Religious Liberty in an Age of Toleration

[nChrist]

Religious Liberty in an Age of Toleration
Jim Tonkowich
Institute on Religion & Democracy

September 8, 2009

After being assaulted by a family member, the sixteen-year-old British girl was placed in a foster home.  Her foster mother had years of experience, a good reputation, and was fully licensed by the state.  She was also a practicing Christian.

While in foster care, the young girl on her own became interested in the Christian faith and began attending church.  Her foster mother neither encouraged nor discouraged her interest.  After a while, the young girl professed faith in Christ and was baptized. And that's when the trouble began.

The girl had been born into a Muslim family.  Baptism into the Christian faith is apostasy for Muslims, punishable by death.  The strange thing, however, is that the trouble didn't come from her family or the Muslim.  It came from the British government.

In what amounts to a frontal assault on religious liberty, officials immediately closed the foster home and moved the girl, ordering her to stay away from church for at least six months in order to reconsider her decision.

In a country where the soil is soaked with the blood of those who died fighting for religious liberty - the religious liberty that we also enjoy here in what was an English colony - something has gone terribly wrong.

That something is the seemingly insignificant shift from a belief in religious liberty to a belief in religious toleration.

In a world that has toleration as its highest virtue, religious toleration sounds like a good idea.  Most people would agree that the world would be a better place if every nation practiced religious toleration.

But does this assumption have any validity? In the April 2008 issue of Touchstone magazine, human rights scholar William Saunders made the surprising argument that religious toleration rather than being a virtue is a source of religious coercion, persecution, and martyrdom.

This is because religious toleration is based on the belief that while religion may be an unavoidable part of human life, it is, nonetheless, dangerous and needs to be managed and controlled.

Saunders quotes John Shattuck who served as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Clinton administration.  In a 2002 speech Shattuck said:

Freedom of religion is predicated upon the existence of more than one religion.  But a multiplicity of religions has always meant conflict, and religious conflict often led to war and human devastation.  This was the state of reality for centuries and millennia, and it is hardly a ringing endorsement of religious freedom.

Shattuck is not in favor of religious liberty.  Instead Shattuck believes that religious toleration is a "strategic necessity" and is "necessary for the internal protection of religion itself."  That is, religion is a danger that must be kept on a leash.

Saunders comments:

[Shattuck], and the philosophical liberalism he represents, sees religion, unlike other human rights, as a problem, as a source of conflict, as something to be managed.

Religion is managed by jettisoning religious liberty and substituting religious toleration.  Thus the Chinese register, approve, and tolerate churches and religious groups deemed safe in light of the state's interests.  Unapproved churches or religions - house churches, falun gong, Tibetan Buddhism - are seen as dangerous and subject to persecution.

Religious toleration is at the heart of the Muslim notion of dhimmitude.  A dhimmi in Islamic law is a non-Muslim "person of the book", that is, a Jew or a Christian, living in a Muslim country.  Dhimmis may practice their religion, but with significant restrictions - especially the restriction on evangelism.  They are taxed at a higher rate, have fewer civil liberties, are treated with contempt, and are in every way second-class citizens.  The Coptic Christians in Egypt are dhimmis who for generations have been the designated garbage collectors with no option for any other life apart from conversion to Islam.

Similarly, Turkey tolerates the Eastern Orthodox Church.   But the Church can't construct new buildings or repair old ones.  When the government expropriates properties, they have no recourse.  The Church has few new priests since the state closed their seminary, does not permit candidates to go elsewhere for training, and forbids non-Turks from ministering.  The predictable result is that the Orthodox Church in Turkey, while tolerated, is dying out.

Though Dhiminitude is an Islamic concept, the idea is not limited to Islamic states.  Communist regimes gave second-class status to religious believers, French secularism has not been kind to the religious, and sadly there are signs of religious liberty eroding in our country.

Hate crimes legislation, certain healthcare reform provisions, attempts to revive the Fairness Doctrine, new rules at the Faith-Based Office, the ongoing push for same-sex "marriage," the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and the rescission of conscience protection for healthcare workers - these tolerate only certain state approved religious positions and thus undermine religious liberty for everyone.

As Judge Robert Bork has said:

You are going to get Catholic hospitals that are going to be required as a matter of law to perform abortions. …We are going to see in the near future a terrible conflict between claimed rights of homosexuals and religious freedom… You are going to get Catholic or other groups' relief services that are going to be required to allow adoption of a child by homosexual couples. We are going to have a real conflict that goes right to the heart of the society.

