The Global Public Square E-Book

Os Guinness

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 370

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Logos Bookstores' Best Book in Christianity and Culture How do we live with our deepest differences? In a world torn by religious conflict, the threats to human dignity are terrifyingly real. Some societies face harsh government repression and brutal sectarian violence, while others are divided by bitter conflicts over religion's place in public life. Is there any hope for living together peacefully? Os Guinness argues that the way forward for the world lies in promoting freedom of religion and belief for people of all faiths and none. He sets out a vision of a civil and cosmopolitan global public square, and how it can be established by championing the freedom of the soul—the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience and religion. In particular he calls for leadership that has the courage to act on behalf of the common good. Far from utopian, this constructive vision charts a course for the future of the world. Soul freedom is not only a shining ideal but a dire necessity and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of our time. We can indeed maximize freedom and justice and learn to negotiate deep differences in public life. For a world desperate for hope at a critical juncture of human history, here is a way forward, for the good of all.

Leseprobe

The Global Public Square

Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity

Os Guinness

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web:www.ivpress.comE-mail:[email protected]

©2013 by Os Guinness

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press®is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at <www.intervarsity.org>.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.TMUsed by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Every effort has been made to credit all material quoted in this book. Any errors or omissions brought to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future editions.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates.

Cover design: Cindy KipleImages: imagedepotpro/Getty Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-3767-0 (print) ISBN 978-0-8308-9565-6 (digital)

DOM,

And to CJ, my lionheart of a son,

And his friends, and generation

Thus says the Lord, “Let my people go!”

Moses to the Pharaoh of Egypt, c. 1300 B.C.

It is a fundamental human right that every man should worship according to his own convictions.

Tertullian,Ad Scapulam, c. 212

The English Church shall be free, and have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired.

Magna Carta, Runnymede, 1215

The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty.

Dante Alighieri,De Monarchia, 1559

It is the will and command of God that . . . a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all countries: and that they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.

Roger Williams,The Bloudy Tenent, 1649

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton,Areopagitica, 1689

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” 1785

To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.

John Jay, letter to R. Luhington, 1786

The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights.

Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Board of Visitors minutes, 1819

The absolute monarchies have dishonoured despotism. Let us be careful that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it.

Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America,1840

By birth all men are free.

Lord Acton,The History of Freedom in Antiquity,1877

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, 1941

These are the rights of all human beings. They are yours whoever you are. Demand that your rulers and politicians sign and observe this declaration. If they refuse, if they quibble, they can have no place in the new free world that dawns upon mankind.

H. G. Wells,Rights of the World Citizen, 1942

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, 1948

The General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among peoples of the member states themselves and among the peoples under their jurisdiction.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct our attention to our common interests and to means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

President John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at American University, 1963

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states a common understanding of the peoples of the world concerning the inalienable and inviolable rights of all members of the human family and constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community.

Tehran International Conference on Human Rights, 1968

Freedom of thought, conscience and religion is one of the foundations of a democratic society.

European Court of Human Rights, 1993

Relativism is incapable of defending anything, including itself. When a society loses its soul, it is about to lose its future.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 2011

Religious freedom is a moral and political good for all human beings and all societies.

Thomas Farr, Georgetown University, 2012

Contents

1 The Golden Key

2 For All the World

3 A War of Spirits

4 First Freedom First

5 Death by a Thousand Cuts

6 Dueling Visions

7 Looking in the Wrong Place

8 A Civil and Cosmopolitan Public Square

9 Later Than We Think

The Global Charter of Conscience

Acknowledgments

Notes

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Author

Endorsements

Related Titles

1

The Golden Key

Soul Freedom for All

We are now seven billion humans jostling together on our tiny planet earth, up from a mere two and a half billion in the lifetime of many living today. Small and insignificant perhaps in contrast to the vastness of the cosmos, we face a simple but profound challenge: How do we live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological, and very especially when those differences concern matters of our common public life? In short, how do we create a global public square and make the world safer for diversity?

