by Jack Phillips
2021 / 199 pages
RATING: Great
Twenty seconds.
And one decision.
That’s all it took to change my life forever.
So begins Jack Phillips’ day on a fateful July 19, 2012. It was a short meeting – a homosexual couple met with Jack, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, and asked him to create a cake for their same-sex “wedding.” The baker declined.
Why’d he object? Phillips didn’t want to use his talents to present as praiseworthy what God has said is condemnable. In the past that stand has also had him turn down requests for pornographic or sexually explicit cakes, and racist cakes too. But this time Jack, and his Masterpiece Cakeshop, ended up going to court, being taken to Colorado’s human rights commission, where they promptly lost. He was told that so long as he was making cakes, he could be compelled to make cakes that stated messages Jack opposed.
Lots of twists and turns occur in this short account of his journey all the way to the US Supreme Court, and Jack is happy to show us how God is evident in it all. I felt like some of his story was in keeping with the passage in 2 Chron. 20:1-30, where God turns Israel’s enemies against each other. Jack Phillips’ eventual Supreme Court win was a direct result of the Colorado human rights commission sabotaging their own efforts by not even pretending to be fair with him – God turned their own arrogance against them.
That didn’t stop them from trying again. On June 26, 2017, the very day that the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ original case, a male attorney placed an order for a “gender transition” cake to help him celebrate his “transition” to being a woman. To state this in clearer terms, a mentally disturbed individual, whose dissociation with reality had either already led him to amputate his genitals, or could well lead him to consider doing so, asked a good Christian man to help him celebrate his disease, and the self-harm that had (or could) result from it. It’s akin to an anorexic demanding someone help them celebrate their determination to never eat again – no loving man or woman could ever do such a thing. Yet, that’s what this attorney wanted. He could have gone and asked for such a cake at any number of other bakeries and gotten just what he wanted. But he didn’t want a cake; he wanted Phillips to have to make it for him or be punished for not doing so. And he brought a second case against Phillips.
What’s notable is what else happened eight months earlier. After Donald Trump one his first term as president, fashion designer Sophie Theallet issued a public letter in which she noted that while she had been happy to dress the former First Lady Michelle Obama, she was formally declining to do so for the incoming First Lady Melania Trump because she didn’t agree with Donald Trump’s politics and didn’t want any part in being associated with, or enabling, them. She encouraged her “fellow designers to do the same” because “Integrity is our only true currency.”
It was a clear cut case of discrimination, but did any of the media report it as bigoted? Did they make a connection with what Jack Phillips was doing in the original case? When the attorney brought the second case against Phillips, did anyone remember the positive coverage Theallet had received for taking a principled stand? No, no, and of course not, no.
The point here isn’t simply that the media is biased, or that the Colorado human rights commission is biased, or that the gay couple, or this confused attorney are unreasonable. What’s worth understanding is that this is all about God. It’s fine to refuse your services to Trump on the basis of your own personal values. But it’s not okay to boycott someone on the basis of what God says to be true and right. He is the pivot point of this battle; He is what it is all about. And Jack Phillips understood that, and in those first twenty seconds, he was ready to follow His Lord, no matter where it took him.
I’ve shared this book with my kids and many others, and everyone finds it such an encouraging read. At just a couple of hundred pages, it’s a quick one too. Buy a copy, and then pass it along, so you and your friends can all learn more about a courageous man serving his glorious God.
