Religious Liberty Is Not Just For Christians

Religious Liberty Is Not Just For Christians
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Yesterday I heard a story on NPR about how Donald Trump is trying to include religious freedom in his campaign. The story raised the question of how for evangelicals religious freedom may or may not extend to Muslims.

The story quoted a pastor who raised this issue earlier in June at the Southern Baptist Convention meeting:

I would like to know how in the world someone within the Southern Baptist Convention can support the defending of rights for Muslims to construct mosques in the United States when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans? They are murdering Christians, beheading Christians, imprisoning Christians all over the world.

He also criticized the actions of the Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission which has supported the right of a group of Muslims to build a mosque. The Commission's leader has argued that principles of religious freedom must apply to all religions.

Given Trump's goal of banning the immigration of Muslims, one must wonder whose religious freedom Trump is committed to protecting. In a recent conversation with evangelical leaders, Trump suggested that Christianity is under siege and that when he is elected, "people are going to say 'Merry Christmas' again." He also decried prohibitions on coaches leading team prayers and restrictions on political endorsements by churches.

Religious liberty is first and foremost a theological idea, not a political strategy, and that some evangelicals, and especially some Baptists, would question its broadest application to all religions and non-religions is astonishing and distressing.

Religious liberty grew from the profound convictions of the earliest Baptists that the human soul must be free from any compulsion in religion. Freedom for these Baptists was an inherent quality of human existence as created by God. God, then, was the source of freedom, and human institutions had no right to deny that freedom.

In his 1612 treatise, "A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity," Thomas Helwys, one of the pioneers of Baptist tradition, advocated for complete religious liberty for all people:

"Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatsoever, it appertaines not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure." Why? Helwys argued, because people's "religion to God is betwixt God and themselves" (qtd. in Shurden, 47.) So radical was Helwys' declaration that he was thrown into prison where he died in 1616.

Roger Williams, who founded the first Baptist church in the United States in Providence, Rhode Island in 1639, similarly wrote:

It is the will and command of God that, since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian consciences and worships be granted to all men* in all nations and countries (Williams, 83).

So deep was Baptist commitment to religious freedom, that they also advocated for those who desired freedom from religion. In the 18th century, another Baptist, John Leland, wrote:

Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing (qtd. in Shurden, 50).

In the early 20th century, E. Y. Mullins explained, "we stand for the freedom of the atheist, agnostic, and materialist in his religious or irreligious convictions" (qtd. In Shurden, 50). George W. Truett added, "Our contention is not for mere toleration but for absolute liberty" (Truett, 63).

What Donald Trump describes is not religious liberty, and we should all be wary of any politician who seeks to use religion, particularly the favoring of one particular religion, as a way to gain votes. Religious liberty does not impose any religious conviction or behavior on anyone, nor does it prevent anyone from believing or worshipping as dictated by that person's conscience.

Forcing people to say "Merry Christmas" or banning people from entering this country based on their religion is not religious liberty. It is religious bigotry, and Christians should be on the forefront of calling it so.

I rarely agree with the Southern Baptist Convention on anything, but, when the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission supported the building of a mosque, they were acting in true Baptist form, and, when Russell Moore argued for religious liberty for practitioners of all religions, including Muslims, he was echoing that long tradition of absolute commitment to absolute religious freedom.

Why does any of this matter to non-Baptist folk? Because this little history lesson is a reminder of how radical the notion of religious freedom was in the founding of this country and in the development of the First Amendment and how passionately we must continue to advocate for full religious liberty for all people. Donald Trump and that SBC pastor and most of us need to read our history to understand that religious liberty is not just for Christians. It's not just for religious people. It is for every human being. It is both freedom for religion and freedom from religion. It is fundamental to our humanness, and it is core to our democracy.

*I recognize the gendered language in these quotations is problematic for contemporary readers, but the historic importance of the quotations has led me to include them as they were written.

Sources:

Shurden, Walter B. The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms. Macon, GA: Smyth& Helwys 1993.

Truett, George W. "Baptists and Religious Liberty." in Walter B. Shurden, ed. Proclaiming the Baptist Vision: Religious Liberty. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1997: 61-84.

Williams, Roger. "The Bloudy Tennent of Persecution." in Leon McBeth, ed. A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage. Nashville: Broadman, 1990: 83-90.

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