Where lawful authorities are not submitted to nor honor shown to those to whom it is due, or when those in such positions abuse and misuse that which God has given, no blessing can be expected. In fact, the Bible and experience shows the disastrous consequences of unruly children, domineering husbands, rebelling citizens, wicked rulers, and selfish shepherds. But there is temporal blessing and prosperity promised to the household, church, and society where the fifth commandment is obeyed.

“Honor your father and your mother.” This command is part of that perfect law that is holy, righteous, and good because it is a reflection of the one who himself is those things. It was once engraved on the tablets of stone, was exemplified in the life of Jesus, and it is now written on the heart of believers by the ministry of the Holy Spirit and affirmed by Apostolic authority. This command convicts, restrains, and directs the Christian life.
The fifth commandment is the first of what is often called the second table of the law. When Jesus was asked which was the great commandment he answered: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:27-39). Love to God and love to neighbor are the two parts of God’s unchanging law. In the division of the Ten Commandments the first four teach us our duty to God and the last six our duty to neighbor. The priority is given to the first table as the greatest and out of a love and service to God we are to love one another. Love to neighbor consists, in part, in giving “honor to whom honor is owed” (Romans 13:7).
The fifth commandment establishes that by God’s design and order there are positions of honor and authority. After all, a part of what it means for children to honor their parents is obedience: “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Colossians 3:20). But the authorities that God has established are not autonomous, boundless, or lawless. Rather, they are derived and contingent upon the authority of God: “For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1).
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Treating religious claims as strictly experiential-expressive can help carve out a space for religious free exercise, over against its cultured despisers. But this is a profoundly unstable space. For one thing, it generally abandons the possibility of giving a normative account of the good of religion as such. One can point to the meaningfulness of religion in the lives of its adherents, but it is denied any possibility of relevance to reality itself. And, of course, one forfeits any principled reason to claim that the Satanic Temple is “not a religion”—even though, by any standard definition, it clearly is not.

Last month, a grotesque little display popped up in the Iowa Capitol: a shrine to the horned god Baphomet, erected by the “Satanic Temple.”[1] To be clear, the Satanic Temple doesn’t revere a literal Satan. It’s a secular-progressive organization with a 1980s edgelord aesthetic, swiping at conservative appeals to religious liberty.[2] You say you want religious freedom? Well, that means freedom for us Satanists too. See how you like it now!
The display didn’t last. Ex-fighter pilot Michael Cassidy tore it down (and was later arrested).[3] Since then, much of the conversation surrounding the incident has focused on whether Cassidy did the right thing—and whether any legal rationales for the Temple’s use of the space can justify having a Satanic display set up in the halls of governance.
Those debates are noteworthy. And yet, beneath the surface of these arguments is a much deeper question: what is a “religion,” and who gets to define it?
Most people naturally intuit that to the extent it exists solely to mock other faiths, the Satanic Temple isn’t a bona fide “religion.” Its “fundamental tenets” are nothing more than banal left-liberalism, such as the claim that “[b]eliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.”[4] There is nothing here of divinity at all, and decidedly no affirmation of an actually existing Satan to whom one swears fidelity.
But the category of “religion” becomes slippery whenever such notions are invoked. For instance, insisting on belief in “a Supreme Being” as the sine qua non of religiosity would seem to exclude traditions widely understood to be “religions.” Could such a definition extend to the “emptiness” lying at the core of Theravada Buddhism, or the theologies of immanence that characterize modern neopaganism?[5]
Plenty of academics have thrown up their hands and declared the question simply hopeless. As Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm notes, “most scholars trained in Religious Studies today now consider it naive to presume ‘religion’ as a concept. . . . in many quarters the rejection of ‘religion’ as an analytical object approaches the consensus view.”[6]
Such a rejection, though, is a discipline-specific luxury. The First Amendment flatly declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The category of “religion,” for all its conceptual instability, is firmly embedded in American constitutional law (and echoed in a myriad of statutes). Justices and judges can’t simply make the postmodern move and refuse to answer the question—at least not if they want to keep their jobs. Somehow, “religion” must be defined—and yet, supposedly, it cannot be.
To be clear, this is not a theological-philosophical problem that can be resolved in the space of a single article. What this piece aims to offer is something far more modest: a direction of inquiry that judges and Justices might consider when (inevitably) they are forced to reassess the matter. As appeals to “religious liberty” grow more and more contested, the Satanic Temple, or its imitators, will keep coming, pushing at the boundaries of the concept. The ultimate goal seems to be that scandalized Christians eventually settle for some sort of laïcité and a sterile public square. Christians ought to seek a better world than that.
Begin by clearing away some jurisprudential brush. Some might argue that the question of defining “religion” can be deferred indefinitely through consistent application of originalist methodology—that is, by pointing to historical examples of what counted as “religion” at the time of the Founding, which the First Amendment clearly protects.
The point is well taken. Courts can in practice make this move and avoid the deeper question. The Supreme Court, with its power of discretionary review, need not entertain cases likely to disrupt its existing precedents.[7] (The same is true of many state supreme courts.) From a public-order perspective, there are probably good reasons not to reopen the issue.
But from a theoretical standpoint, this is not especially satisfying. And it leaves questions unanswered that are not clearly resolvable within a narrow historical frame.
It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment’s protections are not limited to Christian (or even Abrahamic) faiths.[8] But there is ample reason to believe that the eighteenth-century drafters of the Constitution, like most other Westerners of the time, would have superimposed Western Christian conceptual frameworks upon religious traditions that in principle diverged sharply from the Jewish-Christian tradition. For example, assuming arguendo that Native American religious practices were originally cognized by the First Amendment, when these traditions speak of a “Great Spirit,” are they referring to a transcendent Creator (e.g., the God of the Abrahamic faiths), or referring to an immanent life-giving power not metaphysically distinct from the world?[9] If the latter, would those Native traditions count as “religions” at all? In the same vein, John Adams’s remarks on Hinduism suggest that he interpreted the tradition through a decidedly Western/Abrahamic lens.[10]
Hence, the deeper question can itself be transposed into an originalist key. To what, exactly, does the First Amendment’s protection for free exercise extend: a religious tradition as such, or the Founders’ inapt understanding of that religion? Is there principled room in the First Amendment for “religion” that does not in fact fit an implicitly Abrahamic paradigm?[11]
In general, the Founders were not what are today called “theologians of religions” or “comparative religionists.” Their use of a familiar theological-philosophical category (that is, religion) was an unanalyzed use (though understandable given the limits of the time). But now, when confronted with more challenging cases and the benefit of deeper knowledge of theological traditions, judges are not exempted from the responsibility to think through this question more systematically.
And that is, in fact, what the Supreme Court has tried to do—for better or worse.
Today, the vast majority of religious liberty cases heard by the modern Supreme Court do not involve fringe groups. The highest-profile court battles usually involve clashes between defenders of traditional Christian commitments and advocates of contemporary views on sex and gender. These cases are selected precisely because they offer clear opportunities for unsettled legal questions to be resolved and (for the most part) avoid getting bogged down in messy procedural issues or questions of disputed fact.[12] In this context, there is simply no reason to reopen questions regarding the nature of religion as such. Nobody seriously contends that Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam) is not a religion for First Amendment purposes.
But in at least two particular contexts, the question becomes much more difficult: cases involving the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), and determinations of conscientious objector status. As relevant here, RLUIPA (enacted in 2000) protects the rights of prisoners to their free exercise of religion while incarcerated. In practice, this often looks like providing special diets or other exceptions to standard prison practice (such as, in the case of a Muslim prisoner, the privilege to grow a short beard).[13] In making such determinations, courts must evaluate whether a prisoner’s supposed religious practice is in fact religious at all.
And the matter becomes even more fraught when questions of the military draft—questions of risk of death—are involved. That’s why, during the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was required to address directly the sort of belief that properly counts as “religious” for purposes of conscientious-objector status.
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If I alone can determine what is right and wrong, true and false, just and unjust, I will always be bumping heads with all the others who also think and act this way. With no higher objective absolutes that transcend my and your judgments and assessments, we will always clash. Real human dignity and community can only come from recognising who God is and how we share in the image of God.

