We had a few wins in the Supreme Court, including one of them on the issue of free speech and religious liberty. I found an article about it that made me have a lot of thoughts about why this case went all the way to the Supreme Court – in a country where the rights to free speech and religious liberty are in the Constitution.

Here’s Kylee Griswold in The Federalist, talking about the recent Supreme Court decisions:

303 Creative has finally been decided, and Christians — and all Americans — won. In a 6-3 landmark decision on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that graphic designer Lorie Smith can’t be compelled to affirm values that conflict with her deeply held religious beliefs about marriage by designing wedding websites for same-sex couples.

How did we get to the point where Christians can be dragged into courts, and lose, and lose, and lose their cases, until they finally win in the Supreme Court? Well, part of the problem is people who claim to be Christians, but act like non-Christians. People who don’t really KNOW whether Christianity is true or not – because they haven’t done the apologetics work. People who just claim Christianity, in order to virtue signal to others. And what happens when Christianity falls out of favor in the culture, and no longer gets them the admiration and validation they crave? Well, then they shift their allegiance to the secular left, but still keeping the language of Christians to describe their apostasy.

More:

It’s called “winsomeness.” Being winsome is not a novel idea, obviously, nor even a Christian one. To be winsome is to be charming, attractive, or appealing with one’s demeanor or character — an admirable goal, to be sure, and one that should apply to Christians.

But in coopting the idea into a veritable doctrine, Christian leaders morphed winsomeness from a desirable trait into a hermeneutic through which they judge all Christian conviction and conduct… winsomeness became a trump card in matters of spiritual significance. Religious and thought leaders, such as Russell Moore and David French among many others, became victims of the mind virus and infected hordes of others.

[…]The gist of the “winsome” ethos is that for Christians to be faithful, they must be perceived as kind and likable by the unbelieving world they hope to evangelize. And the symptoms are easy to identify. Appeasement to radicals. A tossing of other faithful Christians under the bus. Race-baiting wrapped in Christian-ese. An unwillingness to celebrate God-given victory if the “wrong” leader made it happen. Deference to tyranny. Hatred of masculinity. The list goes on.

Hatred of masculinity. Most people – even people in the church – like to cash out masculinity as mere protection and providing. It’s “servant leadership” according to a recent book by an evangelical egalitarian author. But masculinity doesn’t just mean protecting and providing. Masculinity also means moral leadership and spiritual leadership. It means defending morally good beliefs and actions, and fighting against morally evil beliefs and actions. It means defending truth claims, and fighting against lies. So, Christian men can’t be “winsomely” capitulating to the secular left on truth and morality. Not if they want to be masculine Christian men.

More:

But there’s a glaring problem with the “winsome” worldview: It ultimately measures a Christian’s fidelity to the gospel based on how he is perceived by God’s enemies — and in the process, it implies Christians who aren’t adored by their unregenerate neighbors are unloving.

So you put your obvious pronouns in your email signature because everyone else at work does it, and you don’t want to be known as “that bigot” in your office. Or you post a black box on Instagram because even though you know it serves more to divide people by the color of their skin than to unite them, it looks virtuous. Or you party at your gay friend’s wedding because even though you know that union defies God’s design for marriage, you don’t want to have an awkward conversation or risk jeopardizing a relationship. Or you say yes to a design job for a woman’s group that promotes abortions because you don’t want them to pass over you for the next opportunity.

[…]This version of Christianity doesn’t work. What you end up with on the one hand are craven Christians who pat themselves on the back for their likeability while being largely untethered from all principles save the approval of man (which conveniently endows worldly status and prestige, such as a perch at The New York Times).

What should we expect the Christian life to be like if we read the Bible? Well, according to people like Russell Moore, you should expect to go to the White House and meet with Barack Obama and smile with him, despite the fact that he voted for abortion of born-alive infants several times as a state senator in Illinois. It’s better to be liked by a pro-abortion radical like Obama, than to defend the argument that it should be illegal to abort unborn children. And consider people like David French. He gets articles in the New York Times, but he doesn’t defend the truth of Christianity or Christian moral values in those articles. He just wants to be liked by the secular leftist readers of the New York Times.

But what does the Bible really teach about standing up for the truth? Will it make non-Christians like you?

It no doubt would have been easier for Daniel and his buddies to have bowed to the statue of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar at his command. After all, showing respect and submission to the king would have cemented the young men in his good graces and perhaps given them spiritual sway down the road. But Daniel’s operating principle wasn’t likeability or world-defined niceness. It was a fear of God and undivided devotion that empowered the young Jewish exile to look a fiery death squarely in the face and say with confidence I will not bow.

My favorite passage about faithfulness in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 4:1-4. We did an episode of Knight and Rose Show where I talked about my favorite passages of the Bible, where I talked about that one. Check it out if you haven’t heard it already.