Making the World Safe for Religion

On September 2, Prison Fellowship chairman Charles Colson faced a situation that mirrors what the church as a whole faces. People of several faiths, many of whom were attending the Parliament of the World’s Religions, gathered at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago to hear an address on religious liberty. What do evangelicals have to say in a pluralistic setting? How do we talk about the cultural role of religion with those who worship other gods? As the winner of the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Mr. Colson had earned the right to stand on the platform. What follows is a condensed and adapted version of what he said when he got there.

I speak as one transformed by Jesus Christ, the living God. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He has lived in me for 20 years. His presence is the sole explanation for whatever is praiseworthy in my work. That is more than a statement about myself. It is a claim to truth. It is a claim that may contradict your own.

Yet on this, at least, we must agree: The right to do what I’ve just done—to state my faith without fear—is the first human right and the essence of human dignity. It is a sad fact that religious oppression is often practiced by religious groups. Sad—and inexcusable. A believer may risk prison for his own beliefs, but he may never build prisons for those of other beliefs.

It is our obligation to renew the passion for religious liberty. It is our duty to create a cultural environment where conscience can flourish. The beliefs that divide us should not be minimized, but neither should the aspirations most religions share: for truth, justice, and compassion.

The Four Horsemen

Four great myths define our times and pose a challenge to all faith traditions. They are the four horsemen of the present apocalypse.

The first myth is the goodness of humanity. It deludes people into thinking they are always victims, never villains; always deprived, never depraved. It dismisses responsibility as the teaching of a darker age. It can excuse any crime, because it can always blame something else—a sickness of society or a sickness of the mind. Thus, the first horseman multiplies evil by denying its existence.

It was a Holocaust survivor who exposed this myth most eloquently. Yehiel Dinur was a witness during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Dinur entered the courtroom and stared at the man behind the bulletproof glass—the man who had presided over the slaughter of millions. The court was hushed as a victim confronted a butcher of his people. Suddenly Dinur began to sob and collapsed to the floor. But not out of anger or bitterness. As he explained later in an interview, what struck him was a terrifying realization. “I was afraid about myself,” Dinur said. “I saw that I am capable to do this.… Exactly like he.” In a moment of chilling clarity, Dinur saw the skull beneath the skin. “Eichmann,” he concluded, “is in all of us.”

Jesus said it plainly, “That which proceeds out of a person, that is what defiles the person.”

The second myth of modernity is the promise of coming utopia; that human nature can be perfected by government. This horseman arrives with sword and slaughter. From the birth of this century, ruthless ideologies have pledged to move the world, but could only stain it with blood. We have seen more people killed in this century by their own governments than by all its wars combined.

The third myth is the relativity of moral values. This horseman hides the dividing line between good and evil, noble and base, sowing chaos and confusion. When a society abandons its transcendent values, each individual’s moral vision becomes purely personal and finally equal. Since no preference is morally preferable, anything that can be dared will be permitted. This leaves the moral consensus for our laws and manners in tatters. Moral neutrality slips into moral relativism. Tolerance substitutes for truth, indifference for religious conviction.

The fourth modern myth is radical individualism. The fourth horseman brings excess and isolation. This myth dismisses the importance of family, church, and community, denies the value of sacrifice, and elevates individual rights and pleasures as the ultimate social values. But with no higher principles to live by, men and women suffocate under their own expanding pleasures. Consumerism becomes empty and leveling, leaving society full of possessions but drained of ideals—what Vaclav Havel calls “totalitarian consumerism.”

A psychologist tells the story of a despairing young woman, spent in an endless round of parties, exhausted by the pursuit of pleasure. When told she should simply stop, she responded, “You mean I don’t have to do what I want to do?” As author George MacDonald once wrote, “The one principle of hell is ‘I am my own.’ ”

These four myths constitute a threat for people of all faiths. The four horsemen of the present apocalypse lead away from the cloud and fire of God’s presence into a barren wilderness. Modernity was once judged by the heights of its aspirations. Today it must be judged by the depth of its decadence. That decadence has marked the West most deeply, which makes it imperative that we understand the struggle for the soul of Western civilization.

The coming cultural tyranny

We stand at a pivotal moment in history when nations around the world are looking Westward. With the collapse of communism, the balance of world power has shifted dramatically. Suddenly, remarkably, one of history’s most sustained assaults on freedom collapsed before our eyes. A spell was broken; the lies of decades were exposed; fear and terror fled. And millions awoke as from a long nightmare. Almost overnight the Western model of economic, political, and social liberty has captured the imagination of reformers and given hope to the oppressed. We saw it at Tiananmen Square where a replica of the Statue of Liberty, an icon of Western freedom, became a symbol of Chinese hope. We saw it in Czechoslovakia when a worker stood before a desolate factory and read to a crowd, with tears in his eyes, the American Declaration of Independence.

But, tragically, just at this moment, the culture that fashioned these freedoms is being overrun by the four horsemen. It has embraced the destructive myths of modernity, which are poisoning its wellspring of justice and virtue and stripping away its most essential humanizing, civilizing influence.

Make no mistake: this humanizing, civilizing influence is the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a heritage brought to life anew in each generation by men and women whose lives are transformed by the living God and filled with holy conviction.

Despite the failures of some of its followers—the Crusades and Inquisitions—this heritage has laid the foundations of freedom in the West. It has established a standard of justice over both individuals and nations. It has proclaimed a higher law that exposes the pretensions of tyrants. It has taught that every human soul is on a path of immortality, that every man and woman is to be treated as a child of a King.