The answer to this titanic challenge requires an answer to the prior question of who we humans think we are, and then attending closely to the dictates of our humanity. Put differently, we face a triple imperative that will be a key to our human future: First, to see whether we have reason enough to believe in the measureless dignity and worth of every last one of us. Second, to know whether we can discover a way to live with the deepest differences that divide us. Third, to find out whether we are able to settle our deliberations and debates in public life through reasoned persuasion rather than force, intimidation and violence—even in the age of the new media and a global resurgence of religion.

Indispensable to solving these challenges is the extension of soul freedom for all. Soul freedom is the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief that alone does full justice to the dictates of our humanity. As we shall see, it best expresses human dignity and agency; it promotes freedom and justice for all; it fosters healthy giving, caring, peaceful and stable societies; and it acts as a bulwark against the countless current abuses of power and the equally countless brutal oppressions of human dignity.

As such, soul freedom concerns the foundational freedom to be human. It is both the expression of a high view of human worth and the answer to a human yearning for freedom that is universal and enduring, as well as the surest bulwark against the darker angels of our nature. Soul freedom rises to the challenge of the dictates of our humanity because it is about nothing less than our freedom and responsibility to be fully human and to live together in thriving and beneficial communities, and at the same time to know how to lean against the crooked timber that is also at the heart of our humanity.

Soul freedom for all was once attacked as naive and utopian, and it is still resisted as subversive. Yet it is not only a shining ideal but a dire necessity today and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of our time. Truly it is the golden key to a trouble­some situation in which the darker angels must not be allowed to dominate.

For as the present world situation shows only too clearly, the emerging global era is a time of deep anxieties and fears for governments, groups and individuals. Out of this state of mind many follies and some great dangers and disasters are growing, and we are not far removed from the false and barbarously inhuman answers of the twentieth century. The natural personal desire for certainty and the natural government and group desire for unity can each in their way be twisted into overreaching demands for uniformity, and then into a remorseless slide toward coercive conformity that too often ends with raw power as the abuser of human freedom, justice, security and well-being. Add to this the clash of religions and ideologies, the cacophony of the new media, and the high-octane dimension of prejudice and hatred, and the combination can be lethal.

Against all such abuses, whether by governments, religions, ideologies, tyrants, bureaucrats, university administrators, towering individual egos or some politically correct orthodoxy of one kind or another, this work is a passionate cry for soul freedom for all—for every single person on the earth—and a call to see how its freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief may be advanced in the world of today and tomorrow for the sake of the true dictates of our humanity.

Soul freedom for all stands as the supreme challenge to all contemporary forms of dictatorship of the mind and heart, whether secularist totalitarianism of the Chinese and North Korean kind, or religious authoritarianism of the Iranian, Saudi and Burmese kind. As such, soul freedom is as realistic as it is idealistic. It speaks to the best and guards against the worst of human nature. It not only stands against open dictatorships but mounts a clear warning to all the rising forms of Western illiberalism, especially those that spring from the zealotry of good intentions.

In the short term, soul freedom is essential if there is to be a positive answer to three of the greatest questions shaping the future in the coming century: Will Islam modernize peacefully? Which faith will replace Marxism in China? And will the West sever or recover its roots?

In the long term, soul freedom is crucial to whether there will be an expansion or a rollback of human rights and responsibilities across the earth, and therefore to the prospects for freedom, justice, conscience, human dignity and human well-being itself.

In particular, soul freedom for all must now be freshly understood and advanced in the Western world if it is to hold its indispensable place throughout the whole world. For if the present erosions continue, Western claims about freedom, democracy and progress will slowly be rendered hollow, and the West will be the west in geography only. After all, soul freedom has long been left half-baked and poorly protected in countries such as England, where it was once pioneered, and there are major problems with its status in many countries across Europe.