And make no mistake: religious liberty is at the heart of a free society.  What can be the meaning or value of economic freedom or freedom of assembly or freedom of speech or freedom of the press if our consciences are not free to believe or disbelieve, to worship or mock, to convert to or from one belief system to another, to change our minds?  All human freedoms are important, but religious liberty is the foundation for all the rest.  It is the freedom to think for yourself.  This makes religious liberty our first freedom in importance and in order.

While religious toleration is a creation of the state, religious liberty is an unalienable right rooted in our nature as humans. It is the freedom to choose, practice, share, and live in private - and in public - the faith each of us believes. Religious liberty sees religion as a positive human good that is healthiest and of greatest benefit when it is most free, not something that is dangerous and in need of management.

From a Christian point of view, religious liberty is founded on the conviction that just as God does not coerce belief, we have no right to coerce belief from one another.  Every human has a duty to acknowledge God who is Creator and Judge.  Because this is duty, there must be a corresponding freedom to choose or reject that duty.  Religious belief may only be proposed to our neighbors' mind and heart, never forcefully imposed against their wills.

From a more secular point of view, religious liberty comes from a conviction that the individual and the core if his or her being, the conscience, ought not to be violated.  Humans must be free to believe what they believe or they are not free at all.

Are there limits to religious freedom?  Certainly.  Human sacrifice, child abuse, and violence are illegitimate religious expressions and are appropriately outlawed.  But rather than begin with what is rightly prohibited, we need to begin with the simple fact that religious liberty is a law written into God's relationship with humans and into the nature of human dignity.  That is why it must be the law of every land.

Liberty has always been a fragile proposition.  History shows that it takes years to grow, but only a generation of neglect to destroy. The religious freedom we enjoy - whether we are people of faith or not - is something for which we should give thanks every day, defend with all that is in us, and work to spread throughout the world.

[HisDaughter]

America's subtle change from religious to secular          
christianpost.com

Nonreligious Americans or "Nones" are no longer a fringe group, researchers state in a new report.

Nones presently make up 15 percent of the total adult U.S. population and the statistic is even higher among young people. Twenty-two percent of 18-29 year olds claim the nonreligious label, a jump from 11 percent in 1990, according to Trinity College's American Nones: Profile of the No Religion Population.

If the younger generation remains nonreligious, researchers point out that the percentage of the U.S. population made up of Nones will continue to rise.

"Will a day come when the Nones are on top? We can't predict for sure," lead researcher Barry Kosmin told USA Today.

Kosmin and Ariela Keysar released statistics earlier this year revealing the rise in the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion over the past two decades. The Nones increased from 8.1 percent of the adult population in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008, findings from their widely reported American Religious Identification Survey showed.

The researchers released a follow-up report on Tuesday to provide a more detailed look at who the Nones are and offer predictions on the growing nonreligious population.

Nones may best be described as skeptics. Twenty-seven percent of Nones believe in a personal God. Hard and soft agnostics make up 35 percent of the None population and atheists account for only 7 percent of Nones. Contrary to what many believe, Nones are not particularly superstitious or partial to New Age beliefs. They are, however, more accepting of human evolution than the general U.S. population.

"American Nones embrace philosophical and theological beliefs that reflect skepticism rather than overt antagonism toward religion," the researchers state.

Compared to the general population, Nones are disproportionately male, younger, and more likely to be Westerners and political independents. But researchers found that they are increasingly similar to the general U.S. population in terms of their marital status, educational attainment, racial/ethnic makeup and income.

When it comes to religious roots, researchers found that the majority of Nones came from religious homes (73 percent) and are first-generation Nones or "(de)converts" to non-religion (66 percent).

Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of Nones are former Catholics and 11 percent are former Christians. Almost a third (32 percent) who are currently Nones were Nones at the age of 12.

Researchers note that among those who reported being Nones at 12 years of age, 41 percent switched to join a religion after the age of 12 and 59 percent remained nonreligious. Among those who identified with a religion at 12 years of age, only 12 percent switched to become a None. The retention rate is higher for the religious but the report points out that Nones are growing at the expense of the religious.

"Mathematically, Nones can lose a larger percentage than the religious and still grow as a percentage of the population because they are starting as a smaller percentage of the population," the report states.

If current trends continue, Nones can make up around a quarter of the American population in two decades. But the report highlights that the annual growth rate has slowed at the beginning of the 21st Century. Whereas 1.3 million adults were joining the ranks of the nonreligious in the 1990s, the number of Americans being added to the None population has halved to 660,000 a year since 2001.

Still, researchers caution that because of the Nones' similar social characteristics to the rest of the population, "the transition from a largely religious population to a more secular population may be so subtle that it can occur under the radar as happened during the 1990s."