Freedom of belief

Culture

Freedom

Freedom of Belief

20 September 2023

8 min read

Why religious liberty? Love, actually

Claims for religious freedom can be controversial. Nathan Chapman weighs up approaches to accommodating them, not just legally but in the light of love.

Nathan S. Chapman

Nathan S. Chapman is a scholar of constitutional rights, religious liberty, and Christianity and the law. He is a Professor of Law at the University of Georgia.

A montage of people praying with hands held together.

A detail of Norman Rockwell's 1943 Freedom of Worship illustration.

Norman Rockwell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Religious liberty is a cornerstone of liberal democracy. The freedom of religious belief and practice is enshrined in human rights instruments, national constitutions, and legislation. Usually, those rights are uncontroversial. Only when someone claims a right to do something that threatens the rights of others – such as a right to decline to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding – do most observers take notice. Unfortunately, in controversial cases the values underlying both of the competing rights claims tend to get lost in political rhetoric. The arguments against the religious liberty claims may be obvious - concerns about security, or public health, equal treatment of LGBTQIA+ persons - but for many it is harder to see the value of allowing dissenters to peacefully practice their religion.

So, what is the point of religious liberty? Several justifications have deep historical and philosophical roots. Top of the list is reducing conflict: from the view of believers, God demands one thing, society another. Best to let believers have their way so long as they are peaceful about it. Concerns about political conflict were one of the key reasons for the rise of religious tolerance in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

This reason goes only so far, though—only far enough to prevent actual conflict. It does nothing to justify freedom for groups or individuals who pose no threat to political stability, perhaps because they are small, or because they are politically withdrawn. And focusing exclusively on conflict is intellectually unsatisfying; it considers only the effects of religious difference instead of digging into why people adhere to unpopular religious practices. For that, we need an insider's point of view. We need to see why believers have often supported religious liberty not only as a political expedient, but because they have believed religion required religious liberty for everyone.

Consider two Christian statements of rationale for religious liberty that have become canonical among western democracies. The first comes from John Locke:

“true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”

Such “persuasion” must be free, and it must be sincere. Under this view, compelled religious belief is an oxymoron; it doesn’t work, and even if it did, it would do the believer no good--salvation requires voluntary belief. Therefore, says Locke, the “civil” jurisdiction and the “spiritual” jurisdiction are strictly separate, with the civil magistrate having no say over spiritual matters. This argument went a long way toward justifying the government’s toleration of dissenting assemblies, preaching, and worship. But toleration goes only so far. It does not include freedom from any legal duty that is rightly within the domain of the civil magistrate. For instance, a religious pacifist--Christian, Buddhist, or otherwise--who objects to mandatory military service is out of luck.

James Madison, the architect of the U.S. Bill of Rights, was more sympathetic to dissenters. When Virginia tried to make taxpayers pay tithes to their local churches, Madison pointed to the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776):

“Religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”

At first glance, this may seem to restate Locke’s position: true religion requires intellectual freedom. But it goes much further than Locke did. Madison defines religion as the duty one owes to God and “the manner of discharging it.” And, crucially, Madison jettisons Locke’s binary view of “civil” and “spiritual” jurisdiction. Only one jurisdiction matters for determining the scope of religious liberty: God’s. When we have a duty to God, the civil government should get out of the way. Under Madison’s view, religious liberty resolves inconsistent commands of rulers with overlapping jurisdictions in favor of those issued by the higher authority, God.

This view does not satisfy everyone (including some believers). In the first place, it relies on premises that many reject: the notions that there is a knowable God, that people owe duties to God, and that others should respect those (perceived) duties. In the second place, in religiously pluralistic societies, it often seems like each person claims different duties to different gods. Religious liberty facilitates religious diversity, which proliferates inconsistent claims of divine “duty," thereby diluting each of them. At the same time, it makes accommodating every claim more costly, because there are more of them, and they seek accommodations from a wider variety of laws.

To make matters worse, the divine duty rationale implies that religious liberty has no limits. The person who believes that God demands human sacrifice has as much a claim to religious liberty as the one who simply doesn’t want to be made to attend a church service. The rationale also rests on a notion that is increasingly difficult for those in secularized societies to view sympathetically: the idea that the Creator of the universe exacts obedience, and that society should honor the individual's perception of that duty, in exchange for... what, exactly?

