Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego replied to the king, “Nebuchadnezzar, we don’t need to give you an answer to this question. If the God we serve exists, then He can rescue us from the furnace of blazing fire, and He can rescue us from the power of you, the king. But even if He does not rescue us,w we want you as king to know that we will not serve your gods or worship the gold statue you set up.” – Daniel 3:16-18

Today on Desiring God, John Piper’s blog/ministry/neo-reformed think tank, I came across an article boldly titled The Shadrach Option. Written by Joe Rigney, pastor and professor, it was filed under “persecution and martyrdom,” and featured the mugshot of the much maligned Kim Davis.

Before I start this, let me make a couple of things clear – I think Piper is one of the most important theologians of the 21st century, and I’ve read articles Rigney that I absolutely loved. But with this article, I think Desiring God has jumped the shark, and joined in a continuing procession of folks leading the “religious liberty” movement down an extreme and dangerous path.

Here’s the core of the article: America is Babylon, Kim Davis is Shadrach of the Prophet Daniel’s trio of martyrs, and Christians are being called into the fire of religious persecution. Rigney argues that we should go forward smiling, trusting our God while decrying the lies that a secular government is telling about things like marriage. Rigney further compares Davis to a modern day MLK: a relentless advocate willing to suffer imprisonment for adhering to the views of God instead of bowing down to the state-sponsored take on truth. In the author’s view, Davis is a martyr, enduring persecution for the simple act of declaring Biblical truth. And that’s where I think the author goes very, very, wrong.

Kim Davis was jailed for an act that she justifies by her faith: refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court ruling, and continuing to refuse after specific orders from a Kentucky judge. She was not jailed for speaking out against the ruling: in fact, she was greeted with crowds of allies, a trending topic on twitter, and no less than three Presidential candidates personally offering to visit her in jail, where she was released after just five days of jail time. If this is the fire of Christian persecution, we’re dealing with flickering candles, not murderous ovens.

The author, and Davis herself, argue that she was doing God’s work – refusing to put her name on a marriage license that she believed represented a lie. In God’s eyes, Davis claims, same-sex marriages aren’t valid marriages. I’d happen to agree. Where I’d disagree is in claiming that the state, or its employees, have any sort of obligation to represent God’s perspective, or that Christians should have any realistic expectation that the Bible be more honored in a court of law than the US constitution.

When Davis took her duly elected position she swore an oath, calling upon the name of God, to support the Constitution of the United States, faithfully execute her job according to law. Under her biblical obligations as a professing Christian, she is bound to honor her oath (and is in fact explicitly warned not to make any oaths, precisely because doing so puts the oath-taker at risk of becoming an oath-breaker, and using the Lord’s name in vain). She is under no biblical obligation to conflate God’s definition of marriage with the state’s definition of marriage, or to remain in service to an entity that she believes is violently opposed to the work of God.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were not voluntary state employees. They were slaves (albeit well-treated slaves) of a hostile empire offered into the flames because they refused to bow down and worship an emperor as a literal god. They took no oaths of fealty, could not leave their posting, and were condemned to die a terrible, gruesome death. Kim Davis broke an oath, refused to leave an office she was unqualified to serve in, and endured five days in a prison cell followed by a party with her as the shining star. If religious persecution is represented by a consuming holocaust, Kim Davis suffered all the pains of a flickering candle.

To conflate the two, and to call Kim Davis a martyr isn’t just an insult to the millions of Christians who can draw a distinction between God’s commands to Christians and the legal protections and privileges offered by a secular state, it’s an insult to the millions of Christian martyrs, subjected to torture, lifelong imprisonment, and wanton murder throughout the globe today and throughout the ages. And if we want people to take the very serious, very real, cause of religious liberty seriously, we’d do well not to prop up Kim Davis as the face of an increasingly unpopular movement. If we’re to defend the cause of religious tolerance, the intolerant ought not be our heroes.

For more on my thoughts on gay marriage and the Christian reaction read: A Very Lonely Club: Progressive and Christian