March 2010 – It was a relatively simple 68-word statement as full of compassion as it was of truth. On Fox News Sunday on January 3, political commentator and analyst Brit Hume addressed the subject of disgraced golfer Tiger Woods, whose marriage seemed destined to dissolve after revelations that Woods had been unfaithful to his wife on numerous occasions.

“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” Hume said to the other panelists on the show. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’”

Hume is himself a Christian, and in subsequent interviews he revealed that he had been concerned for the golfer’s welfare and hoped the message of Christ’s forgiveness might somehow find its way from Fox News Sunday to Woods’ heart.

But Hume also said he was surprised at the extent of the hostile public reaction to his simple statement. It is a response that many Christians have encountered whenever they dared present the gospel to a family-member, friend or neighbor.

Christians, however, need not shrink back from this all-important duty. On a number of levels, believers are perfectly within their rights in defending their beliefs.

The constitutional argument
On his blog for The Atlantic, author and gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume and other evangelical Christians for bringing their faith into the public arena.

“Once you have abolished the distinction between secular and religious discourse, as they routinely insist on doing, their politics is their religion and their religion is their politics. And both are corrupted,” he said.

Sullivan, however, has taken it upon himself to create a distinction that does not exist in the Constitution. The First Amendment protects both religious freedom and political speech and allows the mixing of both. The Constitution does not require the forcing of religious speech into some sort of philosophical ghetto.

“Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief,” said political observer and author Ross Douthat in a New York Times op-ed. “In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit – and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.”

According to Gregory Rodriguez, director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute, that marketplace is not for the faint at heart. Instead, it’s a “rough-and-tumble world of competing ideas and beliefs.”

“In the United States, the Constitution doesn’t merely protect religious practice; it also protects a believer’s right to try to change someone else’s beliefs,” Rodriguez wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

On the other hand, while Sullivan’s critique does not pass constitutional muster, it certainly does serve his own personal preferences. A political discourse stripped of Biblical Christianity means that much of the resistance to his homosexual activism would be muted or even silenced. How convenient for him if he could arrange it.

The logical argument
Most of the arguments against Christian speech in the political realm are just as transparently self-serving as Sullivan’s, and quite a few are self-contradictory.

Jay Bookman, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, trotted out this whopper in response to Hume’s Fox News Sunday statement: “I do not understand and can’t begin to comprehend the arrogance it takes to publicly anoint yourself someone’s spiritual adviser, and to then lecture them about their faith and its alleged inadequacies. … A person’s faith is a private matter between that person and God, and is not a matter to be judged by some pompous TV anchor.”

Bookman rejects Hume’s declaration as an expression of arrogance for one single reason: Hume had “publicly anoint[ed]” himself as Woods’ “spiritual adviser.” Which seems to be precisely what Bookman did in his column. Is Bookman not discussing religion? Is he not telling Hume how to practice his? Apparently it’s wrong to be a “pompous TV anchor,” but not wrong to be a pompous newspaper columnist.

He also – like the rest of his ilk – demands that religion be placed in a separate category of discussion from, for example, the politics that he and many other columnists discuss daily.

Rodriguez noted the very nature of the editorial page on which he was writing. “The page you’re reading this column on is dedicated to people who are trying to change your mind about all sorts of issues. Cable news shows are all about the clash of opinion shapers. From the now-nonstop political campaigns of Democrats and Republicans to advertising to PR onslaughts, it’s nearly impossible to escape the daily bombardment of persuasion.”

A liberal columnist can criticize a conservative, disparage his beliefs or even attempt to ‘convert’ him to a “progressive” worldview – but you can’t do that with religion? Somehow Bookman believes that category is off limits.

Moreover, while Bookman excoriates Hume by asserting – without foundation – that “a person’s faith is a private matter between that person and God,” Bookman publicly expresses his own (apparently) religious views and seeks to impose them on Hume. In the process, Bookman makes pronouncements that are so universal and timeless in scope that one wonders if he doesn’t realize how arrogant he sounds.

Ultimately the illogic inherent in such attacks against people of faith reveals a deep-seated anger against the “religious exclusivity” of Christians like Hume, according to Michael Gerson, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior policy analyst under President George W. Bush.

“Religious faiths … generally make claims about the nature of reality that conflict with the claims of other faiths. Attacking Christian religious exclusivity is to attack nearly every vital religious tradition,” Gerson said in a powerful defense of Hume written for the Washington Post. “It is not a scandal to believers that others hold differing beliefs. It is only a scandal to those offended by all belief. …”

The Biblical argument
The more frequently and effectively believers like Hume speak up in public, the harder the push-back is likely to be.

“It used to be that liberals didn’t want you to mention Christ in schools. Then they banned Christ from Christmas concerts and public squares. Now they are demanding that we not talk about Christianity in public,” Jim Hoft said on the Gateway Pundit blog.

This makes “Jesus Christ,” Hume told Christianity Today, “the two most explosive words in the English language.”

Or, as “Laura” so eloquently put it on the Pursuing Holiness blog: “[I]n America [Christian exclusivity] is at least being made socially unacceptable by postmodern leftists who screech like a goth in the sun if they hear a simple declarative statement that Christianity is superior to other religions.”

Remarking about Hume’s Fox News Sunday statement, Rodriguez declared: “And no, it’s not polite. Hume basically said, ‘My faith is better than Woods’ and he was attacked as ‘sanctimonious’ and ‘stupid.’ He wasn’t being respectful, and neither were his critics. Neither is our intellectual and political tradition.”

What’s amazing about Rodriguez’s comment is that he presents a view of our vigorous republic as being filled with full-throated proclaimers who are neither ashamed of their own views nor intimidated by contrary opinions. His characterization of our society sounds positively Homeric.

It should sound like something else, too, at least for Christians. It sounds astonishingly like the New Testament portrait of the Christian in the midst of a hostile environment full of non-Christian ideas.

In Acts 4, for example, Peter preaches an exclusive gospel that certainly rejects all other faiths. In lifting up Jesus Christ, the apostle states: “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (vs. 12, NASB).

What was the reaction of the religious gatekeepers of Peter’s day? They arrested Peter and John and “commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus” (vs. 18).

And, if they’d been alive in A.D. 2010, those religious leaders might have added: “And don’t bear witness about that name on the Sunday talk shows, either.”

But bearing witness to such truth in 2010 seems to surprise secularists in our culture.

“I’m not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians,” said Lisa Miller, religion editor for Newsweek. “The word ‘evangelical’ comes from the Greek word for gospel, or ‘good news.’ Evangelical Christians are those who want to spread the good news. They aren’t pretending to believe in salvation through Jesus Christ. They actually do believe that it – and yours, and mine – comes through him. … Evangelizing is what evangelical Christians do.”

But is it? Is evangelizing “what evangelical Christians do?” One might seriously ask if the shock among non-Christians might simply be due to how poor a witness to Christ the church has been in the last few decades. Even if people don’t necessarily receive the gospel, they should at least have experienced enough episodes of being told the good news to recognize evangelization when they see it.

It is interesting to note that, in Acts 4, after the religious leaders warned the apostles to remain silent about the name of Jesus Christ, the church gathered to pray. Their request? It was that God might “grant that Your bond-servants … speak Your word with all confidence.”

It’s time that more Christians prayed that same prayer, and followed Hume’s example.