You Will Be Made to Care

The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe

Erick Erickson, Bill Blankschaen

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781621574743
• eBook ISBN: 9781621575269
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

Religious liberty is under attack in America. Your freedom to believe may not last much longer.To all those who say they don't care about the culture war, Erick Erickson has only one response: "The Left will not let you stay on the sidelines. You will be made to care."Now the former Editor-in-Chief of RedState.com joins with Christian author Bill Blankschaen to expose the war in America on Christians and all people of faith who refuse to bow to the worst kind of religion—secularism—one intent on systematically imposing its agenda and frightening doubters into silence.The book features first-hand accounts from Christians who've been punished for their beliefs and the perspectives of concerned thought leaders to make the case that Americans of faith can't afford to ignore what's happening—not anymore. You Will Be Made to Care offers hope for preserving freedom of conscience with practical steps that believers, families, pastors, church leaders, and citizens can take to resist tyranny and experience a resurgence of faith in America.

PART I

FIRST THEY COME FOR YOUR FAITH

CHAPTER 1

THE AUDACITY TO BELIEVE

Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially in those quiet moments, when the spotlight’s not on us, and we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.

—MICHELLE OBAMA¹

Kelvin Cochran always dreamed of becoming a firefighter. But Kelvin did more than dream. He rose to the pinnacle of his profession—serving as America’s fire chief—before being blindsided by the city of Atlanta, which abruptly terminated his employment in 2015. Kelvin Cochran was fired for having the audacity to write a book about his Christian beliefs.

Chief Cochran’s decorated career began humbly in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he grew up in a family that was abandoned by their father when Kelvin was quite young. His mother and five brothers and sisters survived on welfare and food stamps, living in a government project. Kelvin recalls times when his mother would have the children fill every pot and jug with water, knowing the water company would soon cut their family off. They had to light their home with candles when they could afford no electricity. And by the end of each month, his mother had only enough money to buy mayonnaise and bread. The six children would eat mayonnaise on toast for breakfast, mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch, and mayonnaise sandwiches again for dinner. If they wanted something sweet to drink, they had to make do with a couple teaspoons of sugar in a glass of water. “Poverty,” Chief Cochran recalls, “was a terrible thing.”

After church one Sunday afternoon, the family heard sirens in the alley outside their house. When Kelvin opened the door, he saw a big red Shreveport Fire Department truck. The house where the firefighters were battling to douse the flames belonged to Miss Katie across the street.

Seeing them in action that day sparked Kelvin’s imagination: “When I saw those firefighters, I was smitten. All I ever thought about growing up from that point forward was being a firefighter, escaping from poverty, and wanting to have a family, because I realized how terrible it was not to have a daddy at home.” When he shared his dream with grown-ups, they told him that “your dreams will come true if you go to school, treat other people like you want to be treated, respect authority, and have faith in God.”

Those core principles, grounded in his Christian beliefs, guided Kelvin Cochran as his “childhood-dream-come-true-fairy-tale-career” took off. In 1981 he became one of the first African American firefighters in the Shreveport Fire Department. He was promoted to captain in just four years. He became an assistant chief of training after ten years and fire chief of the Shreveport Fire Department after just eighteen years of service. Cochran served faithfully in that role until he was recruited by Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin to serve as fire chief for the largest city in the southeastern United States.

As fire chief for the city of Atlanta, Cochran oversaw more than 1,100 personnel serving in thirty-six fire stations across the city, including some at the Atlanta airport. Managing a budget of about $140 million, he was responsible for fire and rescue, field operations, and any emergencies that were not law enforcement–related. His duties included overseeing:

• Aircraft rescue firefighting at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the world;

• Special operations such as high-rise and waterway rescue; and

• Hazardous materials response teams—as three major interstates intersect in downtown Atlanta.²

Cochran was entrusted with tremendous responsibility, and he served with such distinction in Atlanta that he came to the attention of someone in Washington—newly inaugurated President Barack Obama.

When the president nominated him to serve his country as the U.S. fire administrator within the Department of Homeland Security in August of 2009,³ Chief Cochran answered the call to serve his country. In short, he became the nation’s fire chief, overseeing the training of our nation’s firefighters, educating for fire prevention, establishing a national deployment strategy for natural disasters or terrorist attacks, and coordinating the response of firefighters in the event of national emergencies with FEMA.

Throughout his meteoric rise, it was Kelvin Cochran’s Christian faith that motivated him to serve and to excel.

From an early age, Kelvin’s strong and prayerful mother followed the biblical instruction to “train up a child in the way he should go.” As a young father, Cochran became active in his local church, serving as a deacon, teaching children in Sunday school, and leading other men to become better fathers and husbands. Cochran embraced the Christian doctrine of vocation and sought to glorify God through service to his fellow citizens. His faith guided him all the way to our nation’s capital and the pinnacle of his profession.

After just ten months in Washington, D.C., Cochran got a visit from Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta, recruiting him to return to his previous position. In fact, he “begged”—the mayor’s own word—the chief to return to lead the city’s fire and safety efforts.⁴

Cochran returned to Atlanta in June of 2010 and continued to serve the city with distinction. After a winter storm paralyzed the city in January 2014, the mayor enlisted Cochran’s expertise to coordinate emergency disaster response as incident commander.⁵ And a few weeks later, with Cochran in the lead, the city weathered a second winter storm—with dramatically better results.

Under Kelvin Cochran’s leadership, the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department celebrated as the Insurance Services Office raised “Atlanta’s Public Protection Classification (PPC) rating to Class 1, indicating an exemplary ability to respond to fires.”⁶ The department also retained accreditation with the Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CFAI), an achievement earned by only two hundred fire departments in the world. Atlanta Fire Rescue was called “a model for innovative public fire protection practices” by the CFAI commission chair.⁷ In fact, the Atlanta department experienced success story after success story with Cochran at the helm until—suddenly, a week before Thanksgiving 2014—everything changed.

