Toleration?

I believe in God. I honestly do.

I believe God loves even me. I often wonder why. I have lived long enough, made enough horrible mistakes, to wonder how anybody can love me. Yet I believe God does. Thank God.

I believe God loves all people. I know quite a few people who seem to have earned that love more than I. I also know some who seem not to have earned it. But who am I to decide who God loves and why?

I pray—literally—that I live my life in a manner that supports my beliefs. I pray that I would manifest the love of God for all. I know I fail in this. But I sincerely try.

This is why the flap over Indiana's new law protecting the free exercise of religion grieves me deeply. I am a Hoosier. But I happen to live in a state, Michigan, that passed the same law years ago. Nobody seemed to care then. Nobody seemed to care when President Clinton signed the same law on the federal level twenty-two years ago. But times change, and so do political calculi.

For decades now “tolerance” and “diversity” have been taught in our schools. They have received ever-greater play in the media. But I put those words in quotation marks because in my experience the tolerance extends only to certain people. Christians who try to live according to a traditional interpretation of the faith—no matter how lovingly—are not tolerated by many.

As a Christian I have often felt condemned by the tolerance folks. I have never felt this more keenly than right now. The bitter irony of their judging my beliefs in the name of tolerance seems to escape them.

I understand that many people sincerely believe that these laws are meant as an attack against gays and lesbians. I disagree with them, but I grant their genuine feeling.

Can they grant my genuine religious convictions? I can live with them; can they live with me?

I thought I lived in a country founded in part on the protection of my right to practice my sincerely-held religious beliefs. If a law meant to defend that cannot stand, then where can I go? I know of no place.

In that case, God help us all.