Three reasons we should care about religious liberty

By J. Brent Walker

Reflections
April 2006

Recently I had the privilege of speaking at the First Baptist Church of Dalton, Ga. It was part of an eight-week Sunday evening series on a variety of topics. Each presenter was asked to speak on "Why I Should Care About ... ?" My topic, of course, was religious liberty. This was a good exercise for me. We often assume the importance of religious liberty and then barge ahead to analyze the church-state issue de jure.

It's helpful, however, to go back and examine exactly why we value religious liberty in the first place. What would you say to a skeptic who doesn't accept your a priori assumptions and convince him or her of religious liberty's importance? This is what I came up with.

It is not too facile to say up front that we should care about religious liberty because so few do nowadays. Many, including Baptists who ought to know better, take their own religious liberty for granted. Even those who care about their own often do not care about the liberty of others. No one should be able to claim religious liberty for himself or herself unless he or she is equally concerned about the liberty of everyone else.

In light of this, we should care about religious liberty for three reasons:

1 It is the right thing to do. Liberty is precious, primal and prescient. It is based on who we are as humans and who God is as our sovereign. It has to do with "soul freedom"—a God-given freedom of conscience that we enjoy not because we are Baptists or Christians, but simply by virtue of our basic humanity. God has made us all free agents—free to say yes, free to say no and free not even to make up our minds. To be sure, our faith is nurtured in the womb of the church, but it's a decision each of us has to make for ourselves. Religious freedom, as Baptists throughout history have reminded us, does not result from any act of toleration on the part of the state. Religious freedom is not just a warmed-up leftover from the Enlightenment. It has theological import. So, the fight for religious liberty is an effort to ensure against others doing, or the church doing, or the state doing, what God will not do: to violate conscience or to force faith.

2 It is the fair thing to do. Religious liberty goes beyond its theological moorings; it has ethical import. It often has to do with simple fairness, common sense and good citizenship. What we wish for ourselves and our families, we should want for everybody else. Concern for religious liberty requires us to heed what Charles Haynes and Os Guinness commonly refer to as the three R's of civic life: rights, responsibility and respect. We must treasure the rights God has given us, take seriously our responsibility to exercise them wisely and respect those who have a different point of view about our religious beliefs. In the long run, the rights I enjoy are no stronger than your willingness to stand up for them, and your rights are no more secure than my courage to defend them.

Another way to talk about this concept is to couch it in terms of a golden rule. The shear reasonableness of the golden rule is acknowledged by almost everyone—people of faith and people of no faith. The golden rule of religious liberty goes something like this: "I must not ask government to promote my religion if I don't want government to promote somebody else's religion. I must not permit government to harm somebody else's religion if I don't want government to harm my religion." How much better off we would all be—in the United States and abroad—if everyone or even most of us would adhere to this time-honored principle of fairness.

3 It is the expedient thing to do. In addition to fundamental rightness and demonstrable fairness, raw self interest should impel us to care about religious liberty. Even if successful in obtaining official governmental sanction for one's own religion, it's still playing with fire. Once you establish the precedent of knocking down the wall of separation for your own benefit, it's hard to deny it to somebody else when they take over or gain control. One day it might be somebody else's religion. Just consider the fast growing religious groups: Mormonism, Islam and various others. While these religious traditions deserve our respect, the idea of a theocracy governed by the president of the LDS Church or even a moderate Imam is not something most Baptists would welcome. And finally, even if that never happens—or in the meantime before it happens—it's still a bad idea. Experience has demonstrated that the merger of church and state, even in the hands of a benevolent government, waters down religion and robs it of vitality. This in part explains why some western European democracies, where religion is replete in the public school and square but church pews are empty, are talking seriously about disestablishing their privileged churches.

So this was my best shot at it—three reasons why we should care about religious liberty. You may think of others. If you do, let me know.