Yet that is nothing compared with the specter that now looms across the Atlantic. For if soul freedom continues to be neglected and threatened in the United States as it has been recently, it clearly can be endangered anywhere. Fine words are not enough. The wordsmiths of the world have been busy, but statesmen have been absent, lawyers have run amok and activists have trampled the ground carelessly in their rush to press their own interests. Only wise leadership and courageous action can bring the situation back and lead us forward. The stakes for the world and the future of humanity are incalculable.

The immensity of the issue has been created by the clash of three trends that every concerned citizen of the world must recognize and confront:

First, there is now solid and incontrovertible evidence that when freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief is recognized, respected and advanced for citizens of all faiths and none, there is a parallel advance in many important social goods, such as peace, stability, social cohesion, generosity, enterprise and the unleashing of the positive forces of civil society.

1

Second, there is equally strong but contrary evidence that restrictions on this foundational human right are a mounting problem across most of the nations of the world, including countries that were once the leading champions of this freedom.

2

The plain fact is that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people believe strongly in

someone or something higher than human

, yet the overwhelming majority of them do not have the freedom to practice their faith freely. In 2010, for the very first time, the United States moved into the top sixteen countries of the world where there was a rise in both government restrictions and social hostility toward religion.

3

Third, the greatest current obstacle to resolving these contradictory trends is a surprising one. The menace to religious freedom is no longer just the age-old evils of authoritarian oppression and sectarian violence around the world, but a grave new menace from within the West itself. For we are seeing an unwitting convergence between some very different Western trends that together form a perfect storm. One trend is the general disdain for religion that leads to a discounting of religious freedom, sharpened by a newly aggressive atheism and a heavy-handed separationism that both call for the exclusion of religion from public life. Another is the overzealous attempt of certain activists of the sexual revolution to treat freedom of religion and belief as an obstruction to their own rights that must be dismantled forever. Yet another is the sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle initiatives of certain advocates of Islam to press their own claims in ways that contradict freedom of religion and belief, and freedom of speech as it has been classically understood. (Current Western forms of hate speech, for example, operate in a similar way to the blasphemy laws put forward on behalf of Islam, and they are equally misguided.) Each of these trends represents a serious crisis in itself. But when considered together, and especially in light of the generally maladroit governmental responses, they are also a window into the decline of the West.

In 2015, the world will celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, the iconic charter of English liberties imposed upon King John at Runnymede in 1215. Winston Churchill described it as “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”4 But if the celebration is not to be hollow, we must use the occasion to assess the current dangers and obstacles to freedom, take stock of our liberties and rights, and see where we have slipped and where we need to advance, even in the lands that once pioneered these precious and essential human freedoms.

The Crunch Generation

“If you could be born in any generation other than your own, which would you choose?” I was first asked that question at Stanford University, and I hesitated before replying. What did the questioner have in mind? My family is Irish, but I was born in China and spent my first ten years there, and since then I have lived in Europe and North America and visited many other parts of the world in both hemispheres. Possible responses flashed through my mind, ranging from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of the Emperor Hadrian, to the China of the Tang or Ming dynasties, to the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to the America of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison, and the England of William Pitt and William Wilberforce. But almost instantly I knew my answer before I had time to debate these other periods.

“Your generation,” I said. “I would like to be a member of your generation because in your lifetime you will witness some of the most crucial years humanity has ever navigated.”

The present generation now rising to its early adulthood across the earth can be described as “the crunch generation” because of the present state of the global era and the many crucial issues converging to challenge humankind. In his last speech to the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill asked the question “What if God tires of the human race?” He was referring to the apocalyptic possibilities of the nuclear issue in the 1960s. Today, a generation later, a wide raft of issues—economic, technological, demographic, social, political, medical, environmental, as well as nuclear—is crowding in to menace the horizons of the world that is almost at the door.

If the coming generation answers these issues responsibly and well, the world can look forward to calmer sailing. But if they are answered badly or not at all, the prospects for the future and for the future of humankind are turbulent.

