Religious Liberty: The Next Big Thing?

Abstract

Religious Liberty: The Next Big Thing? Patrick Riordan SJ Pope Francis’s timely letter Laudato Si’, on care for our common home, coincided with a general awakening of awareness of the crisis posed by climate change and the degradation of the natural environment. The Amazon Synod of Bishops has reinforced concern for our common home in the same year that saw not only extensive fires in the rainforests of Brazil but Siberia also in flame. The teenage Greta Thunberg and the protest movement of Extinction Rebellion have claimed the headlines and brought the issue to wider public awareness. What is the next big issue for the pope and the church that may evoke another prophetic statement comparable to Laudato Si’? In the spirit in which Francis insists on integral ecology, including the flourishing of humankind, I suggest that the next big thing already looms over us. It is the widespread and growing violation of the right to religious liberty. Ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, dating back to the time of Christ, have been destroyed or decimated in the violence of the recent years; Yazidis and other minorities have experienced extreme persecution by Islamic extremists. Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern Islamic states continue to deny religious liberty to their non-Muslim inhabitants, and to their own citizens they deny the freedom to leave their ancestral religion. Resurgent religious nationalism is found not only among Islamic states: Hindu revivalism in India is accompanied by the persecution of Muslims as well as Christians, and Buddhism in Myanmar asserts itself by expelling to Bangladesh the Rohingya minority. Sri Lanka has also seen a bloody conflict in which a Buddhist majority has succeeded in asserting a form of religious nationalism. The status of the Uighurs in China points to another context in which a dominant cultural population is unable to accept the presence of a large minority religious group. Freedom of religion, although prominent in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the subsequent Conventions, is not functioning to protect the vulnerable members of persecuted religions. Apart from the actual violations of religious liberty across the world, there is also a threat to the very idea of religious liberty posed by developments Studies • volume 109 • number 433 31 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 31 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 31 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 in the philosophical language used to discuss rights and specifically human rights. The question is being raised, whether there is anything distinctive about religion that would warrant the inclusion of a right to religious liberty in the international lists of human rights and in national Bills of Rights. Since freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from arbitrary discrimination on grounds including religion, are normally protected, why should religious liberty be included? Does it not reduce to the other rights? In what follows I will first recall what is asserted about religious liberty; second I will review philosophical trends that tend to question the need for a distinctive right; and third, I will summarise the arguments that are required to explain and uphold the right to religious liberty. Religious liberty TheAmerican Constitution’s FirstAmendment combines in a single sentence the non-establishment clause and the free exercise clause: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’. It is a simplification to describe the free exercise provision as protecting religion from politics although that is its main effect, denying the US Congress the power to make laws restricting the exercise of religion. Here the free exercise of religion is linked with other freedoms, viz., the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government. Is the freedom of religion an additional freedom to those listed as the freedoms of speech, of the press and of assembly? If the state is obliged to respect and protect those rights of free expression, of publication and of assembly...