Natural Law and Religious Freedom

The Role of Moral First Things in Grounding and Protecting the First Freedom

J. Daryl Charles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317089735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ética y religión

Every successive generation finds fresh reasons for the study of natural law. Current interest in the natural law may well be due to a pervasive moral pessimism in the Western cultural context and wider contemporary geopolitical challenges. Those geopolitical challenges result from two significant and worrisome global developments – unprecedented violent persecution of religious minorities on several continents and a growing climate of secular hostility toward religious faith in Western societies. Natural Law and Religious Freedom aims to address what is relatively absent from the literature by demonstrating the importance of natural law ethics in both establishing and preserving basic human rights, of which religious freedom has pride of place.

Probing contemporary challenges to natural law thinking that are both internal and external to religious faith, and examining the character and constitution of natural law ethics, Natural Law and Religious Freedom will be of interest to theologians, ethicists and philosophers as well as policy analysts, politicians and activists who are concerned to anchor religious freedom and human rights policy considerations in an enduring way.

1 Introduction – religious freedom as the “first freedom”

What it is and why it matters

That some of the natural rights of mankind are unalienable, and subject to no control but that of the Deity. Such are the sacred rights of conscience. Which in a state of nature, and of civil society, are exactly the same. They can neither be parted with nor controlled, by any human authority whatever.

—Samuel Stillman¹

There are other branches of knowledge, which will be of great advantage to men in power. It is, at least, desirable that they should have a tolerable acquaintance with natural law – that they understand the natural rights of men, which are the same, under every species of government, and do not owe their origin to the social compact. Such, in a peculiar manner, are the sacred rights of conscience.

—Chandler Robbins²

Truth … has nothing to fear from conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate … Truth and reason are eternal. They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail.

—Thomas Jefferson³

The assault on religious freedom

Religious freedom is in trouble. Serious trouble. The very freedom to respond to ultimate convictions – that is, to affirm what is true, definitive, and binding for all time – is under assault, and it is under assault both at home and abroad. Perhaps we have token familiarity with threats to human rights, religious freedom and practice, and public expression of religious beliefs around the world, particularly in communist police states and Islamic nations. However, terrorism and violence will be reported by the broadcast and print media only insofar as they are political events, not as they bear on religious minorities and religious freedom. Yet the truth is, rarely does a week go by without intimidation and violence against religious minorities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It is a world “marked by persecution, discrimination, terrible acts of violence and religious intolerance.”⁴

At present, confessing Christians are the religious group suffering the most severely from persecution on account of their faith, as serious research today indicates and Benedict XVI noted with particular poignancy in 2011:

It is painful to think that in some areas of the world it is impossible to profess one’s religion freely except at the risk of life and personal liberty … Many Christians experience daily affronts and often live in fear because of their pursuit of truth, their faith in Jesus Christ and their heartfelt plea for respect for religious freedom. This situation is unacceptable, since it represents an insult to God and to human dignity; furthermore, it is a threat to security and peace, and an obstacle to the achievement of authentic and integral human development.⁵

No stranger to inter-religious dialogue, Benedict enunciates what is integral to “human development” and flourishing – namely, the right to religious freedom. The absence of religious freedom, he stresses,

Puts the brakes on authentic development and impedes the evolution of peoples towards greater socio-economic and spiritual well-being. This applies especially to terrorism motivated by [religious] fundamentalism, which generates grief, destruction and death, obstructs dialogue between nations [,] and diverts extensive resources from their peaceful and civil uses.⁶

Benedict is not inattentive, however, to the fact that religious fundamentalism worldwide is not the only challenge to religious freedom. He notes as well that just as religious fanaticism, in particular global contexts, impedes the exercise of the right to religious freedom,

so too the deliberate promotion of religious indifference or practical atheism on the part of many countries obstructs the requirements for the development of peoples, depriving them of spiritual and human resources. God isthe guarantor of man’s true development, inasmuch as, having created him in his image, he also establishes the transcendent dignity of men and women and feeds their innate yearning to “be more.” Man is not a lost atom in a random universe …: he is God’s creature, whom God chose to endow with an immortal soul and whom he has always loved. If man were merely the fruit of either chance or necessity, or if he had to lower his aspirations to the limited horizon of the world in which he lives, if all reality were merely history and culture, and man did not possess a nature destined to transcend itself in a supernatural life, then one could speak of growth, or evolution, but not development.⁷

When the state promotes, teaches, or imposes forms of “practical atheism,” Benedict concludes, “it deprives its citizens of the moral and spiritual strength that is indispensable for attaining integral human development and it impedes them from moving forward with renewed dynamism as they strive to offer a more generous human response to divine love.”⁸ Why is that? And how?

