A Theonomy if You Can Keep It

Blatant Partiality

Is this the world we want to live in?

I’m not going to serve cakes to two disabled people because God makes perfect creations, and there are some religions who believe that?
Sonya Sotomayor, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Oral Arguments

A bakery could refuse to sell a birthday cake to a black family if it objected to celebrating black lives. A corporate photography studio could refuse to take pictures of female CEOs if it believed that a woman’s place is in the home.
David D. Cole, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Oral Arguments

A photography business in a shopping mall during the holiday season that offers a product called Scenes with Santa, and this business wants to express its own view of nostalgia about Christmases past by reproducing classic 1940s and 1950s Santa scenes. They’re really bringing the people in and having them interact with Santa, children, because they’re trying to capture the feelings of a certain era. But precisely because they’re trying to capture – capture the feelings of a certain era, their policy is that only white children can be photographed with Santa in this way because that’s how they view the scenes with Santa that they’re trying to depict… What they’re saying is Scenes with Santa is preserved for white families and they want to have a sign next to the Santa that says “only white children.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, Oral Arguments

We have a reaction that is disgusted by most of these situations because we understand that everyone listed in these cases has been created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). God tells us to “not be partial to the poor or defer to the great” (Leviticus 19:15) and continues to emphasize this in the New Testament in James 2:8-9:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

We love our neighbor as a fellow creation of God and understand that the impartiality shown is morally degenerate.

Theo, Theonomic

God has laid down what is good. Now what should we do about what He has said? Is it good for us to use this as a guiding principle for our laws in this country or any country? Should we make it illegal for anyone to discriminate like this?

Many believe that a theonomy would entail enforcing a law, much like the one related to the cases in the quotes above (CADA § 24-34-601), to ensure that we are all moral according to the dictates of scripture, that laws like the ones in the Civil Rights Act are the outflowing of the morality of God.

Here is where we should proceed with caution. All men are sinful this can easily be played out in laws that bring that same sinfulness upon a whole group or nation. We do not have a king because that much power in the hands of one man is dangerous. Alexander Hamilton addressed the rationale for checks and balances in the Federalist Papers:

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Expanding state power is crowning the government with the ultimate authority to be our savior.

Whenever you give the state plenipotentiary powers to crack down on x, y, and z, what you are actually doing—please remember this—is giving them plenipotentiary powers to commit x, y, and z. Doug Wilson, Mere Christendom, pg. 173

Do we trust the civil government to make, and continue to make, decisions about what is immoral partiality? Let’s see what happens when we do.

Richard Nixon, in the cultural swirl of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, signed executive order 11478 in 1969 that set out to “provide equal opportunity in Federal employment for all persons, to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, handicap, or age, and to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a continuing affirmative program in each executive department and agency.”

Bill Clinton amended that order with executive order 13087 by including “sexual orientation.”

Barack Obama amended it further with executive order 13672 by including “gender identity.”

We should ask who the Theos (God) is in our Theonomy. Does the civil government respect the scripture on which these laws are being constructed? When we give government the ability to crack down on and define impartiality without demanding a biblical definition, we start sliding down the slippery slope that completely reverses the law’s original meaning. We end up with laws defending anti-biblical categories of people based on what they believe about themselves.

In the Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative cases, the government defined partiality and set out to force a baker and website designer to provide their services to someone with whom they morally disagreed. We are now forcing businesses, and the individuals behind those businesses, to provide services against their wills. Again the civil government used its citizen-granted kingship to say that what you do with your private business is a “public accommodation,” and so you are required to support immorality. There is no biblical accommodation for sin, even by popular demand. There is the grace God shows us, Jesus died for those sins (Romans 5:8), they are not without cost, and the laws against such sins have not been abolished (Matthew 5:17).

Justice Sonya Sotomayor explains the savior position of the civil government in the oral arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission:

The problem is that America’s reaction to mixed marriages and to race didn’t change on its own. It changed because we had public accommodation laws that forced people to do things that many claimed were against their expressive rights and against their religious rights. It’s not denigrating someone by saying, as I mentioned earlier, to say: If you choose to participate in our community in a public way, your choice, you can choose to sell cakes or not. You can choose to sell cupcakes or not, whatever it is you choose to sell, you have to sell it to everyone who knocks on your door, if you open your door to everyone.

Should we grant such unlimited powers to the civil government while allowing them to redefine Biblical categories? On what Theos can we ground our Theonomy?

Government is Spherical

Government is not simply civil. It is spherical. Abraham Kuyper used the term Sphere Sovereignty. Many governments are ruling our lives. God is the king of all of them, and they start with the sphere of self-government. God says how we are individually supposed to live as his creation, with purposes and ends to glorify Him, and expands from there. He then includes rules on how to live in the spheres of community with family and church governments. And at the very least, civil government with rule for how we are to behave together as a wider society.

This leads to the conclusion that the civil government is not the arbiter of all laws and the executor of all sins. When there is a dispute within my household, when my son lies about doing his homework, I do not call the local authorities to report him. He has committed a sin, but it is not a crime. What distinguishes between the two? When there is another closer local authority that will address the sin, there is no authority granted to the broader authority unless it goes unaddressed. This escalation is outlined well in Matthew 18:15-20:

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.

There is only authority for the church here when the brother-to-brother sin goes unaddressed. We allow for a similar escalation when the responsibility of the parents is neglected in taking care of their children, and we allow the civil government to address and even take their children. This authority is only granted when Biblical duties are neglected. The first responsibility is with the parent to raise their child.

Do we want to live in a world where partiality is shown? No, we respect God’s word and what he says about treating each other impartially. But just because we believe something is good and right does not mean there needs to be a civil law addressing it. We can believe and strive for Biblical impartiality without granting the state the power to enforce it because we know the state is not acting Biblically when it redefines morality.

Freedom

Should we then live in a society where business owners are free to serve whomever they wish without the state interfering? Yes.

We can speak to the shop owner, the baker, the website designer and, appeal to their Christian beliefs and point to the Bible to show them the right way to go. And in some cases, that means not serving the gay couple a wedding cake or website because of the immorality of the act. In other cases, it means that not allowing black children to take pictures with Santa is showing sinful partiality. But what we do not do is tell the state to bring the sword. Does this mean that sinful people will continue to suppress what they know to be right and do the opposite? Of course, but an unrepentant government is much more impactful than an unrepentant baker.