WASHINGTON — When the Berlin Wall fell, Church leaders anticipated a new springtime for religious liberty. But this fundamental right is under attack at home and abroad, prompting a slew of scholarly initiatives designed to educate the public and build support for the “first freedom.”
This month, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, an 18-year ecumenical initiative designed to identify common theological beliefs and forge joint public witness, published “In Defense of Religious Freedom” in the March issue of First Things, the influential journal of religion and public affairs.
Meanwhile, academic forums like the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University draw scholars, policymakers and journalists to high-level debates on a range of topics, from President Barack Obama’s contraception mandate to the plight of religious minorities in the wake of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings.
“In the West, certain religious beliefs are now regarded as bigoted. Pastors are under threat, both cultural and legal, for preaching biblical truth. Christian social service and charitable agencies are forced to cease cooperation with the state because they will not bend their work to what Pope Benedict XVI has called the ‘dictatorship of relativism,’” noted the statement “In Defense of Religious Freedom.”
While persecution of religious minorities abroad has received increasing attention, the statement’s authors suggest that intolerance of faith-inspired public activity in the West is more accepted — at least in elite circles. Today, March 9, The New York Times published a full-page advertisement paid for by the Freedom From Religion Foundation that attacked the Catholic Church for a host of social and economic problems across the globe.
“Proponents of human rights, including governments, have begun to define religious freedom down, reducing it to a bare ‘freedom of worship.’ This reduction denies the inherently public character of biblical religion and privatizes the very idea of religious freedom, a view of freedom such as one finds in those repressive states where Christians can pray only so long as they do so behind closed doors.”
“It is no exaggeration to see in these developments a movement to drive religious belief, and especially orthodox Christian religious and moral convictions, out of public life,” the statement charges.
‘Made in the Image of God’
Evangelicals and Catholics Together is an ecumenical fellowship established by the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, the founding editor of First Things, and Charles “Chuck” Colson, the Watergate figure and Christian convert who founded Prison Ministries, a nationwide outreach program to prison inmates.
“In Defense of Religious Freedom” provides relatively brief but powerful reflections on the biblical basis for religious freedom, backed up with doctrinal statements from the Catholic Church and evangelical organizations.
“In Genesis 1:26, the Bible teaches us that only human beings are made ‘in the image of God.’ No one bears this image (imago Dei) more than others; no one has the right to assert that by reason of race, tribe, ethnicity, class or sex his imaging of God is superior to another,” reads the statement.
“In a world of manifest and innumerable inequalities, this radical equality of all men and women before God is the bond that allows us to speak meaningfully of a human family, a human race, in which we share mutual obligations — including the obligation to recognize and honor that sanctuary of conscience in which each person can meet the divine source of life.
“Any power, be it cultural or political, that puts unwarranted impediments in the path of the human quest for truth, which culminates in the human quest for God, is violating the order of creation.”
Indeed, the statement asserts that our first freedom “reflects God’s design for creation and his pattern of redemption. Religious freedom is thus grounded in the character of God, as revealed in the Bible and in the moral structure of the world that we can know through reason. It is precisely as evangelical and Catholic Christians that we affirm, on the authority of the Bible, religious freedom for all, even as we are prepared to defend religious freedom in public life through arguments drawn from reason.”
During the 20th century, some advocates for social justice set aside state-sanctioned violations of religious freedom and conscience rights, ostensibly for the sake of securing an economic or social good. Fidel Castro’s Cuba, for example, has been lauded for improving health-care services, and Castro’s supporters in the West have shrugged off his suppression of basic freedoms.
In contrast, the statement argues that respect for religious freedom is a pre-condition for a “just state,” one that “recognizes the limits of its own capacity: It cannot coerce consciences; it cannot compel belief.”
Two Years in the Making
Work on the statement began two years ago, as members of the ecumenical group became increasingly concerned about the First Amendment threat posed by legal same-sex “marriage” and the weakening of conscience protections for health-care providers.
“Catholics and evangelicals constitute the two largest religious groupings in North America. Though we practice an ecumenism of conviction, not one of accommodation (not just papering over our differences), we realize more and more that we share in common a core spiritual fellowship,” said Timothy George, a primary author of the document who noted that the group has released previous statements on contentious theological issues like the relationship between Scripture and tradition, the nature of justification, and the role of Mary in the Church.
The dean of Beeson Divinity School and a professor of church history and doctrine, George also serves as executive editor for Christianity Today/i>.
Recently, Colson and George wrote an open letter to evangelicals, urging them to join with Catholics against an “unjust mandate that violates our first freedom as Americans.”