There are many ways to describe and discuss sin. Perhaps one definition of major significance is to speak in terms of autonomy. In its simplest form this means self-law or self-government. However, if there is a God who created us and seeks to govern us for our own best good, then autonomy is the height of folly – as well as sin. It is idolatry on steroids.
We perhaps see this especially played out in the radical trans movement. Here we have folks who have so deified autonomy that they believe they can – at will – redefine morality, redefine biology, redefine truth, and redefine reality. Talk about playing God! Talk about kicking God off his throne and elevating mere man in his place.
Last week I penned a piece featuring the important new book by Christopher Watkin: Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan, 2022). As I said there, this is such a wide-ranging and significant volume that a short review will hardly do it justice.
So instead I will feature aspects or chapters of the book in a number of articles. The first one focused on Ch. 23 and is found here.
What I want to highlight today is found in Ch. 5: “Sin and Autonomy.” The Australian Christian philosophy professor also stresses autonomy as the heart of sin, and shows why it is so very destructive. And let me preface this by citing a paragraph from the previous chapter, “Sin and Society”:
The absence of a sustained emphasis on sin and judgment in Christian cultural engagement is, at least, a little odd and, at most, a heinous omission that leaves Christian cultural theory limping and unbalanced. After all, sin is such a crucial figure in the biblical rhythm of creation, fall, and redemption, the rhythm that taps out the distinctively Christian approach to all things from identity and ethics and the environment to culture, the economy, and politics. 108
Exactly right. So it is vital that we speak about sin and identify it properly and accurately. Autonomy is key to all this. And it is the perfect descriptor of what happened in the garden with our first parents:
Adam and Eve choose to live by their own law, their own code of what is permitted and not permitted, rather than by God’s law, and they choose to do so in a world that God has created and sustains, as the creatures God has created and sustains. In the context of Genesis 3, autonomy manifests itself as deciding for oneself what is to be counted as good and evil. It is not, of course, deciding for oneself what is good and evil, because God has already settled that question, and any new legislation that Adam and Eve pass down from their DIY parliament does not annul God’s royal decrees. 133
All this should be sensible enough to understand, but sin of course twists everything, including our understanding. So it is like a toddler telling his parents that he knows what is best, that he can fend for himself, and that he is able to determine what is right and wrong. Or as Watkin expresses it:
It is hard to underestimate the extent to which many in our society today fail to consider what the Bible has to say about God on its own terms because that would require admitting that our own autonomous reason may not be the most reliable truth-discerning tool in the universe. One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.
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