There are far more egregious consequences of the Equality Act than its lack of protections for religious freedom. It celebrates and legitimizes a way of life that is fundamentally destructive, both on an individual and societal level. The Equality Act would not merely alter legal code. It would engender and nourish a burgeoning assault on any who publicly dissent from the new secular orthodoxy.

Laws reveal much about what a society values. Legal jargon is never just jargon: statutes and proposed legal amendments reveal foundational moral convictions about what is true, good, and just. It ought not to cause surprise, therefore, that when lawmakers propose new laws, a clash of worldviews ensues, and rhetoric emerges that reveals fundamentally disparate visions of how society should be structured.

The Equality Act is perhaps one of the clearest pictures of just how polarizing the legal code can be. One legislative act can thrust the nation into a divisive dispute over a priori moral and ethical questions—questions over what it means to be male and female, the institution of the family, matters of discrimination, and the issue of religious freedom.

The complexities of the Equality Act will continue to grip political discourse and debate in the months and, most likely, years to come. The act’s advocates contend that the Equality Act represents the keystone achievement of LGBTQ equality. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued, the Equality Act resoundingly commits the United States to treating LGBTQ people equally not only “in the workplace, but in every place.” The act, however, also suffers its discontents, who rightly chide the legislative measure as an assault on religious freedom.

But is the argument about the lack of religious freedom protections enough? I think Ryan Anderson is right: religious freedom cannot be the only end sought by conservatives and especially for Christians. “The answer,” Anderson argues, “isn’t for our side to forfeit the fight about the truth by pleading only to be left alone.” Indeed, there are far more egregious consequences of the Equality Act than its lack of protections for religious freedom: it celebrates and legitimizes a way of life that is fundamentally destructive, both on an individual and societal level. There are serious matters at stake in the constellation of ethical issues connected to the Equality Act. Again, legal jargon is never just jargon. Codified laws flow from a worldview, and in the case of the Equality Act, the undergirding worldview is antithetical to human flourishing.

That is, perhaps, one of the more pressing and pervasive threats of the Equality Act: the freedom to think, to be offensive, to state publicly without equivocation or fear of retribution that transgenderism, as an example, is destructive. The editorial board of The Washington Post suggests that such views are permitted, but they must remain private—they cannot, for the sake of human dignity, have a place in the public square. Cancel culture devours dissent, as evidenced by Amazon’s removal of Ryan Anderson’s book against transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally. The Equality Act would not merely alter legal code. It would engender and nourish a burgeoning assault on any who publicly dissent from the new secular orthodoxy.

Civility of Conformity in Colonial Massachusetts

The impulse to silence and sideline dissent against a socially prescribed orthodoxy is not new. Indeed, the proponents of cancel culture and the advocates of the Equality Act embody an all too familiar impulse of the human condition. The inclination to gag society’s dissenters stems from what I call the civility of conformity, which is a political ideology that prizes moral and ethical uniformity around a socially mandated orthodoxy.

Civility of conformity made its way to America in the earliest days of the colonial period. As winter’s chill began to descend in October of 1659, the colony of Massachusetts carried out the execution of William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who disturbed the civil peace and threatened the purity of the church with their blasphemies and idolatry. The authorities in Massachusetts feared the spread of Quaker heresy throughout its colony, and Massachusetts colonists believed that they must faithfully maintain the law of God. In the preservation of God’s ordinances among them was their security and peace. In other words, religious establishment in this early American colony created no space for dissent. Conformity secured peace, ecclesial purity, and social stability.

Throughout the 1630s and 40s, Massachusetts navigated the Roger Williams controversy, the antinomian crisis, the Samuel Gorton case, and the Remonstrance of 1646. The rise of Protestant pluralism, coupled with the unrelenting conviction of dissenters, continued to undermine the colony’s efforts at uniformity. Not only that, but the colony suffered in each of these controversies a public relations catastrophe with England. News began to cross the Atlantic of the colony’s departure from the Anglican model of church governance, which violated its charter. Individuals like Thomas Lechford, for example, detailed the harsh antics of a colony that had dissolved into a chaotic spree of violence against nonconformists. Lechford chronicled how the colony banished, whipped, and imprisoned men for theological crimes “without sufficient record.” The assault on the aspiration and vision of Massachusetts’s Puritan divines led men like John Cotton, John Winthrop, Nathaniel Ward, and Plymouth’s Edward Winslow to defend the colony’s actions as well as to reassert the necessity of civility of conformity.

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