A more thoroughly Christian view of religious liberty depends on grasping why believers want to obey God. Locke’s answer was straightforward: fear of eternal damnation. What ought to motivate religious tolerance, Locke insists, are differences about what constitutes “true and saving religion.” Here, Locke was understandably a creature of his times, when western Europe and North America were divided by doctrinal disputes about Christian salvation. Although the promise of eternal life through faith in Christ is the core of Christian doctrine, Scripture surely teaches that those who have already acknowledged Christ as their Savior should obey God not out of fear of damnation, but out of love. Jesus said the greatest commandments were these: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Whatever duties we owe to God and others, from the most sublime form of corporate worship to the most mundane task of changing a diaper, flow from love. Love is the framework, the backdrop, the engine for Christian duty.

Where does such love come from? For Jews and Christians alike, such love is a proper response to God’s love for all of creation, and especially for humankind. Consider the evocative imagery of the ancient songwriter/poet known as the Psalmist:

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.”

For Christians, God’s love is shown most thoroughly in the teaching, life, death, and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. As the Apostle John wrote,

“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”

All too often non-believers seem to appreciate the core of Christian ethics better than many self-proclaimed believers: Christian duty ought to be not merely a private act of personal piety, but an active, self-giving, others-oriented love that mirrors the gentleness, kindness, and sacrifice of Christ.

It turns out that love, actually, is the root of the Christian duty that can sometimes generate conflicts with civil law. The freedom to love God and others according to one's best lights is the most thoroughly Christian basis for religious liberty. "According to one's best lights" is an important qualification. Although Christians agree on the requirements of love in many cases, they have from the beginning disputed whether some conduct is consistent with love. For instance, in the first century, they debated whether it was okay to eat food that had been sacrificed to the idols representing Roman deities. Some thought yes, some no. The Apostle Paul taught those who had no qualms with eating such meat to be understanding of those who did. Christians were to tolerate those with different interpretations of the requirement of love--at least as to matters that were inessential to the gospel.

What difference might love make for religious liberty? Most importantly, it might render claims for religious liberty more legible to those of any (or no) religion who disagree with the claim's morality. Not everyone has experienced fears about eternal salvation, but everyone has experienced a moral duty arising from affection, whether for a favorite sporting club, a family member, or country. Believers regard God as the source of all these good things, and many others besides, so God alone deserves our highest adoration. We may not be able to relate to a God who issues (seemingly) severe commands, but we ought to be able to relate to one who asks for, and merits, our love.

If love is the best motivation for observing a higher duty, we ought to think twice before we condemn those who say their religion will not allow them to follow the law. We ought to presume they have the best of motivations. To be sure, not every one who claims a religious exemption is motivated by love—no one is perfect, and some religiously-motivated conduct (whether in the name of Christianity or another religion) is decidedly unloving. Moreover, believers sometimes disagree about what love requires. In my own country (the U.S.), some religious claimants assert a religious duty to avoid funding contraceptive insurance on the ground that it facilitates abortions, while others claim a religious duty to facilitate an abortion. Those claims are morally inconsistent. If we assume that religious claimants in principle might be motivated by affection for what they take to be the divine, we ought to respect the dilemma that claimants find themselves in--even when the law does not, and should not, exempt their conduct.

Religious love is especially deserving of our respect and, when possible, accommodation. We should affirm our neighbors' attempts to follow the demands of divine love, even when we disagree with their understanding of those demands. And we should respect them even when that understanding cannot be squared with the needs of society in any given case. Love should not always be a trump card--no more than divine fear should be a trump card. Some religious freedom claims will not, and should not, win the day. There is no avoiding drawing lines according to law and public conscience. But love for God offers a richer, and perhaps a more attractive, justification for religious liberty in the first place.

Review

America

Books

Culture

Politics

2 November 2024

8 min read

James Davison Hunter: diagnosing America’s health

A great experiment is depleted, and nihilism slips into the void.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

Riot police stand guard outside a White House fence line.