“Both evangelicals and Catholics are fully convinced that religious liberty is a pre-political right which must be respected by the state,” noted Father Thomas Guarino of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, who played a major role in forging the statement. “We argue our case on the basis of both biblical and philosophical warrants. For we are convinced that both faith and reason testify to the foundational importance of religious liberty.”
During a March 1 conference on religious freedom at Georgetown’s Berkley Center, Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and a signer of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement, offered a strong, reason-based defense of religious freedom as constitutive to human flourishing.
The conference was organized around a new book, Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right, by Tim Shah, an associate director of the Religious Freedom Project.
Most conference panelists agreed with the broad outlines of George’s defense of conscience rights as an essential human good, but they contested the nature and scope of the threat posed by the contraception mandate, as Austin Ruse reported in a March 9 post on The Catholic Thing website.
Thomas Farr, the director of the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown, noted that “significant moral and political confusion remains about the legal status and civic role of religious liberty in our society — confusion which can only be addressed over the long term by a sustained, concerted, respectful but clear articulation of its meaning and importance in American life.”
Such reasoned debate is likely to be in short supply as scholarly arguments migrate from the academy to the campaign trail and media talk shows. Meanwhile, many voters will shrug off commentary on religious freedom as an unnecessary digression from more central political concerns.
But scholars who have followed the steady effort within the academy to redefine the first freedom as a “freedom to worship,” rather than a broadly protected right to engage in a range of faith-inspired speech and activities, know better.
“Ideas have consequences,” as Richard Weaver famously observed, and public policy will reflect efforts to marginalize religious witness.
“We knew that contemporary, liberal legal scholars were thinking about narrowing our constitutional protections of religious liberty,” said R.R. “Rusty” Reno, the editor in chief of First Things, who helped with the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement. ”It turns out that this tendency now influences the Obama administration, which has adopted a very narrow view of what counts as a religious organization fully protected by the Constitution.”
Register senior editor Joan Frawley Desmond writes from Chevy Chase, Maryland.
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I like the statement religious liberty is a pre-existing element for a just society. If we fail to honor it we fail in justice and our society is doomed to fail. It certainly was the basis for the U.S.A. and I wonder if our enemies who want this nation to fail are targeting this very foundation. Ignorance and indifference open the door to their success. I pray the blinders will come off and people will see what is going on and take action. Yours truly, Mary Jane Martin
This is such a difficult gordian knot. If any person can claim “strong moral justification, or religion” for not allowing a medical procedure, Treatments for obesity, smoking, diabetes, vacinations could be kept out. On the other hand, published and historic prohibitions against birth control in Catholic institutions seems reasonable for their insurance plans. The only difficulty is when you hire people that don’t share that view. Then the challenge is, can every group that hangs the title “catholic” on it get the exception. Catholic car wash, Catholic Radio (EWTN).
This is an intersting quote:”
In a world of manifest and innumerable inequalities, this radical equality of all men and women before God is the bond that allows us to speak meaningfully of a human family…” Since Catholics and most Evangelicals don’t allow women ministers, some have more radical equality than others.
The question of religious liberty or conscience was one of the hottest contested issues fought during Vatican II between liberals and conservatives. Its intent was to give individuals (People of God) their God given right to claim primacy over Church teachings. The debate ended in the now familiar constitution which reads:
“Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law that they have not laid upon themselves but which they must obey. Its voice, ever calling them to love and to do what is good and to avoid what is evil, tells them inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For they have in their hearts a law inscribed by God. Their dignity lies in observing this law, and by it they will be judged . . . By conscience that law is made known in a wonderful that is fulfilled in love for God and for one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined to others in the search for truth and for the right solution to so many moral problems that arise both in the lives of individuals and in social relationships.” - Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World
Today Traditional Catholics are again challenging this ruling from Vatican II especially in such areas as abortion, condoms, homosexuality, contraception, treatment of HIV/aids. In some extreme cases some Traditional bishops have threatened or applied sanctions on laity who challenged Church teachings by applying such measures as excommunication or access to communion.
We need to stop referring to the self-proclaimed “enlightened” groups and organizations who are bigoted against Christians as “elite”. No, they are not enlightened or elite. They are intolerant, unthinking, unreasonable bigots. And we should name them as such….certainly not as elites.
These groups, political arms, think tanks and organizations are not interested in reason or tolerance, but in muzzling those who have a different, more reasonable view of the Truth.
The proof - these groups are not inclined, or are not capable of entering into and sustaining an ongoing conversation about morality, truth, religion/faith or even adhering to the most basic principles of classical logic. Instead they are ALWAYS inclined to flit from accusation to accusation, to make unreasoned comparisons and to walk away from any conversation wagging their tongues about how ignorant we are.
