Think of the ideological distance between Muhammad Ali, Sun Moon, and Marabel Morgan. Then give thanks. Not for plurality as such, but for the principle that, in the very existence of such a range of beliefs, shows itself to be alive and well. No aspect of America presents more cause for gratitude than the generous measure of religious liberty enjoyed by its citizenry.
Some of the best minds on the American religious scene spent the better part of a Bicentennial week in Philadelphia in behalf of religious liberty. They found the Bicentennial Conference on Religious Liberty not only a celebratory occasion but a demanding intellectual exercise as well.
How does religious liberty relate to God’s transcendence, natural law, the civil religion, and original sin?
Temple University professor Franklin Littell wisely reminded the 300 conferees that for all our love of liberty, we know that it is not an end in itself. “Liberty is penultimate,” said Littell. “The end is truth.”
Freedom of religion should nonetheless be a basic right in a society in which church and state are constitutionally separate. Unfortunately, this freedom is taken for granted; academicians as well as the general population give relatively little thought to it. Robert Gordis of Jewish Theological Seminary compared the situation to that of an otherwise well-read elderly person who, upon seeing for the first time a performance of Hamlet, commented, “Nothing but a string of old quotations.”
Virtually every American now pays at least lip service to the concept of religious liberty. As an abstract principle it is firmly established and respected in America (and sometimes extended to embrace freedom from religion). As a matter of practice, however, it causes considerable disagreement.
Robert McAfee Brown, en route to a professorship at Union Theological Seminary, readily concedes that there must be limitations to religious freedom: “I may not invoke a Markan passage in defense of snake handling, claiming that the right is inherent in my understanding of revelation, when such an action jeopardizes the life expectancy of those in my immediate vicinity.” Brown also raised the question whether a society should grant religious liberty to a group or person whose point of view would involve denying religious liberty to others if that group or person had the power to do so.
Americans may have to face up to these kinds of issues much more than they have been doing if right of conscience is to continue to play a significant role in their consensus of values.
The conference, an interfaith event, was certainly one of the most worthwhile of the surprisingly few religiously oriented Bicentennial commemorations scheduled this year. It was sponsored jointly by the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia, the Catholic archdiocese, and the local board of rabbis. Influential evangelical spokesmen, for whatever reason, were conspicuously absent from the program. The conference was thus deprived of a major perspective, namely, that which sees a Puritan-related evangelical ethos based on an absolutely trustworthy New Testament undergirding the American cultural tradition.
An evangelical consensus on religious rights appears in the Lausanne Covenant: “It is the God-appointed duty of every government to secure conditions of peace, justice and liberty in which the church may obey God, serve the Lord Christ, and preach the gospel without interference. We therefore pray for the leaders of the nations and call upon them to guarantee freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom to practice and propagate religion in accordance with the will of God and as set forth in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Evangelicals enthusiastically support the democratic process, but many of them now take sharp issue with what they see as a subtle but serious trend toward aligning it with secular humanism as a controlling national outlook. The rise of evolutionary theologies and philosophies that are deemed to be self-authenticating nourishes the trend and undermines the evangelical ethos.
Brown skirted this territory in citing the inadequacies of live-and-let-live attitudes. Such a foundation is precarious, he said, “to the degree that indifferentism is hardly a way of building enduring or significant loyalties. Its atmosphere, moreover, paves the way for the intrusion of fresh idolatries that are willing to capitalize on indifferentism, and impose themselves on unsuspecting peoples and nations before the latter are really aware that they have signed away by default the liberties they sought to espouse.”
Elwyn A. Smith, former Eckerd College provost, had the taxing assignment of analyzing the assortment of phenomena brought together under the rubric of “the civil religion.” As it exists in the popular mind, the theory if not the practice of the civil religion is somewhat discredited. However, a number of respected scholars, led by Richard Neuhaus, are calling for at least something like it as a way of renewing America’s spiritual heritage. It was to these that Smith addressed himself.
Smith identified with the need, but fails to find true transcendence in the various options. “All civil religions are intrinsically flawed because they would make use of God,” he says. Even natural law, which may yet have potential for an overarching national purpose, is seen as far short of the power of the transcendent God. And what happens to religious liberty when the civil religion is embraced?
The positive evangelical ethos that has undergirded American life for two centuries has allowed the exercise of competing influences to a degree that has little or no precedent. Even Neuhaus, who would not call himself a conservative evangelical, senses the strengths of this ethos when he calls for consideration of “the unexamined resources in a tempered Puritanism.”
DAVID KUCHARSKY
