Fourteen-year-old Ariana Iacono is at the center of a controversy reverberating throughout eastern North Carolina. A student at Clayton High School, not far from Raleigh, she has been suspended for 10 days. Her disobedience? She arrived at school with a nose piercing, a violation of the school system’s dress code.
Bob WeathersNaturally Ariana was upset about this, but her mother was livid. She has filed a lawsuit against the school system.
Given our litigation-crazed society, that probably doesn’t surprise you. But you may be surprised to learn that the lawsuit claims that the school system has violated Ariana’s rights to the free exercise of religion.
It seems that Ariana and her mother are members of the Church of Body Modification. (No. I’m not making this up.) Richard Ivey, who serves as the church’s “minister” in the Raleigh area, says that the group has about 3,500 members.
They describe themselves as a non-theistic faith whose adherents believe that piercings, tattoos and other physical alterations are ways of “experiencing the divine.” “We don’t worship the god of body modification or anything like that,” he says. “Our spirituality comes from what we choose to do ourselves. Through body modification, we can change how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about the world.” (Also not surprising: The ACLU is siding with Ariana.)
This extraordinary abuse of the protection of religious freedom in America provided by our Founders is made possible by the distance we have traveled from the standards of verifiable religious truth. If we have no qualifications for God, and no standards for truth, then pretty much anything can be called a spiritual experience, and all serious theological truth is trivialized. And when anything can be protected as a religion, then nothing is protected.
This slide-away truth is easier than we think. It begins when we drift from God’s standard for truth, His Word. On one occasion Jesus prefaced his correction of the Sadducees’ bad theology with this observation, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).
To live tethered to the truth, our understanding of God and spirituality must be informed by the Bible. Otherwise, we wander into error. And there is nothing in between.