by David Lane

In every generation, God’s people have faced the same question: bow down, or stand up?

Pharaoh demanded (this of) Israel’s children. Nebuchadnezzar demanded worship before the golden image. Caesar demanded lordship over Christ’s church. Each time, the faithful were forced to choose between obedience to God and submission to the State.

In 2015, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis faced that same question. She was jailed for 5 days because she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She would not betray her faith or her God. That moment marked the first time in American history that a public official was imprisoned for living by Biblical conviction.

Her attorney, Mat Staver, rightly called Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges legal fiction. The decision did not merely redefine civil marriage; it redrew the boundary between religious conviction and the State’s coercive power. 

From that moment, America embarked on a spiteful course of punishing conscience.

Close to 75 years ago homosexual activists pleaded for a libertarian reprieve: “Allow us the right to live our lives in the privacy of our own homes.” But after Obergefell, that libertarian plea gave way to totalitarian demand: “Christian bakers, florists, and photographers must take part in our homosexual weddings - or be destroyed and bankrupted by the State.”

Once again, God’s people were told: bow down, or stand up?

What begins with marriage never ends with marriage. Once the government claims the right to redefine what God has ordained, there is no limiting principle. That became clear in 2018, when Hamilton County Juvenile Court Judge Sylvia Hendon stripped custody of a 17-year-old girl from her Christian parents. Their only offense? Refusing to authorize hormone treatments for a so-called ‘gender transition’. The judge awarded custody to the grandparents, who supported the procedure.

This was not a case of abuse or neglect. It was a case of parents losing their daughter because they refused to bow down to the State’s new orthodoxy of gender ideology. As with Kim Davis, the line was drawn: bow down, or stand up?

This trajectory did not begin in 2015. It traces back a century, climaxing in the Warren Court’s cultural revolution of the 1960s. The dominoes fell one by one:

• Barring prayer from public schools in 1962 [Engel v. Vitale].

• Expelling the Bible from public education in 1963 [Abington School District v. Schempp].

• Inventing a constitutional right to annihilate the unborn in 1973 [Roe v. Wade].

• Banning the Ten Commandments from public schools and courthouses in 1980 [Stone v. Graham].

• Enshrining same-sex marriage in 2015 [Obergefell v. Hodges].

• Consecrating ‘special rights’ for homosexuality and transgenderism in 2020 [Bostock v. Clayton County].

With a few strokes of the judicial pen, nearly three centuries of America’s Biblical heritage were overturned. The Bible - once the foundation of civic virtue and literacy - was expelled from the classroom and the courthouse. Justice Potter Stewart warned in dissent in 1963 that the Court had not established neutrality but “a religion of secularism.” And indeed, what began as exclusion soon matured into compulsion.

By 2015, Obergefell elevated radical autonomy above centuries of moral tradition. Kim Davis refused to bow down, and was jailed. By 2018, Christian parents refused to bow down, and they lost their daughter. Today, Christian teachers, doctors, and business owners face lawsuits, fines, and threats to their livelihood for refusing to comply with the new orthodoxy. What once paraded as “tolerance” has hardened into enforced conformity.

The pattern is unmistakable. Pharaoh demanded Israel’s children. Nebuchadnezzar demanded worship. Caesar demanded lordship. Each time, the faithful had to decide: bow down, or stand up?

Kim Davis stood, and she was jailed. Christian parents in Ohio stood, and they lost their daughter. These are not isolated incidents. They are harbingers of what is to come. Which is why Obergefell v. Hodges must be moved to the ash heap of history.

For critics, Obergefell is not just another legal precedent; it is a cultural rupture. A ruling hailed as “progress” by some came at the expense of the long-established freedoms of others. It enthroned a new orthodoxy with the full power of the State behind it, while driving Biblical conviction to the margins.

Neutrality is no longer possible. Silence is no longer innocence. Accommodation is no longer peace; it is surrender. The line has been drawn.

If America is to be renewed, we must recover what the Founders knew and what Julian the Apostate feared: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” [Proverbs 1:7]. Without Him, education produces clever devils instead of virtuous citizens. Without Him, the law enslaves instead of protects. Without Him, freedom collapses into tyranny.

From Kim Davis’s jail cell in 2015 to Christian parents losing their daughter in 2018, the handwriting is on the wall. But God has not left His people without hope. Gideons and Rahabs are entering the public square. Evangelical and Pro-Life Catholic Christians must do the same. The call is clear.

In every generation, God’s people have faced the same question: bow down, or stand up?

David Lane

American Renewal Project

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