All of Cochran’s career success became irrelevant when he was targeted by gay activists who claimed that his Christian beliefs—the very ones that motivated him to serve with excellence for thirty-four years—now disqualified him from doing his job keeping Atlanta safe.

KICKED TO THE CURB AND MADE TO CARE

In November 2013 Chief Cochran had published a book titled Who Told You That You Were Naked? Overcoming the Stronghold of Condemnation. The idea for the book came out of a men’s Bible study examining the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden. As Cochran describes it:

I asked them if they thought men today are still suffering from the consequences of what Adam did in the Garden of Eden. All of them without hesitation said, “Yes.” I asked them to each share their stories of why. And as they shared, the question that God asked Adam, “Who told you that you were naked?” kept resonating in my spirit and in my mind. I was led to research the word naked because I felt that God was asking Adam more than who told you that you don’t have on any clothes.⁸

Cochran’s research led him to conclude that there were a lot of Christian men still acting as if they were “naked”—condemned—instead of living redeemed and restored lives as faithful fathers and husbands. So he wrote the book to share his findings and encourage Christian men with a basic expression of Christian beliefs.

Then without warning—nearly a year after he published his book—Cochran was called into a meeting with three members of Mayor Reed’s administration and suspended without pay for thirty days pending an investigation. His alleged wrongdoing was publishing his religious beliefs about marriage and sexuality. On November 24, 2014, the mayor’s Facebook page showed the following post:

The contents of this book do not reflect the views of Mayor Reed or the Administration. . . . I was surprised and disappointed to learn of this book on Friday. I profoundly disagree with and am deeply disturbed by the sentiments expressed in the paperback regarding the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] community. . . . Chief Cochran will be required to complete sensitivity training. . . . I want to be clear that the material in Chief Cochran’s book is not representative of my personal beliefs, and is inconsistent with the Administration’s work to make Atlanta a more welcoming city for all her citizens—regardless of their sexual orientations, gender, race, and religious beliefs.⁹ [emphasis added]

All citizens, that is, except those whose religious beliefs happen to agree with the Bible instead of Mayor Reed’s “personal beliefs.” When Cochran was suspended, openly gay District 6 councilmember Alex Wan actually said, “[W]hen you’re a city employee, and [your] thoughts, beliefs and opinions are different from the city’s, you have to check them at the door.”¹⁰

A month later, the investigation had found no wrongdoing and zero facts to support the claims of discrimination that had been hurled against the chief by the gay activists: “Reed officials found no evidence that Cochran treated lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees unfairly during his tenure.”¹¹ Investigators produced no evidence to support allegations that the chief was proselytizing at work, either.¹² In fact, the investigation produced no evidence of any policy violations whatsoever. And yet Chief Kelvin Cochran was unceremoniously fired, simply for his beliefs about marriage and sexuality, which were all consistent with historic Christian doctrine but were suddenly deemed to be bigotry so deplorable as to make him unemployable by the supposedly Bible Belt city of Atlanta.

Cochran’s Christian faith shaped how he treated all people with respect and how he rose to the very peak of his profession. His commitment to live out his faith in his vocation and all of life is a reflection of historic Christianity. It is also a summation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Street Sweeper” speech: “Go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.’”

What Cochran did by living a life that consistently reflected his deeply held religious beliefs was no different from what Martin Luther King urged, and yet he wasn’t even allowed to sit in the back of the bus. He was kicked to the curb.

Kelvin Cochran had dared to quote a passage from the Bible in his book! As part of a general call to “serve one another humbly in love” and to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the Apostle Paul encouraged believers in Galatia to stay away from a number of sins, including any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. All Cochran did, ever so briefly and in language you’d find in study Bibles across America, was to affirm the basic Christian teaching that gay sex, like heterosexual sex outside of marriage, is a sin.

So gay rights activists screamed loudly that he could no longer do his job. It wasn’t enough for them to disagree with the chief’s religious beliefs, or to explain why theirs were right. The activists offended by Cochran’s religious beliefs had to destroy Kelvin Cochran’s livelihood because these beliefs offended them.

Mayor Reed of Atlanta complied.

Chief Kelvin Cochran was made to care. And make no mistake, he will not be the last person who is. The Left is coming for your freedom to believe. The day is coming—sooner than you think—when you too will be made to care.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU

What happened to Chief Cochran isn’t an isolated incident. Across America over the last decade—and especially in the last few years—the attacks on religious liberty have intensified in what I can only describe as a war on our freedom to believe.

The examples are numerous—and multiplying.

Evangelical Christians Jonathan and Elaine Huguenin declined to photograph a same-sex ceremony based on their belief that marriage is a sacred union of a man and a woman. The New Mexico Human Rights Commission ruled that the Huguenins had discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation and ordered them to pay $6,637.94 in attorneys’ fees.¹³ The New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the ruling, with one justice claiming the Huguenins’ loss of religious freedom was simply “the price of citizenship.”¹⁴

Catholic Charities of Boston was forced out of adoption services because it would not abandon the clear tenets of the Christian faith and place children in the homes of same-sex couples.¹⁵

Two lesbian women asked the owners of an Oregon bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, to bake a wedding cake for their same-sex commitment ceremony. When the business declined on religious grounds, the women filed a complaint under the Oregon Equality Act. The Labor Commission of Oregon ruled that Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, had violated Oregon’s sexual orientation law. After being relentlessly harassed by gay a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART I: FIRST THEY COME FOR YOUR FAITH
• PART II: THEN THEY MAKE YOU CARE
• PART III: HOW TO WIN THE WAR
• CONCLUSION: YOU ARE NOT ALONE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX