No American has suffered the fate of Helen Berhane, the Eritrean gospel singer whose evangelizing earned her two years in a shipping container in the middle of a hot desert. But in the last decades American Christians, like Christians across the West, have faced a rising trend of what Pope Francis has termed “polite persecution.” As the pope explains, “if you don’t like this, you will be punished: you’ll lose your job and many things or you’ll be set aside.” At the hands of bureaucrats, bosses, and judges, Christian merchants, universities, schools, hospitals, charities, campus fellowships, students, public officials, employees, and citizens have been fired, fined, shut down, threatened with a loss of accreditation, and evicted for living out traditional convictions about marriage and sexuality.

How ought Christians to respond? A twofold lesson arises from Christians who have faced persecution over the centuries. The first is an injunction to avoid cooperation with sin; the second is an obligation, overlooked all too often during an era of relative freedom, to bear witness. Christians are to manifest a love that communicates the truth about friendship with Christ through language and life. In the face of polite persecution, this witness is unlikely to beget martyrdom but may well incur costs. And the history of Christianity shows that when those costs are accepted, witness is brightened and amplified.

Barronelle Stutzman, a florist at Arlene’s Flowers in the state of Washington, shows the way. A devout Baptist, Stutzman sold flowers to Robert Ingersoll, a gay man whom she counted as a friend, over a period of nine years. After Washington legalized same-sex marriage in 2012, Ingersoll and his partner, Curt Freed, decided to declare themselves married and to celebrate it through a wedding. When Ingersoll asked Stutzman to provide the flowers for the wedding, she sorrowfully informed him that she could not. He didn’t just leave her store and take his business elsewhere, but rather filed a discrimination suit with representation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The attorney general of the state of Washington followed with a suit of his own.

Both the ACLU and the state offered settlements to Stutzman. The state proposed allowing her to pay a fine of $2,000 as long as she agreed to provide services for same-sex couples in the future. Stutzman refused, explaining that her freedom to live her faith would be compromised. Although she did not use the technical language of moral theology, she refused to cooperate formally with sin—that is, intentionally to further the wrongful act of another person. At a wedding, the purpose of flowers, like cakes and official photographs, is to magnify, memorialize, and celebrate the union being established. This union Stutzman could not endorse. In declaring themselves married, the two men would espouse a falsehood and announce their availability for sexual acts that mimic but distort those intrinsic to marriage. The state made no accommodation for Stutzman’s conscience, however, leaving her subject to ruin for her continued witness to her faith. In early 2015, the Benton County Superior Court ruled against her, forcing her to supply services for gay weddings. She then appealed her case to the Washington Supreme Court, which ruled 9–0 against her in February 2017.

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