The Globe & Mail‘s plagiarism-happy columnist Margaret Wente has called us, this weekend, to reflect on the importance of religious freedom as the most important front in the battle for greater human freedom in the 21st century. Religious persecution is on the rise — mostly, she says, because of the expansion of Christian minorities in Muslim countries. So the Harper regime’s Office of Religious Freedom may not be the most effective way of tackling the problem, but it is a problem we have to talk about, and hopefully do something about. Thus saith Wente.
One of the last times I waded into the fray on religion, I was denounced as a racist missionary, so I won’t say I’m not a little nervous writing this, but I’m also not going to back down from a good fight. Here’s the first problem: we can’t talk about the importance of “religious freedom” until we understand what we mean by freedom. I’m not sure Wente has put much thought into this. Freedom from what, exactly? Or more to the point, for what?
First of all, let’s cut out the crap about whether or not “religious persecution” equals “Christian persecution.” People like Wente, and our government, assert that Christians are the main victims of religious persecution around the world today. Leftist critiques of the new Religious Freedom Office say that it is a front group to advance Christian prejudice. There’s a little truth to both positions, and a lot of exaggeration. Whatever may or may not be going on in the world, the Canadian Office of Religious Freedom is not going to make one bit of difference. It’s going to be a small, underfunded government bureau producing annual reports on religious freedom, probably cribbing the lion’s share of the content from existing American sources.
Second, we need to think seriously about what we mean by “religious freedom.” The reason is because we have to be honest with ourselves, and with others, about the fact that what we mean by “religious freedom” is that many groups of people actually will not have the freedom to practice their religion. We aren’t in the Cold War anymore, Wente hasn’t brought up North Korea or anything of that ilk, and so what she is actually talking about is taking away some people’s religious freedom.
Now, most of us would agree that this is a good thing. Conservative Muslims should not be free to execute Christian converts. Evangelical Christians and Jews should not be free to starve Palestinians to death because they are interlopers walking on holy ground. (Somehow Wente manages to steer clear of mentioning that this battle is a religious one, too.) Mayans should not be free to offer human sacrifices. The coastal First Nations should not be free to own slaves. And so on. When we talk about “religious freedom,” just like most other liberal freedoms, we mean freedom from something, not freedom to do something: freedom to believe whatever you want, but not to force those beliefs on anybody else.
Almost everyone in Canada today is basically liberal, politically speaking, and so sees very little wrong with this perspective. But we should realize that this statement is profoundly at odds with many religions, including those variants of Christianity which dominated both in Europe and in North America until relatively recently. Even many of those evangelical groups which have settled into an uncomfortable truce with the forces of tolerance merely believe they are displacing the true violence from the human present to the divine future, when God will roast the naysayers in everlasting flames. Make no mistake: thinking that those who do not believe in your God are going to burn in hell is still an affront to religious freedom, even if it is a less violent and shocking one than taking a personal hand in the immolation of nonbelievers in the here and now. You obviously don’t believe that people are free to believe whatever they want about God, if you think that God is going to subject them to eternal punishment for believing the wrong thing.
Which brings me to my main point: there are very few religions that can genuinely accommodate the concept of religious freedom. Religious peoples can come to a point where they agree not to kill each other, and they should definitely be encouraged to reach such truces on every possible occasion. It has to be recognized that, with the brief exception of the Communist era of the 20th century (and arguably not even that, if you agree with the late Christopher Hitchens that the personality cults of men such as Josef Stalin and Kim Jong-Il were so extreme as to be religions themselves), the main threat to religious freedom comes from religion itself.
And rightly so. The gods adhered to by many of the ancient faiths are very exclusive, jealous, and violent beings. Much of the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible, for instance, is a horrifically gory sequence of religious violence, in which God initially plays a leading role (tearing down the Tower of Babel to discourage humans from cooperationg, flooding the Earth to murder everyone except Noah’s immediate family, slaughtering every first-born son in Egypt to punish the Pharaoh for his intransigence) but gradually steps out of the fray, leaving his Jewish acolytes to pick up the sword in his place. Christians and Muslims, in their turn, have also been capable of appalling violence.
Again, then, freedom of religions leaves us with an essential paradox. Freedom of speech means allowing anybody to speak their mind at any time. Freedom of assembly means allowing peaceful gatherings to form regardless of their purpose. But freedom of religion explicitly does not mean allowing anybody to practice any religious faith they happen to hold.
There are two ways out of this problem. The first is to invent for ourselves a sort of liberal civil religion which states that while we can believe anything we want in our private lives, we will not accept the punishment of others for holding different religious beliefs from our own — neither punishment from the government, nor punishment from civil society, nor punishment from God himself. (Lest you think the latter is irrelevant, remember that after almost every major disaster, a high-profile Christian preacher somewhere takes it upon himself to announce that the cataclysm, be it HIV or the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, was sent from God as a warning against human sin.) There is nothing wrong with holding such a faith, although it does require recognizing that those who hold it are essentially fashioning a God in their own image, a God willing to play by the rules of modern liberalism.
It is this civil religion which has made the modern West what it is. A lot of people find solace in a vaguely defined belief that there is some divine being out there, watching over them in unseen and mysterious ways. A smaller but generally more influential corps of philosophers, politicians, and journalists like Lawrence Solomon, Wente’s pro-religion compatriot at the National Post, believe that this religion must be maintained because of the social, economic, and political solidarity it enables, even if we who are enlightened recognize that the core creeds are almost certainly false. These people have read Plato’s Republic and taken the idea of the “noble fiction” to heart.
