\n\tIt is hard to find anyone unashamedly opposed to religious liberty. It is becoming even harder to find that rare person who understands the principle at
\n\tplay and will grant religious freedom to beliefs they find abhorrent and to peoples they find vaguely threatening. Because, truth be told, for most people
\n\treligious freedom is toleration disguised by unconcern and colored by NIMBY (not in my backyard).\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tA generation ago we in the West struggled against the rise of godless Communism. This now almost pass\u00e9 ideology seemed poised to take the world by storm.
\n\tIn the wake of a debilitating Second World War many found it hard to identify with a God who remained silent as all the good young men died and the life of
\n\tvirtue rewarded gave way to chaos. They found it harder still to trust the great powers whose rivalries had precipitated much of the killing. They were
\n\tattracted to Communism and its idealism. They were attracted to the freedoms it offered: freedom for self-determination and freedom from religion.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tBack then this magazine featured many an article documenting the persecution of Christianity and other faiths behind the Iron Curtain, as Winston Churchill
\n\tstyled the emerging divide between Western democracies and the Communist bloc. The persecution was real enough, with many sent to gulags for their faith,
\n\tand others pushed to the margins of the new society and eventually declared mentally unstable for persisting in their beliefs.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tBut even today I think many misapprehend where Communism was coming from in regard to faith. Marx famously condemned religion as the opiate of the people.
\n\tAs a historical commentary on Russia in particular he was quite correct: religion had been used by church and state in concert to control the peasants and
\n\tensure their passivity. But Communism—in theory, at least—was less opposed to faith than it was in competition with it. Communism was in essence the
\n\treligion of humanity\u2019s own efforts to build a secular paradise. It saw traditional religion as misguided and empty. The ideologues who replaced the first
\n\trevolutionary despots like Stalin (who sent many a pastor and priest to a Northern death) were more inclined to educate people away from their
\n\tsuperstitions. They placed much hope in raising a new generation of young Communists who would be unencumbered by the old superstitions. And the old
\n\tpeople: by and large they left them to their religious delusions. They even provided churches for them, and the right to worship quietly as a set-apart
\n\thandicapped class, soon to die off and leave the field to the true believers of Communism. Of course there was persecution, but most of it revolved around
\n\tprotecting the next generation from the taint of religion.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd, curiously, the Communist states invariably had some sort of guarantee of religious freedom in their constitutions or manifestos. They had to, because
\n\tthey believed in human freedom. They just didn\u2019t believe in religion.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThey might have gotten away with it longer if the god of human progress hadn\u2019t failed to deliver. He went belly-up on too many five-year plans and a
\n\tdebilitating arms race.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Protestant Enlightenment thinkers who informed the principles now enshrined in the religious freedom guarantees of the United States Constitution saw
\n\tfaith as a preeminent human right from which all others flowed. They studiously tried to avoid a religious state, which then might have regarded some
\n\tother forms of religion with the same jealous eye that Communism used on religion. They separated the aims of the state from religion and, by defining
\n\treligion as a generic right of all humanity \u201cleveled the playing field \u201cof faith.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWell, as with Communism, so this construct has foundered on the shoals of competing ideologies. During the Cold War we caricatured the debate as between
\n\tgodless Communism and the free Christian West. But of course it was never quite that simple. The debate had more to do with a challenge to the social and
\n\teconomic models of the West. But, like the characters in Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm, freedom, even religious freedom talk, was often used to cover for the bigger
\n\tconflict. That was fine, but it has blinded us a little to our present reality on religious freedom.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFor a long time religious freedom in the United States has flirted with religious entitlement for certain mainline interests and toleration for the rest.
\n\tEvery now and again the veil is drawn aside by events and we see it more clearly. For example: the Hobby Lobby case, whatever else it settled, shows a
\n\treadiness to project into the larger society the preferences of a particular faith view—even as it removes choice for those who would differ. Hobby Lobby
\n\thad the courts legalizing the dynamic, but one can easily go to certain public schools in the so-called Bible belt and find pretty open religious
\n\tinstruction of a type that the local community approves—even as in other, usually urban, areas the teachers are overzealous about reducing any faith talk
\n\tbelow the blather of secular utopia. And the veil really lifted recently in Maryland when in response to non-Christian groups like Muslims demanding that
\n\ttheir holidays be honored too, the school board removed all religious holidays from the calendar. I may have my own favorite religious day, but the state
\n\tshould not be tipping its hand in this regard.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWe are in a period of global religious rivalry. For better or worse, the West (and the U.S. in particular) has made \u201cour way of life\u201d emblematic of a
\n\tprojection of Christian values. So far we have maintained an agreeable tolerance to the dissonance that nonmajority religions have brought to this image.
\n\tPartly this comes from good intentions and partly from prudent policy, because many minorities are too large to offend and the prospect of real religious
\n\tconflict is daunting, I am sure.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tHowever, with the emergence of ISIL, something largely unforeseen may be about to warp us back to cold war assumptions of religious identity.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is on one level a perfectly explainable political phenomenon. The artificial states of the Middle East,
\n\testablished by British and French whim, are in turmoil following the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Arab Spring. What would normally be nationalistic
\n\trevolution has unfortunately been sidetracked into an Islamic jihad to reestablish what has become for them a mythical caliphate, which in reality was the
\n\tincreasingly corrupt and brutal Ottoman Turkish Empire. It perpetrated the genocide of the Armenians and, curiously, stood in the way of Arab
\n\tself-determination.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe real danger of ISIL, as I see it, is its appeal to a whole generation of young men in Western countries: England, Canada, Australia, and the United
\n\tStates. Thousands from your neighborhood and mine have left to make the dream a reality—even if it means cutting off a few heads. But the caliphate has
\n\tglobal aspirations, and already these young men are threatening their own countries with warlike rhetoric. Soon—and sooner if the bombing works—they will
\n\tbe returning with their bloody religious agenda.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThis is now to be the real test for us. Will we have the patience to root them out individually, or will the era of toleration end? Will all minority
\n\treligions find themselves under a cloud? Will all minority religions be suspected of sedition, even as the mainstream girds for civil war? Will there be
\n\tinternment camps, as there were for native-born Japanese in World War II, or will it just be containment by legal distinction—all religions are equal, but
\n\tsome religions are more equal than others?\n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is hard to find anyone unashamedly opposed to religious liberty. It is becoming even harder to find that rare person who understands the principle at play and will grant religious freedom to beliefs they find abhorrent and to peoples they find vaguely threatening. Because, truth be told, for most people religious freedom is toleration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[304],"tags":[136],"class_list":["post-6288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-january-february-2015","tag-january-february-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}