HB2 supporters must remember Jesus’ focus on love, justice and mercy

It’s spring revival season in North Carolina’s churches, and Christian preachers like ourselves spend weekday evenings challenging the faithful to bring religion into real life. As Jesus makes clear in Luke 4, true evangelicalism begins with good news for the poor. We pray for faith to shape our state’s public life, but faith can feed fear and venom as easily as love and mercy. House Bill 2 offers a clear example.

As pastors, we know that some of the religious support for HB2 is sincere, but we are also troubled by the way political extremists have tried to exploit the religious community for political gain. HB2 is not a “bathroom bill” to protect women and children from predators. It is a cynical attempt to pit supposedly Christian values against our families’ best interests and our faith’s highest morality.

When caring for a community, every preacher must decide how to counsel parishioners about sexuality. We know how any identity issue can cut to the heart of who people are and how they understand their Creator. But whatever our counsel in these deeply personal matters, Scripture is clear that our public action must be guided by love, justice and mercy.

The Bible tells us in over 2,000 verses to be mindful of the needs of the poor. Yet even Gov. Pat McCrory’s proposed changes to HB2 do not alter those parts of the bill that attack working families. The bill still prevents local communities from improving wages, hours or work conditions. The bill still bars any increase in the minimum wage; so much for defending women, since the vast majority of low-wage workers are women. Though proponents pretend that it protects children, HB2 explicitly bars our communities from safeguarding, in its words, “the well-being of minors in the workforce.” The bill keeps municipalities from requiring private contractors to treat workers decently. While its proponents claim to defend women, the bill effectively bans local governments from enacting set-asides for women or other minorities.

What do these labor provisions have to do with transgender people and public restrooms? Nothing. While one should not shortchange the venom behind this attack on transgender citizens, the bill also uses prejudice and fear to get working people to support a bill that attacks their best interests and to get the Chamber of Commerce to support a bill that damages our economy. The opposition of hundreds of corporations shows that this has not worked well. Apparently keeping wages low is not everyone’s first concern, though it appears to be crucial to McCrory and the extremists in the General Assembly.

Even so, many faith leaders swallow the sex-baiting cooked up by political strategists. The provisions that feed unjustified fear of transgender children of God remain in place. HB2 is a solution to a problem that does not exist. It would not prevent disguised predators of any persuasion from targeting people in public restrooms. The bill’s interference with local self-governance with respect to LGBT people remains hateful and needless, calculated to rally social conservatives. This is not working too well, either, since recent polls reveal that only 18 percent of North Carolinians say the bill should go forward as it is and 61 percent agree that the bill is bad for North Carolina.

Still, many Christians we know and love are misguided about HB2. Enamored by worldly power and the religious right’s rhetoric, North Carolina’s faithful too often equate Jesus with a narrow agenda of personal morality, forgetting what Jesus called the “weightier matters of the law” – love, justice and mercy. Jesus spent most of his time on Earth with people who are scorned and rejected by our representatives in Raleigh.

This is not new. When we look back at North Carolina history, we see how the “Redemption” movement of the 19th century used accusations of “immorality” and corruption to defeat Reconstruction and the voting rights of African-Americans. We have to face the so-called Southern evangelicals who refused to support Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. because he neglected his “spiritual work” to address political injustice. In a painfully familiar way, the language of “morality” is being hijacked again to support immoral policy like HB2.

We know from personal experience that Jesus is greater than the mean tricks of politics. These are tenuous times when the lives and well-being of “the least of these” hang in the balance. We pray that our Christian sisters and brothers will consider how to be salt and light without supporting those who exploit fear for political gain.

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "HB2 supporters must remember Jesus’ focus on love, justice and mercy."