When you are fighting a losing battle, sometimes the answer is as simple as changing the battleground.

A New Declaration of Independence

By Scott P. Richert

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Considered thoughtfully, outside of the soundbite debates of FOX News and MSNBC and the tribal battlegrounds of Facebook and Twitter, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is hardly a “great victory for religious freedom” but simply the latest little pothole in the road toward a more powerful central government and a society freed from the “unenlightened” influence of the Christian Faith. The Court’s decision does not do anything to restore federalism; nor, as Justice Alito’s suggestion to the Obama administration shows, does it revive in any significant way First Amendment protections for Christians. Two years ago, most of the same people who were cheering on the Court for its ruling in Burwell were condemning (and rightly so) that same Court for the ObamaCare decision. Having lost the constitutional war, we have now settled for making the other side angry for not getting everything they want at the very moment when they want it.

But they will get it eventually.

And that is the way it goes, as American Christians, and American Catholics in particular, cede more and more ground in a culture war that grows wider with every passing year. In the wake of the Court’s decision, the Republican Party—deathly afraid of being perceived as “anti-women” as they head into the midterm elections this fall—circulated talking points on Burwell, and many good Catholic pundits and bloggers repeated them all, including the point that everything is copacetic because Hobby Lobby is happy to cover 16 of the 20 forms of contraception mandated by ObamaCare. Never mind that the reason why Plan B and Ella, two of the four forms of contraception that were the focus of Burwell, act as abortifacients is because they have been engineered to increase the abortifacient effect already present in the Pill, one of the 16 forms of contraception with which those who repeated the talking points have apparently made their peace.

Just as the willingness to accept homosexual civil unions so long as gay “marriage” was off the table didn’t prevent gay “marriage” from coming to pass (and sooner rather than later), this “compromise” over contraception ultimately won’t prevent a future federal mandate of insurance coverage for chemical, or even manual, abortions. In every new battle, the anti-Christian forces push the envelope a little further, and we never push back as hard as we should, because we lack the courage of our convictions.

Or, perhaps, we simply lack conviction, because we have lost any sense not only of what government under the U.S. Constitution was meant to be, but of what the Church teaches that all government should be. In 1791, the first bishop of the United States, John Carroll of Baltimore, a cousin of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote A Prayer for Government, and ordered it to be recited in the parishes of his diocese.

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