of all but churches. Such government coercion of conscience is intolerable.

The president’s supposed “compromise” of having insurance companies pay for these services is an accounting trick, a distinction without a difference. The cost to the insurance companies will be built into the premiums, paid by the religious organization or the individual.

This controversy is about freedom, not fertility. As Cardinal Dolan asks in his letter, “If the government can, for example, tell Catholics that they cannot be in the insurance business today without violating their religious convictions, where does it end?”

Indeed! Let’s all understand what is at stake here. Unless you are a priest or a minister working for a church or you work for a firm with less than 50 employees, here is the dilemma you will face. If the U.S. Supreme Court does not strike down Obamacare’s mandate that all people purchase health insurance upon penalty of a substantial fine, and if Obamacare, unimpeded, takes effect as scheduled Jan. 1, 2014, millions of Americans will be faced with a tortuous choice. If you have religious conscience objections to subsidizing contraception, or abortifacients, or sterilization in your health insurance program, you will face a stark choice. Under Obamacare, all health insurance programs will be required to offer free reproductive services (i.e. contraception, abortifacients, sterilization), which means that many Americans will face the choice of violating their deeply held religious convictions and purchasing health insurance which forces them to financially subsidize that which they find unconscionable (i.e. reproductive services) or pay a substantial fine for declining to purchase health insurance and not having health insurance for their families.

A government imposed fine for following your religious convictions? In America? Say it isn’t so! Our Founding Fathers would be aghast.

We need to pray for our nation.  We need to pray for God to watch over us.  We need to ask God to give our national leaders some good sense and wisdom.  And, we need to look to God for our strength.  Also, in November, we need to remember who it was that tried to lead our country into socialism and bankruptcy.   At the next Presidential election, we all need to remember who it was that caused our nation to take such a drastic step in the wrong direction.  We need to remember who these people were who wanted our tax dollars to fund abortions.  We need to remember the ones who wanted our country to make this big change in direction towards socialism, and higher taxes, and more government control over our lives.  I will remember.  Will you?

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Below are links to the items we discussed during the podcast:

Manhattan Declaration

Georgia Baptist Convention action

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Below are some links to the items we discussed in this episode. See you next week on the podcast.

• Trevin Wax’s blog discussion with Romanian Baptist leaders
• Oklahoma’s ultrasound law struck down
• Tornado warnings
• Richard Dawkins equating evolution skeptics with holocaust deniers
• Southwestern prof resigns to retain membership in Broadway Baptist Church
• National health care as moral concern

While civil rights took a big jump forward on election day, it also took a greater jump backwards concerning the rights of the unborn. On inaugural day, executive orders that helped protect unborn children around the world will be reversed by our newly elected president. Federal money will be allowed to flow to abortion mills around the world.

I find it disturbing that someone who had previously said that defining when human life begins was “above my pay grade” has now reached the pay grade that allows him to define it much later for millions of innocent babies who will be slaughtered. Knowing that God will judge us all, wouldn’t it be better to be on the safe side and give the benefit of the doubt on behalf of the unborn?

This is truly a dark time for unborn who cannot speak for themselves. Federal and Supreme Court positions will be open and President-Elect Obama will choose people who are pro-abortion to fill those positions. Because of this, I will leave you with the wise words of CB Scott that reflect what my heart is feeling:

Therefore, I challenge all men and women who call themselves followers of Christ to pray with me that President-elect Obama turns from this wickedness and abomination and that he seeks the face of God as he leads this nation. Abortion is our national sin. May God change the heart of Barack Obama even before he becomes President Obama of the United States.

My celebrations have ceased, now is the time for all Christians to heed the words of CB and pray for those who are being denied the right to life.

Since I had the privilege of preaching in the chapel at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary on October 7, 2008 I have received many emails and phone calls from students, faculty, and others outside the seminary offering both appreciation and concern over what I said during my exposition of Psalm 127. The response has allowed me the opportunity to elaborate on my views and sharpen my position by hearing those who disagree. In fact today I spoke with a reporter from the Associated Press on the subject. You can view the AP article here.

For the sake of clarifying further both what I said and what I believe, I have provided the following few paragraphs. Also, you may view the sermon in its entirety here.

During the exposition of Psalm 127 approximately a 6 minute segment discussed some of my personal decisions regarding birth control and my support of life as a gift from God. I could not address every issue and left many questions intentionally unanswered including the appropriate size of each person’s family.

To clarify, I do not believe all birth control is murder. I do believe that human life begins at the moment of conception. I am opposed to abortifacients which prevent the progression or continuation of life. The third function of most birth control pills prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall and this function is what I referred to as murder. I am opposed to abortion, the morning after pill, and the third function of most birth control pills.  This is part of what I attempted to communicate in my sermon.

We live in a society which largely feels that children are a burden but the Bible tells us that children are a blessing. We live in a society which largely feels that children will make a rich man poor, but the Bible tells us that children will make a poor man rich.

I don’t speak for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary on this matter but my view is consistent with the confessional statement of the institution. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 article 15 titled “The Christian and the Social Order” states, “We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.”

Here are some websites that you may refer to for more information on the birth control pill. I do not endorse everything on these websites, but they will help you begin researching the issue for yourself.

• http://www.epm.org/artman2/publish/prolife_birth_control_pill/Birth_Control_Pill_Abortifacient_and_Contraceptive.shtml
• http://www.prolife.com/BIRTHCNT.html
• http://www.gateway.org/content/pdf/Combo%20and%20Mini%20BC%20Pills.PDF

http://www.orthoevra.com/orthoevra/about_how.html#how

We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.

I have seen Southern Baptists use this statement as an argument against capital punishment (see here and here), and I have seen Southern Baptists characterize the argument that life begins at conception as “moralistic and quaint” (here).

But I have never read a more poignant, hope-giving treatment of this subject than this letter from a husband to his grieving wife after the death of their unborn child.