Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk and devout Christian, refused to issue licences for homosexual marriages because they “conflict with God’s definition of marriage”.
There are only two objections to her statement possible even in theory. One: there is no such conflict. Two: either way, God’s definitions don’t matter.
The first objection would be clearly nonsensical: both Testaments treat homosexuality as an abomination, which a priori invalidates homomarriage. This leaves only one objection on the table, one that Kentucky authorities indeed invoked.
The objection was so strong that it had to be delivered in the form of a custodial sentence – nothing less would have driven the point home with sufficient force. Since the US Supreme Court had ruled on 26 June that homomarriage is a constitutional right, Mrs Davis was sent to prison.
She took her punishment meekly but with dignity, as Christians have been doing for 2,000 years. “It is not a light issue for me,” she said. “It is a heaven or hell decision.”
That draconian measure looks particularly brutal against the backdrop of our time, when burglars are routinely spared jail. Clearly, their crimes are innocuous compared to the felony committed by Mrs Davis.
So they are, for burglars only hurt individuals. Mrs Davis, however, attacked the very foundation on which every modern state rests, emphatically including the USA.
What to her is a matter of heaven or hell is to the state a matter of life or death, and it’ll defend itself with every means at its disposal.
The modern state, pioneered by America, came into being when a jolt of anti-Christian energy was injected into Western civilisation. All resulting states may have evolved slightly different positive desiderata, but they all converge at the negative end: the urgent need to wipe out every vestige of Christendom.
Leave any of them intact, and no modern state, whatever its manifest politics, would be able to function. The Founders and the Framers understood this with prescient clarity, which is why the very first constitutional amendment, ostensibly providing for freedom of religious worship, in fact “erected a wall between religion and state”, to cite Thomas Jefferson’s gloating boast.
With a few minor exceptions, all those distinguished gentlemen were non-Christians, or rather anti-Christians – regardless of whether they called themselves atheists, agnostics or deists.
Yes, they were prepared to let their citizens worship God in private. But under no circumstances would they allow Christian tenets to exert one iota of influence on public affairs.
In due course the modern state bifurcated into its philistine and nihilist variants (championed in their purest forms by the USA and the USSR), but, in terms of their treatment of Christians, they differ only in methods, not principle.
Some, like the Bolsheviks, will massacre priests and their parishes en masse; some, like the Founding Fathers, will allow Christian worship provided it doesn’t lead believers to defying the state.
Christians may be allowed to live – as long as Christianity stays dead as a moral, social and especially political force. On this condition no modern state run by the motley crew of our today’s Baracks, Daves and Françoises will ever compromise.
However, even as Christians are imprisoned for refusing to sacrifice their faith at the idolatrous altar of state worship, many still regard America as a Christian country. This misapprehension is widespread not only in the country itself but also among the outlanders.
They base their judgement mainly on the frequency with which the plastic figurines called American politicians scream “God bless America!”, the Pledge of Allegiance to ‘one nation under God’, the slogan ‘In God we Trust’ appearing on dollar bills (which medium leaves little doubt of the deity in the message) and the statistics of church attendance. Of these only the last one merits any consideration, the others being simply risible.
Gallup polls suggest that 37 per cent of Americans are church-goers. Whether we accept this finding or rely instead on the self-reporting online surveys indicating a lower figure of 22 per cent, the number is still impressive.
My point is that, even if church attendance were 100 per cent, it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on government policy. The state would remain aggressively atheist even if its every citizen were devoutly Christian.
However, even those statistics are meaningless unless we understand clearly what kind of people go to what kind of churches.
About 23 per cent of the US population describe themselves as evangelical Christians, and one suspects that most of them are the happy-clappy folk who express their piety by speaking in tongues, jumping over pews, and dancing shamanistic jigs in the aisles.
I find it hard to see them as bona fide Christians, though my priest friends will probably say such cynicism will make me burn in hell.
Mrs Davis’s religion is described as apostolic, which could mean Catholic, Anglican (or Episcopalian, which is in communion with Anglican) or Orthodox. Whatever it is, the state’s hostility to specifically apostolic Christianity has from the time of the Founders been even stronger than to any other confession.
Hence the brutal treatment of Mrs Davis. She hasn’t quite been thrown to the lions or crucified upside down, but prison is a good modern equivalent, conveying the same message: the state, not Christ, is God.