The White House, June 2020.

Angela N., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was unsettling. Disturbing. And in the months since, it has proven to be a powerful and haunting image, etched in my memory. Thinking about it now has exactly the same chilling effect.

So, it was earlier this year. I was at the cinema with a friend, sitting comfortably and waiting for our movie to start. Our shared love of Sci-Fi had taken us there that afternoon. Not unexpectedly, up pops the reel of trailers. Fast paced, dramatic and with loads of loud music, they’re either enticingly engaging or mercifully short.

On this occasion the climax of the reel saw America engulfed in a modern-day civil war. And the image?

A man is pleading, ‘There’s some kind of misunderstanding here, we’re Americans, okay?’

There’s a pause. The music stops. Silence. It’s a long pause.

Then the camera pans to a man in military fatigues, with sunglasses and a rifle sitting ominously on his hip, cocks his head and responds:

‘Okay … [another pause] what kind of American are you?’

Guns cocked, the trailer explodes back into life.

Our movie was really good. My friend’s company, as usual, was delightfully affable. But the image that remains echoes with that question, ‘what kind of American are you?’

I have to confess, I love America. I studied there. I have good friends there. I gorge on American food. I watch American football with my son, every week, on a pay-per-view live stream with real US TV ad breaks (‘Go, Pack, Go!’). In my personal experience Americans are some of the kindest, most thoughtful and most generous of people.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found the image so troubling. Not that it was some kind of fantastical dystopian depiction, but rather that it portrayed something altogether more plausible. Especially in the light of the ‘storming of the Capitol’ on January 6, 2021, the epidemic of mass shootings and the ongoing violent rhetoric on both sides of the political divide.

How do you square the circle of America? How do kindness and generosity sit alongside gun violence? Is the country on the brink of civil war?

Back in 1991 the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America suggested that cultural controversies would be increasingly significant in American politics. At the time not everyone agreed and some even pushed back against such an overblown prediction. Time, however, has vindicated Hunter’s reading of the runes. The ubiquity of his ‘culture wars’ epithet is the proof of his pudding.

Hunter’s latest offering picks up the story once more. Using the present situation in America as a case study, his reflections ‘bookend’ his earlier thinking. However, Democracy and Solidarity is not an extended commentary exploring the rise of populism and the radical right, or the snowflake, woke elitism of the socialist left. Rather, it seeks to understand why the sentence that opens his preface is true: ‘Democracy in America is in crisis.’

Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!'

For Hunter, understanding what is going on in a culture requires diving deep into the sources it draws on. What forms it? What drives it? All too easily we focus on the observable and what we can see. The stuff that happens and the values, beliefs and institutions that comprise our common life.

But that is to miss the deeper structures of culture that are formed by our tacit assumptions and the latent frameworks of meaning that nestle unseen and form the cultural architecture that surrounds us. The power of culture is demonstrated by how far it is taken for granted’.

In an interview Hunter likened his approach to be the difference between weather forecasts and climate studies. Or, to put it another way, moving from ‘the politics of culture’ to ‘the culture of politics.’

Beginning at the beginning, Hunter goes to the origin story of the nation. Deeply influenced by the principles of the enlightenment the Founding Fathers of the United States set about their task of nation building. Proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the national motto on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), summed up their political objective. The creation of solidarity. The glue that binds a society together.

The genius of the Enlightenment in America was that it facilitated this solidarity. What was created was a ‘Hybrid-Enlightenment’, fusing the insights of French and British intellectuals in a context deeply influenced by the faith of religious dissenters, with the Puritans chief among them. The blending of the secular and faith insights from the Enlightenment was what provided its robust inclusivity and durability. For Hunter, this proved key because:

“In the end, the hybrid-Enlightenment in America was a broad enough and opaque enough amalgamation to encompass substantial diversity and the tensions that diversity implied.”

This opacity enabled different groups to see themselves in the enterprise and gave wider American society an ability to absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions. A commitment to Enlightenment rationality also then provided the tools whereby differences could be ‘worked through’ in reasoned debate. Thus, the culture was a living thing, growing, evolving and developing. All the time maintaining the wider solidarity, the ‘buy-in’ from the different communities and constituencies that comprise America.