We should work to gain our governance back, but it seems the best thing we can do for those who are so intolerant is ignore the accusations, smile and pray for them. But lets name them for what they are.
The question of religious liberty was one of the hottest contested issues fought during Vatican II between liberals and conservatives. Its intent was to give individuals (People of God) their God given right to claim primacy over Church teachings. The debate ended in the now familiar constitution which reads:
“Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law that they have not laid upon themselves but which they must obey. Its voice, ever calling them to love and to do what is good and to avoid what is evil, tells them inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For they have in their hearts a law inscribed by God. Their dignity lies in observing this law, and by it they will be judged . . . By conscience that law is made known in a wonderful that is fulfilled in love for God and for one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined to others in the search for truth and for the right solution to so many moral problems that arise both in the lives of individuals and in social relationships.” - Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World
Today Traditional Catholics (including George Weigel) are again challenging this ruling from Vatican II especially in such areas as abortion, the use of condoms, homosexuality, contraception, treatment of HIV/aids. In some extreme cases some Traditional bishops have threatened or applied sanctions on laity who challenged Church teachings by applying such measures as excommunication or access to communion.
The question of religious liberty was one of the hottest contested issues fought during Vatican II between liberals and conservatives. Its intent was to give individuals (People of God) their God given right to claim primacy over Church teachings. The debate ended in the now familiar constitution which reads:
“Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law that they have not laid upon themselves but which they must obey. Its voice, ever calling them to love and to do what is good and to avoid what is evil, tells them inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For they have in their hearts a law inscribed by God. Their dignity lies in observing this law, and by it they will be judged . . . By conscience that law is made known in a wonderful that is fulfilled in love for God and for one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined to others in the search for truth and for the right solution to so many moral problems that arise both in the lives of individuals and in social relationships.” - Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World
Today Traditional Catholics are again challenging this ruling from Vatican II especially in such areas as abortion, the use of condoms, homosexuality, contraception, treatment of HIV/aids. In some extreme cases some Traditional bishops have threatened or applied sanctions on laity who challenged Church teachings by applying such measures as excommunication or access to communion.
Trebert,
There was never such a primacy of subjective over objective. The constitution on the modern world, refers to the natural law written in our hearts, which we discover through reason, and not feeling.
Post V2 theology is very much rooted in personalism. Move over from the 60s, they do not apply today. Study where the church is at today.
Start with Love and Responsibility
http://www.catholicculture.com/jp2_on_l&r.html
And then come join the conversation on the personalist project.
http://www.thepersonalistproject.org/
A most helpful Review and a very timely, penetrating title-question—Do WE (value Religious Freedom)?
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Because numerous contracepting Catholics are not eager to chat with fellow Catholics on that rather private topic where some guilt can linger, and because lawsuit approaches against the HHS anti-conscience mandate can easily be delayed past the Nov. 6 election, it is VITAL to have during the remaining primaries and 2012 campaigns a simple, valid, powerful gut-level (not gutter-level) response to what President Obama is doing to us, namely, treating Christians as if we were Lower Animals with no consciences!!
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There is no way that President Obama can escape the penetrating charge in the “Lower Animals analogy”, given that conscience is our most sacred gift from God, after life itself. Indeed, where we spend Eternity depends on how we react to our conscience! Consider, for clergy who mention contraception while reading a letter from a local bishop calling for lay action to defend Religious Liberty, that MANY departing Mass will be eager to get to their cars lest they be drawn into uncomfortable discussion. And that is *Bad News* for hope for rescuing Religious Liberty via an historic election that will bring severe consequences against our families for many years to come—unless we wake up now and *fight back intelligently*!
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In strong contrast, if clergy and respected lay parishioners cite the Lower Animals analogy, it will be applauded and can be openly discussed even by those contracepting because of its clarity, truth and avoidance of the touchy topic, hence giving rise to MANY MORE open voices against what this President is doing to good people and to Christ’s Church. Such a vivid analogy exposes just how far this President is willing to go—for indeed conscience IS sacred. Think of what he’ll dare in a second term!
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A subsequent comment will describe a unique pilot-program-tested way that ordinary Catholic laity can easily, inexpensively and successfully implement in their own parishes to press for Religious Liberty and for conscience-protection all across America – in unison and well before November 6, all the while remaining magisterium-faithful and respectful and thankful for the resources via the USCCB and other good Church-sources needed in such a national effort. Truly, what the President has done constitutes an unintended GIFT which we need to unwrap and use for the common good to secure brighter futures for our families and continuance of the American Republic.