What then do we face? An inspiring new era for global humanity, a new dark age for the earth or a period of muddling through that lies somewhere in between? Only God knows the answer. Futurism is a murky science that often pretends to know far more than it does, but there are certain issues and certain problems that are clear beyond dispute. This book is about one of the biggest of them, the challenge facing all of us as the earth’s now billions of citizens: Soul freedom for all and its answer to how we are to maximize freedom and justice and learn to live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological—and in particularthe answer to how we are to negotiate those differences in public life, and so create a global public square that is worthy of our heritage as members of free and open societies.

Immediate reactions to that statement may vary, but it is hardly a secret that many of the world’s educated people respond with weariness, if not disgust, at any mention of religion. Anything to do with religion and public affairs is messy at best and repugnant at worst. But while the issue is awkward and difficult, there is no avoiding it. Incidents of egregious violations of freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief are coming in from all around the world, and urgent analyses and reports are mounting too.5 It is now said that more than one billion people live under governments that systematically suppress freedom of religion and belief, and that 70 percent of the world’s seven billion people are living in countries with a high degree of restrictions on their faith, which in turn means injustice and suffering for millions and millions.

Responsible leaders, as well citizens, can no longer ignore this issue, for it represents not only a massive denial of individual freedom but a major humanitarian crisis and a grand strategic challenge to global peace and security.6 But what follows is not merely one more analysis or one more protest, important though these may be. Progress surely requires that the first step toward answering any serious problem is to go beyond the point at which we started. What is offered here is an exploration of an indispensable key to the future, and one that sets out a proposal for a constructive way forward for humankind, with three different components:

First,

a vision of soul freedom for all, the foundational freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief that reflects, promotes and protects the inviolable and alienable dignity and worth of all human beings

.

Second, a proposal for cultivating civility and constructing a global public square that maximizes soul freedom for people of all faiths and none, and shows how such a vision can do justice to the integrity of diverse truth claims while also guaranteeing freedom and building stability

.

Third, to support these two goals, a Global Charter of Conscience that reaffirms Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and sets out its significance for establishing and protecting soul freedom in the world of today

.

For Whom and By Whom?

We live in a cynical age well schooled in suspicion and well stocked with reasons to be suspicious. Our first instincts are therefore to look for the bottom line and the real agenda. And that in fact is not all bad, for soul freedom is not a utopian daydream but a vision of freedom carved out against the realism of what Immanuel Kant called the “crooked timber” of our humanity. Let me then put my cards on the table at the outset.

Who is this book written for? On the one hand, this book attempts to set out a vision of liberty and justice throughout the earth and for all human beings. No single person can ever speak on behalf of all humanity, for the obvious reason that none of us can speak from everywhere any more than we can speak from nowhere. We all speak from somewhere, but it is possible to speak for what are sincerely believed to be the best interests of all, and thus for the common good, the good of everyone. In that sense, although I cannot do other than write as a single individual and from the perspective of my own faith and my own place in the world, this book is written for Asians as much as Europeans, for Middle Easterners, Africans and Latin Americans as much as North Americans. It is written for atheists and Muslims, for Hindus and Buddhists, for Mormons and Baha’i, and for the adherents of every faith under the sun, as much as for Jews and Christians.

Importantly, this book is written for individual believers as well as for the religious and ideological institutions and the organizations behind them. And most importantly too, it is written for liberals and conservatives alike, though it challenges equally the unconservative actions of some conservatives and the illiberal actions of some liberals.

On the other hand, and with a closer focus, this book is addressed especially to those people across the world who are concerned for global as well as national affairs and feel the force of three basic things:

First, the inescapable fact of the world’s diversity, part promise and part problem

Second, the prime values of freedom, justice and order to humanity in any age

Third, the menace of the many-sided threats to human thought and conscience today

This proposal shares with many people the stubborn hope that drift and disaster need not be the last word in the human story. Here, for all who appreciate such core realities, is a vision, an argument and a practical proposal that set out a possible way forward for humanity on a crucial issue and at a critical juncture of world history.