Opacity also meant that tensions and contradictions were part and parcel of the endeavour from the start. There may have been a promise of freedom, equality and universal justice for all, yet historically these have been denied to large tracts of the American population. But still the centre held, and solidarity was maintained. As Abraham Lincoln presciently reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, given on March 4 1865, shortly before his assassination and the end of the Civil War:

“[We] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … [Yet] the prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.”

The problem today, as Hunter discerns it, is that the elements of the hybrid-Enlightenment are unravelling. He sees a number of contributory causes to this escalating collapse.

Right at the centre is an amoral, materialistic and individualistic neoliberalism which reduces everything to economics and the market. This is deeply corrosive of community and solidarity.

Then there is the fruit of postmodern scepticism that has filtered down from the intellectuals into the general population. Truth is deconstructed, experts are distrusted and misinformation, disinformation and fake news abound.

Widespread immigration also plays a part. It intensifies American pluralism and brings into the country those who are unfamiliar with the legacy of the hybrid-Enlightenment and for whom the national mythos of America is either strange or incomprehensible. Far from being taken for granted, their worldview does not fit.

The growth of identity politics further complicates the unravelling. Solidarity, rather than being found in the national vision, is achieved by defining ‘us’ over and against ‘them’. It doesn’t foster cohesion, it seeds division. Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!’ As with Nietzsche, this acts as a narcotic against the hurt, an anaesthetic for the pain.

Of course, identity politics has no room for reasoned debate and mutual resolution. All that matters is the outcome of the zero-sum game where the justice of my position is both acknowledged and acted upon, and you lose. Whether that identity falls on the political right or left, it doesn’t matter. Family, sexuality, public education, the news media, the arts, the law, electoral politics, you name the issue the game play is the same.

Solidarity always involves drawing boundaries. Even the hybrid-Enlightenment drew the line between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. Who was a part of us, and who was not. Without boundaries there is no identity. It is just that now, identity politics require the boundaries to be much more tightly drawn. “What kind of American are you?”

In all of this, America’s cultural resources for ‘working through’ these issues have been seriously depleted as the hybrid-Enlightenment has unravelled. Into the void, observes Hunter, a form of cultural nihilism slips in. It is far from being all-pervasive, and he maintains that few Americans are nihilists. Yet as a cultural reality he sees it in the prevailing tendencies towards ‘epistemological failure’, ‘ethical incoherence’ and ‘existential despair’. Then, deriving from these he adds a fourth, ‘political annihilation’ and the will to obliterate everything that obstructs acquiring power by destroying enemies completely.

Does it all seem rather depressing?

Hunter admits that he has neither proposals nor a plan to address the crisis he so eloquently describes and accounts for. Yet he concludes:

“… truth be told, I myself am very hopeful – not because I don’t see the seriousness of the problem and its dangerous implications, but because I believe that the times are full of real opportunity if one has the eyes to see them. Sadly, my eyesight is not very good. … [but] without real images of a better world, without myths of a completion of the past in the future, without a world ordered towards goodness, truth, and beauty … We become something like Nietzsche’s ‘last men’.”

I’m grateful to Hunter. I think I understand my American friends, their country and their present challenges better for his insights. As for the possibility of a civil war, he thinks it’s unlikely as the ‘red and blue’ are too intermingled and economically interdependent across the country. In the meantime, political violence will continue to be a very real threat.

As for the future he hopes for, it requires a paradigm shift to imagine and articulate a new vision of public life. It needs the cultural resources of a reconstituted humanism, drawing on the rich insights available in a genuinely pluralist society. Resources that embrace the faith wisdom of exemplars like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Resources that include a retrieval of the fundamental principle of forgiveness. Without the realism to accept that none of us are perfect, we’ll never be able to live together. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958):

“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

Arendt’s insight is altogether more telling when seen in the light of her experience as a German Jew under the Nazis. And if forgiveness is too high a bar, at the very least we have to somehow learn to let things go and move on.

Hunter is under no illusions, such a paradigm shift remains a long haul away.

But he is hopeful.