This muscular faith has inspired public virtue and motivated excellence in the arts and sciences. It has undergirded an ethic of work and an ethic of service. It has tempered freedom with internal restraint, so our laws could be permissive while our society was not. It ended the slave trade, built hospitals and orphanages, and tamed the brutality of mental wards and prisons.

Christian conviction provides a principled belief in human freedom. As Lord Acton explained, “No country can be free without religion. It creates and strengthens the notion of duty. If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the liberty.”

This is the lesson of centuries: that ordered liberty is one of faith’s triumphs. And yet, Western cultural and political elites seem blinded by modernity’s myths to the historic civilizing role of Christian faith. And so, in the guise of pluralism and tolerance, they have set about to exile religion from our common life. They use the power of the media and the law like steel wool to scrub public debates and public places bare of religious ideas and symbols. But what is left is sterile, featureless, cold.

Courts strike down even perfunctory prayers, and we are surprised that schools, bristling with barbed wire, look more like prisons than prisons do.

Universities reject the very idea of truth, and we are shocked when the best and the brightest of their graduates loot and betray.

Celebrities mock the traditional family, and we are appalled at the human tragedy of broken homes and millions of unwed mothers.

The media celebrate sex without responsibility, and we are horrified by sexual plagues.

Our lawmakers justify the taking of innocent life in sterile clinics, and we are terrorized by the disregard for life in blood-soaked streets.

C. S. Lewis described this irony a generation ago, “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.… We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Where does the stampede of the four horsemen lead us? Only one place: tyranny—a new kind of cultural tyranny that finds minds, uninformed by traditions and standards, easy to shape.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt described totalitarianism as a process where lonely, rootless individuals welcomed the captivity of ideology. This coming cultural tyranny already casts its shadow across university campuses where repressive speech codes stifle free debate; across courthouses and legislatures where officials hunt down and purge every religious symbol; across network newsrooms and board-rooms where nothing is censored except traditional beliefs.

And so, paradoxically, at the very moment much of the rest of the world seems to be reaching out for Western liberal ideas, the West itself, beguiled by myths of modernity, is undermining the very foundation of those ideals.

The enduring revolution

This, then, is the challenge facing all of us: Every culture must decide whether to embrace the myths of modernity or turn to a deeper, older tradition, the half-forgotten teachings of saints and sages.

We in the West bear a particular responsibility—for modernity’s myths have found fertile soil in our lands; we have offered haven to the four horsemen who trample the dreams and hopes of men and women everywhere. As the world looks to us, let us summon the courage to challenge our comfortable assumptions, to scrutinize the effect we have on our global neighbors, and then to recover that which has been the soul and conscience of our civilization.

Admittedly, the signs are not auspicious, and it is easy to become discouraged—but a Christian has neither the reason nor the right. For history’s cadence is called with a confident voice. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reigns. His plan and purpose rob the future of its fears.

By the Cross he offers hope; by the Resurrection he assures his triumph. His triumph cannot be resisted or delayed. Humanity’s only choice is to recognize him now or in the moment of ultimate judgment. Our only decision is to welcome his rule or to fear it.

This is a vision beyond a vain utopia or a timid new world order. It is the vision of an enduring revolution—one that breaks more than the chains of tyranny: it breaks the chains of sin and death. It proclaims a liberation that the cruelest prison cannot contain.

This revolution reaches across centuries and beyond politics. It confounds the ambitions of kings and rewards the faith of a child. It clothes itself in the rags of common lives, then emerges with sudden splendor. It violates every jaded expectation with the paradox of its power.

The enduring revolution teaches that freedom is found in submission to a moral law. It says that duty is our sharpest weapon against fear and tyranny. This revolution raises an unchanging and eternal moral standard and transforms the will in order to achieve it. It builds communities of character and of compassion.

On occasion, God provides glimpses of this glory. I witnessed one in an unlikely place—a prison in Brazil like none I’ve ever seen.

Twenty years ago in the city of Sao Jose dos Campos, a prison was turned over to two Christian laymen. They called it Humaita, and their plan was to run it on Christian principles. The prison has only two full-time staff; the rest of the work is done by inmates. Every prisoner is assigned another inmate to whom he is accountable. In addition, every prisoner is assigned a volunteer family from the outside that works with him during his term and after his release. Every prisoner joins a chapel program, or else takes a course in character development.

When I visited Humaita, I found the inmates smiling—particularly the murderer who held the keys, opened the gates, and let me in. Wherever I walked I saw men at peace. I saw clean living areas, people working industriously. The walls were decorated with biblical sayings from Psalms and Proverbs. Humaita has an astonishing record. Its recidivism rate is 4 percent compared to 75 percent in the rest of Brazil and the United States. How is all this possible?

I saw the answer when my guide escorted me to the notorious punishment cell once used for torture. Today, he told me, that block houses only a single inmate. As we reached the end of a long concrete corridor and he put the key into the lock, he paused and asked, “Are you sure you want to go in?”

“Of course,” I replied impatiently. “I’ve been in isolation cells all over the world.” Slowly he swung open the massive door, and I saw the prisoner in that punishment cell: a crucifix, beautifully carved by the Humaita inmates—the prisoner Jesus, hanging on the cross.

“He’s doing time for all the rest of us,” my guide said softly.

In that cross carved by loving hands is a holy subversion. It heralds change more radical than humanity’s most fevered dreams. Its followers expand the boundaries of a kingdom that can never fail. A shining kingdom that reaches into the darkest corners of every community, into the darkest corners of every mind. A kingdom of deathless hope, of restless virtue, of endless peace. This work proceeds, this hope remains, this fire will not be quenched: The enduring revolution of the Cross of Christ.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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