The second way is to take the bull by the horns and point out that the only way to permanently eliminate religious persecution is to persuade people to abandon religion entirely. Not force them to, I stress. That would be a violation of religious freedom, but it is not, interestingly, the sort of violation of religious freedom that is bothering Margaret Wente today.
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate
One of the last times I waded into the fray on religion, I was denounced as a racist missionary, so I won’t say I’m not a little nervous writing this, but I’m also not going to back down from a good fight. Here’s the first problem: we can’t talk about the importance of “religious freedom” until we understand what we mean by freedom. I’m not sure Wente has put much thought into this. Freedom from what, exactly? Or more to the point, for what?
First of all, let’s cut out the crap about whether or not “religious persecution” equals “Christian persecution.” People like Wente, and our government, assert that Christians are the main victims of religious persecution around the world today. Leftist critiques of the new Religious Freedom Office say that it is a front group to advance Christian prejudice. There’s a little truth to both positions, and a lot of exaggeration. Whatever may or may not be going on in the world, the Canadian Office of Religious Freedom is not going to make one bit of difference. It’s going to be a small, underfunded government bureau producing annual reports on religious freedom, probably cribbing the lion’s share of the content from existing American sources.
Second, we need to think seriously about what we mean by “religious freedom.” The reason is because we have to be honest with ourselves, and with others, about the fact that what we mean by “religious freedom” is that many groups of people actually will not have the freedom to practice their religion. We aren’t in the Cold War anymore, Wente hasn’t brought up North Korea or anything of that ilk, and so what she is actually talking about is taking away some people’s religious freedom.
Now, most of us would agree that this is a good thing. Conservative Muslims should not be free to execute Christian converts. Evangelical Christians and Jews should not be free to starve Palestinians to death because they are interlopers walking on holy ground. (Somehow Wente manages to steer clear of mentioning that this battle is a religious one, too.) Mayans should not be free to offer human sacrifices. The coastal First Nations should not be free to own slaves. And so on. When we talk about “religious freedom,” just like most other liberal freedoms, we mean freedom from something, not freedom to do something: freedom to believe whatever you want, but not to force those beliefs on anybody else.
Almost everyone in Canada today is basically liberal, politically speaking, and so sees very little wrong with this perspective. But we should realize that this statement is profoundly at odds with many religions, including those variants of Christianity which dominated both in Europe and in North America until relatively recently. Even many of those evangelical groups which have settled into an uncomfortable truce with the forces of tolerance merely believe they are displacing the true violence from the human present to the divine future, when God will roast the naysayers in everlasting flames. Make no mistake: thinking that those who do not believe in your God are going to burn in hell is still an affront to religious freedom, even if it is a less violent and shocking one than taking a personal hand in the immolation of nonbelievers in the here and now. You obviously don’t believe that people are free to believe whatever they want about God, if you think that God is going to subject them to eternal punishment for believing the wrong thing.
Which brings me to my main point: there are very few religions that can genuinely accommodate the concept of religious freedom. Religious peoples can come to a point where they agree not to kill each other, and they should definitely be encouraged to reach such truces on every possible occasion. It has to be recognized that, with the brief exception of the Communist era of the 20th century (and arguably not even that, if you agree with the late Christopher Hitchens that the personality cults of men such as Josef Stalin and Kim Jong-Il were so extreme as to be religions themselves), the main threat to religious freedom comes from religion itself.
And rightly so. The gods adhered to by many of the ancient faiths are very exclusive, jealous, and violent beings. Much of the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible, for instance, is a horrifically gory sequence of religious violence, in which God initially plays a leading role (tearing down the Tower of Babel to discourage humans from cooperationg, flooding the Earth to murder everyone except Noah’s immediate family, slaughtering every first-born son in Egypt to punish the Pharaoh for his intransigence) but gradually steps out of the fray, leaving his Jewish acolytes to pick up the sword in his place. Christians and Muslims, in their turn, have also been capable of appalling violence.
Again, then, freedom of religions leaves us with an essential paradox. Freedom of speech means allowing anybody to speak their mind at any time. Freedom of assembly means allowing peaceful gatherings to form regardless of their purpose. But freedom of religion explicitly does not mean allowing anybody to practice any religious faith they happen to hold.
There are two ways out of this problem. The first is to invent for ourselves a sort of liberal civil religion which states that while we can believe anything we want in our private lives, we will not accept the punishment of others for holding different religious beliefs from our own — neither punishment from the government, nor punishment from civil society, nor punishment from God himself. (Lest you think the latter is irrelevant, remember that after almost every major disaster, a high-profile Christian preacher somewhere takes it upon himself to announce that the cataclysm, be it HIV or the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, was sent from God as a warning against human sin.) There is nothing wrong with holding such a faith, although it does require recognizing that those who hold it are essentially fashioning a God in their own image, a God willing to play by the rules of modern liberalism.
It is this civil religion which has made the modern West what it is. A lot of people find solace in a vaguely defined belief that there is some divine being out there, watching over them in unseen and mysterious ways. A smaller but generally more influential corps of philosophers, politicians, and journalists like Lawrence Solomon, Wente’s pro-religion compatriot at the National Post, believe that this religion must be maintained because of the social, economic, and political solidarity it enables, even if we who are enlightened recognize that the core creeds are almost certainly false. These people have read Plato’s Republic and taken the idea of the “noble fiction” to heart.
The second way is to take the bull by the horns and point out that the only way to permanently eliminate religious persecution is to persuade people to abandon religion entirely. Not force them to, I stress. That would be a violation of religious freedom, but it is not, interestingly, the sort of violation of religious freedom that is bothering Margaret Wente today.
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate
No comments:
Post a Comment