The question of Religious Liberty is grounded in the inherent Right of all persons to come to know, Love, and serve The True God, The Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. There is no inherent Right to worship false idols.
The NY Times ad comes across either as an excuse to spew bigoted hate speech and ridicule towards the Catholic Church, or as a sign of desperation and instability in FFRF:
Parody translation of the FFRF ad at:
http://sytereitz.com/2012/03/translation-of-ffrf-quit-the-catholic-church-nytimes-ad-or-its-not-easy-being-free-from-religion/
My comment above (Mar 11 @ 10:39 Pm, EST) explains the importance of providing a “valid, powerful gut-level (not gutter-level) response to what President Obama’s HHS mandate is doing to us, namely, *treating Christians as if we were Lower Animals with no consciences.” Add to that Dr. Janet Smith’s article in which she seeks that “All of us need to do our part with our families, friends and co-workers. Make no mistake about it: This is an epic battle, and we need to fight it skirmish by skirmish.”
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http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/religious-liberty-blood-transfusions-cigarettes-and-contraception
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The “all of us” includes the less familiar case of Catholic parishioners *already planted everywhere across America* and very capable of organizing themselves, quite quickly, too, since there is a proven model like the pilot program outlined below showing how a few lay leaders can readily convey crucial messages on a very threatening topic to seated-after-Mass fellow parishioners. Given that the topic requires at least a mention of contraception, laity-speaking-to-laity is best because preaching and teaching on contraception are not feasible objectives at this point. Laity are also most influential when expressing gut-level truth about our being treated like Lower Animals. It will take such “gut-level words” to get above campaign cacophony and to have an irrefutable position enabling the many who do use contraception to openly join in the epic battle more comfortably. Low lay participation will lose this election!
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The current attack on Christ’s Church, on conscience and on Religious Liberty is more than enough to rally laity around the whole country. But it can’t be done without the cooperation of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB and other bishops who are needed to allow good lay participation from within their parishes, under their guidance. Cardinal Dolan will be asked to help make it possible for we surely ought not put all our eggs in the basket of the Courts in these times, even though we have a good case. Asking the laity to contact their representatives, though good and necessary, falls far short of what will be needed in this heated 2012 campaign summer and November election. Not to use easily available defenses and influences before the election, as described below is to risk freedom, itself, in areas beyond Religion.
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Since we have about 8 months to Election Day, the pilot program below is easily adapted within a month’s time over all Catholic parishes in America because the methodology is not at all complicated and no parish needs to depend on any other in order to begin to prepare. Important for preparing the presentations, there is already ample information on the topic of Religious Liberty and conscience, from USCCB and similar documents. It is far less complex than the range of problems of the poor, the reason we conducted our pilot-program.
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It started as “Witnessing With the Poor” (WWP) in upstate NY, a pilot-program made successful by a small group of caring, normal-intelligence parishioners responding to Vatican II’s charge to the laity to “improve the temporal order”. Our group showed that individual parishes are easily able to assist a few of their own parishioners to deliver, at, say, monthly-to-six-week intervals, 5-minute presentations immediately after weekend Masses. Individualized presentations reflect researched information on *specific* problem-areas for the poor (local, state or national) with suggested action that congregants can pursue to alleviate the problem, often requiring interaction with their legislators. Over three years the congregation was still positive about the pilot.
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Though “subsidiarity” was not yet in my vocabulary, our small group was de facto demonstrating a form of “subsidiarity” by helping, especially, local poor—thus also acting out “solidarity” while all efforts sought the “common good”—that third principle hallmarking a healthy society. Though outside speakers cannot cover a whole nation of Catholic parishes, there are always a few parishioners capable of presenting adequately. So, “going national” to defend Religious Liberty and conscience is a no-brainer! There is nothing to fear. We solved an initial major problem by using *pairs* to share the presentations; that strategy completely overcame “the common fear of public speaking”. Practice of their talk before a small audience of helpful parish “critics” gave polish and confidence “for the real thing”.
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Problems of the poor are much more complex and diverse than is the matter of correct Catholic teaching on Conscience and Religious Liberty. What I seek from our bishops is their approval and at least some assistance. Ora et Labora is my way of life. It falls on both laity and American Bishops to mutually assist one another in the rescue of our straying nation.
Parishioners reaching out to other parishioners has always been the way in the Body of Christ. A great way to start the conversation of our religious liberty being threatened, and then in time progressing to conversations on the immorality of birth control, sterilizations, and abortion. I say lets give it a try. Thanks Buill Folger!
Personally, “Freedom of Religion” is my favorite 1st Amendment right. For those interested, I stumbled onto a great statement on religious freedom from the LDS Church right here.
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