A poison pill for religious liberty

How should we defend religious freedom on the international stage? What are its greatest threats? Is it possible that some arguments for religious freedom are actually a poison pill used by its detractors?

This is a crucial issue raised by a gathering this week of 1,000 religious freedom experts and activists for the annual International Religious Freedom Summit (IRF Summit) in Washington, D.C. The summit’s Charter declares, “That every government, every religious community, and every political and civil society organization in the world should strive toward the goal of achieving freedom of religion and conscience, for everyone, everywhere—protected in law and valued by culture.”

As former State Department official Tom Farr has written, religious freedom includes the rights of individuals and communities to fully live out their faith commitments, not just in private worship, but in all aspects of their lives. In the words of the charter, this means pursuing “the goods natural to religious communities, such as building houses of worship, training clergy, establishing religious schools” and the like. It means that as religious people “participate in civic life,” they have the “right to convey their religious views to the general public on issues of the common good, such as justice, peace, equality, and freedom.”

It seems clear, then, that the fundamental source of religious freedom must comprehensively defend the wellsprings of religious communities and their longstanding faith traditions. In other words, for religious freedom to be fully realized for the majority and the minority in any given country, it must be rooted in the scriptural, theological, and cultural convictions of that faith tradition. It then should grow up from there based on a Golden Rule-sort of ethic of respect for one’s neighbors based on their God-given human dignity and a skepticism that matters of faith can be coerced by government power.

This approach accords with the Christian understanding, which undergirds the moral worldview of our Constitution and Bill of Rights: that it is not the place of government to coerce on matters of religious conviction and that limited government and a free society will be diverse.

When we look around the world, therefore, it seems clear that we need to be looking for arguments in diverse faith communities to provide, from the ground up, the basis for religious freedom for everyone. One scholar has called such an approach “covenantal pluralism, a constitutional order of equal rights and responsibilities … and a culture of reciprocal [individual and community] commitment to engaging, respecting, and protecting the other.”

In practice, this means that our world needs more of the tolerance that we once saw in historic India as opposed to the violence of some of today’s Hindu nationalists. The same holds true for the relatively peaceful pluralism that parts of Muslim-majority Indonesia experienced in contrast to the repression of non-Muslims in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

However, there is another approach emanating from the West that actually may be a poison pill to authentic religious freedom. This view is two-fold. First, it holds that human rights are a creation of law. Elites have created a human rights paradigm in international law, largely due to the depredations and destruction of World War II. These “rights” are a human creation, not rooted in the natural law that comes from the way God structured the human person and our reality.

Second, the way to expand human rights, in this view, is to impose them from the secular West through a system of lawfare—op-eds, speeches, journal articles—and then pressure through international institutions such as the World Health Organization, United Nations, and strings attached to humanitarian funding.

This new approach is a poison pill because the elitist, top-down conception of rights in the modern era must, necessarily, advance the progressive revolution in redefining the human person, especially the framing of the self in sexualized terms. In practice this means that the “discovery” of new rights, such as LGBTQ “rights” and the so-called right to abortion, are being reshaped as the new struggle for religious freedom. Global elites seek to use the platforms designed to champion religious freedom to bludgeon traditionally religious faith communities’ resistance to abortion-on-demand, the understanding of male and female distinctiveness, and other classic theological concepts.

Is the global human rights movement going to be hijacked by those who pretend that they seek religious freedom by attacking the fundamental convictions of most religious people? To stop this we must be vigilant in protecting a more humble approach to religious liberty that draws on the moral convictions for human dignity found in theological traditions, and pledges—makes a covenant—to defend the religious freedom of everyone, everywhere, particularly from government coercion at home or at the hands of progressive zealots in international organizations.