When you first become a Christian, you acknowledge and accept Jesus as your savior who died to save you from your sins. You confess that you accept Jesus into your heart and depending on your denomination, you get baptized. That is the primary rule of Christianity. You accept, believe, and confess. Your sins put you at risk of hell, a place of fire and/or a place apart from God. Without Christ's sacrifice, you would have never been able to be in God's presence in Heaven. This is the primary, fundamental belief that all Christians hold.
Everything else is secondary. What do I mean by secondary? I mean all of the varying beliefs among Christians. There are hundreds of denominations of Christianity and within those, each member of every church holds varying beliefs, but they all hold the belief that Jesus came and died on the cross as a substitutional sacrifice. He died so that we would not die. In Him we have eternal life. I will refer to this as the Primary Rule.
That's it. Anyone who does not believe and accept Jesus Christ's sacrifice and the reason for it is not a Christian.
Any other beliefs are considered secondary in that they are important to the Christians who believe them, but are not agreed on by all Christians. For example, you may believe that you need to be baptized to be saved. You may believe it so much that you insist that all of your children and grandchildren be baptized for fear that they will not enter Heaven without doing so. To you, this is a primary issue. But to someone else, they may believe differently as demonstrated by many denominations of Protestants who believe that baptism isn't required for Salvation, but is part of the confession. They believe that you re-enact burial and resurrection with Jesus as an outward demonstration of your faith. Baptism is secondary because not all Christians agree that it is necessary for Salvation, but everyone agrees that you need to accept Jesus--the Primary Rule.
Without going into any secondary rules, should we enforce the Primary Rule? Should we force other Americans to accept Jesus as their Savior and confess that they believe in Him? What would such a country look like?
- In 381 A.D., The Roman Emperor Theodosius was the first to outlaw pagan sacrifices in The Codex Theodosianus1. For not being a Catholic you would receive fines. For being caught using a temple or sacrificing, you would be punished by being be killed by the sword and all your property would go to the city. As a pagan, you were not allowed to make wills. Any pagan gatherings were hit with fines and the members cast out with the house going to the city. By the end of his reign, Theodosius paid informants for information regarding pagans who would then be killed and have their property confiscated2.
- Under Justinian's rule from 527-565 A.D., non-Christians could not teach3 and everyone was forced to be baptized including Jews4. If you were not a Christian, you were not allowed to make accusations against Christians.
- From 771-779 A.D. Charlemagne campaigned against the Saxons in modern northern Germany. In the year 782, he infamously massacred 4,500 pagans who preferred to die rather than convert to Christianity.
- Iceland in the year 1000 A.D. had multiple missionaries who converted the local chiefs. In multiple cases, those who did not convert where killed5
- On November 27 1095, Pope Urban I declared a Holy War on the Turks6. When the crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, they massacred Muslims and Jews. Thousands of crusaders would die in battles for the next two centuries.
- From 1390-1406, Henry III of Castile and Leon pressured and persecuted Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity. Those who weren't baptized were killed
- In 1452, Pope Nicholas V gave permission to "attack, conquer, and subjugate Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ wherever they may be found." This authorized the African slave trade in which 2 million Africans died crossing the ocean and 12 million entered slavery in the Americas.
- In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV issued the decree that inquisitors should seek out and find anyone who was not a Christian. Anyone accused of not believing was burned at the stake. Over the next hundred years, thousands would be burned at the stake and some 300,000 expelled.
- In the years following Columbus' arrival to the New World, the Spanish Conquistadors would kill millions of inhabitants. Many were burned at the stake.
To impose your Christianity, you would need to make consequences. What would you do if your neighbor did not convert? Would you make them pay a fine? Jail them? Kill them?
The primary goal of Christianity is to accept Christ's sacrifice. This is the Primary Rule in Christianity. Does Christ want us to force America to submit whatever the cost? That was the thinking for hundreds of years and millions suffered the price. We like to point at countries like North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia for their strict religious laws, but we fail to recognize our own past. In many ways our Christian forebears were just as strident in their pursuit to make others become like them.
I don't want to live in a country where I have to spy on my neighbors or see them killed for not believing like I do. I don't want to see them jailed either. If I am not willing to coerce others into believing like I do and following my religion's primary rule, how can I expect them to abide by and follow my secondary rules? I can't.
You may believe that abortion is wrong because it kills thousands of unborn children each year, but that is a secondary issue. Your point of view is at odds with other Christians and cannot be confirmed or denied beyond a shadow of a doubt. Nor can your view on birth control, divorce, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, keeping the Sabbath, taking the Lord's name in vain, blood transfusions, or the other myriad of secondary issues we Christians argue about. Yes, you can point to your verses or popular opinion, but that doesn't make it a primary issue.
I look at theocracies of non-Christian countries and I think, how backwards can you get? Read sometime about life in the Caliphate of ISIS and you'll realize how closely their religious laws reflect medieval laws. I wouldn't want to live in a country where I couldn't practice my beliefs, but that's exactly what we propose when try to force our beliefs onto others.
I know not many Christians agree with C.S. Lewis' views on divorce, but I think he fundamentally understood the impracticality of coercing others into our Christian worldview:
As Christians, we are called to:"Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The conception of marriage is one: the other is the different question – how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 99
"Do to others as you would have them do to you." -Luke 6:31 (NIV)
"Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked." - Luke 6:35 (NIV)
"Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." - Mark 12:31 (NIV)
"Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." - Romans 13:10 (NIV)
"A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity." - Proverbs 17:17 (NIV)"Love" is found 333 times in the King James Bible. There are 76 verses about caring for widows, 32 verses about orphans, and 56 verses about caring for the poor. If you want my opinion on how to go about getting society to follow the primary rule, this is where I would start. Everything else is secondary.
1 http://www.heretication.info/_pagans.html↩
2 http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/codex-theod1.asp↩
3 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justinian-I↩
4 http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9097-justinian↩
5 https://books.google.com/books↩
6 http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/christianity-in-the-middle-ages.html↩
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