In the “Benedictine” spirit, then, both contexts that threaten religious freedom – religious fanaticism and “practical atheism” – deserve examination, insofar as religious fundamentalism and secular fundamentalism both area rejection of principled pluralism. Both are an impediment to human flourishing.⁹

Challenges in the global context

Converts from Islam to Christianity, in our day, are subject routinely to surveillance, arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment, torture, destruction of property, displacement, and death. In the words of one authority on religious persecution, “ ‘Harassment’ is much too weak a word” to describe what converts suffer in Middle Eastern countries.¹⁰ It is surely worth noting that for the last 14 centuries, execution has been the prescribed penalty for “apostasy” from Islam. While not all Muslim scholars promote this understanding, most would advocate the death penalty, citing authoritative texts and teachings; in both the Sunni and Shiite schools of Shari’a, the death penalty is prescribed for leaving Islam. In Iran, murdering an apostate falls into the same category as the murder of an adulterer, the murder of a non-Muslim, the murder of a child or grandchild by the father or grandfather, and the murder of a mentally handicapped person. The perpetrator faces no retribution, though he may be required by the courts only to pay “blood money.”¹¹ In Saudi Arabia, religious freedom is non-existent, since all citizens must be Muslim. There the Quran, Shari’a, and the religious traditions of the Prophet Muhammed form the foundation of the nation’s laws and constitution; hence, there is no separation of “church and state.” Moreover, even for non-Muslims, any public practice of religion other than the officially sanctioned version of Islam is categorically forbidden. These representative discriminatory norms, of course, are wholly aside from terrorist attacks in public venues around the world spawned by militant Islamists who draw inspiration from their own sacred texts.¹² In any event, the “Arab Spring” has not led to any sort of “springtime” of religious freedom in the Islamic heartland and beyond, nor can we expect it to do so in the future.¹³ Rather, in 2016, by all accounts, it is more accurate to speak of an “Islamic Winter.”

In addition to apostasy, consider the centrality in Islam of “blasphemy,” which until two decades ago was not taken seriously by most people in the West. Today that has radically changed. As Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg speech on reason and violence in religion well illustrated, any perceived insult to the religion of Islam is considered blasphemous, and hence, worthy of recrimination. Thus religious freedom scholar Paul Marshall:

Twenty years ago, few in the West were concerned with blasphemy restrictions, which, while sometimes still on the statute books, were usually thought to be only of historical interest. That began to change when in 1989 the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then head of Iran’s government, declared that it was the duty of every Muslim to kill Britain-based writer Salman Rushdie on the grounds that his novel The Satanic Verses was deemed blasphemous. Khomeini’s edict triggered a wave of violence. Rushdie himself has survived but only at the cost of a hidden and protected life. Others connected with the book were not so fortunate. The novel’s Japanese translator was assassinated, its Italian translator was stabbed, its Norwegian publisher was shot, thirty-five guests at a Turkish hotel hosting its Turkish publisher were burned to death in an arson attack. Khomeini’s fatwa also inaugurated a worldwide movement to export blasphemy rules already suppressing religious minorities and Muslim dissenters in Muslim majority countries.¹⁴

The nagging question is why the unspeakable abuse and killing of religious minorities doesn’t arouse the same horror and intense public fascination as the celebrated “atrocities” that unfolded at Abu Graib, for instance, or at Guantanamo Bay.¹⁵ Indeed, why? Few seem motivated to ask. Something is very wrong with this picture; at the very least, it represents a moral inversion – rather, a moral perversion – that calls for a response. Where is our concern for those who are truly suffering?¹⁶

While a variety of religious groups have demonstrated concern, few policy organizations have performed the service of charting religious persecution worldwide as it exists in our day.¹⁷ This is a persecution that includes, but is not limited to

• Christians and minority religious groups in communist police-states;
• Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East, where religious freedom is sharply curtailed – when not overtly denied – due to the strictures of Islamic Shari’a law;
• religious minorities in Russia and in former Soviet satellite states of Central Asia;
• Hindu extremism in India;
• religious groups – particularly, the house-church movement – in China;
• Muslim-Christian tensions and violence in significant parts of Africa; and
• disappearance of the Orthodox Church in Syria and Iraq due to genocidal tendencies.

This brief survey and, specifically, the allusion to communist police-states in existence today cannot begin to describe the darkness that characterizes North Korea. There religious faith of any sort conflicts with required worship of the dictator and “supreme leader” (since 2011, Kim Jong-un, son of Kim Jong-il) and hence can result in banishment to prison camps, disappearance, and death. The document North Korea: A Case to Answer – A Call to Act, published in 2007 by Christian Solidarity Worldwide,¹⁸ represents the culmination of seven years of research and draws heavily on interviews and consultations with over 80 North Korean defectors. It examines the nature of political repression in the nation, chronicles the brutal oppression of religious believers, and states the urgent need to respond to mass killings, arbitrary torture, and crimes against humanity occurring among religious believers in North Korea. According to one researcher of religion in North Korea who is cited in this document, “All religiously active people have disappeared as a result of the central party’s intensive guidance program,” with hundreds of thousands of people having been either banished to prison camps or executed if they did not recant their faith.¹⁹ Based on the evidence, this has been the unspeakably tragic plight of many millions of North Koreans since the 1950s.

A number of important efforts have been made in the last decade to document the range of religious freedom and persecution of religious minorities worldwide. For example, the 2011 volume, The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the 21st Century, authored by...