And who is this book written by? I write as a Christian, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Had all who bore the name Christian been true to the teaching and the way of Jesus himself, that identification might cause no problem and raise no suspicion. But tragically a significant part of the religious repressions and bloodshed throughout history have been perpetrated by those who called themselves Christian and did what they did in the name of Jesus. From the dark record of the Inquisition and the slaughter of the Albigensians and the Huguenots, to the infamous papal attacks on religious freedom in the nineteenth century and down to the far slighter follies and fears raised by the so-called Christian right in recent American history, Christians have too often been or been seen as part of the problem and not the solution. As a Woody Allen character says in his film Hannah and Her Sisters, “If Jesus were to come back and see what people have done in his name, he’d throw up.”

Indeed, it is only fair to acknowledge frankly that a significant reason for the present aggressiveness of many secularists toward religion is their legitimate reaction to the past corruptions and oppressions of the state churches in Europe, and to the fear that such things might happen again. The Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot seconded Jean Meslier’s conviction that the world would be happy only when “the last king has been strangled with the guts of the last priest.” Gruesome as it sounds, and bloody though the fulfillment turned out to be for the Bourbons and the aristocratic class, that desire represented a passionate cry for freedom and justice and an accurate indictment of the brutal repressions of both throne and altar under the ancien régime in France.7

The time has come for atheists to define themselves by what they believe rather than what they disbelieve. After several centuries they have made the point clearly that they are not theists, and most of the rest of us are happy to accept their assertion. But at the same time they are not really “nones” either, and their faith, which is far from vacuous, needs spelling out. But a plausible case can be made, and I for one am equally happy to grant it, that whatever their vision of life without God, gods or the supernatural, most forms of secularism are also fueled in large part by an understandable reaction to the excesses and evils of religion. Much of the world can agree on this with no further argument: bad religion is very bad indeed.

Yet the teaching of Jesus himself points in an entirely different direction than much of Christendom. Not only has Pope John Paul II, as leader of the worst offender among the Christian traditions, openly confessed the past sins of the Roman Catholic Church, but there are powerful branches of the Christian community who have always tried to follow Jesus more directly, who have never had blood on their hands, and who have a shining record in standing for human rights in general and for the cause of freedom of conscience in particular.

Indeed, the name and the notion of soul freedom come from Roger Williams’s iconic term soul liberty. He was the seventeenth-century English dissenter who was an inspiring pioneer of both freedom and freedom of thought, conscience and religion for all, and his courageous stand deserves far wider recognition and celebration. He, and not Thomas Jefferson, was the first person to call for “a wall of separation” between church and state, to devise the world’s first government that enshrined that principle, and to offer freedom of thought, conscience and religion to people of all faiths and none—without exception.8

Besides, the Christian faith is the first truly global religion, the leading proponent of the three great Abrahamic faiths, by far the world’s most numerous and diverse, and also at the moment by far the most persecuted. As I write, the U.S. Commission on International Human Rights has issued its report listing sixteen countries as the worst violators of religious freedom, and while many religions are persecuted in these countries and elsewhere, only Christians are persecuted in all of them.9 All that to say that there can be no solution to the world’s problem without significant Christian participation.

Speaking for myself, I emphatically challenge the disdain that views all religion as uncouth and unworthy of serious understanding. I equally reject the current sneer that to defend freedom of religion and belief is merely a covert form of advancing faith of one kind or another. From the drafting of the Williamsburg Charter, which celebrated and reaffirmed the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to the drafting of the Global Charter of Conscience, which was published in Brussels in 2012 to reaffirm Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I have long joined forces to work with all who defend the human rights of all human beings—all human rights and all human beings without exception, but with a special eye to the foundational importance of freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief.

So let the past and the suspicions that it stirs be put to one side for the moment, and let this present proposal speak for itself and be judged on its own merits. For a start, there needs to be a clear understanding of what soul freedom is and is not, and this needs to be augmented by a realistic dealing with the many obstacles seen to be standing in its way. Together this clarity and this realism can open the way to an innovative and constructive approach to what is a vital requirement for our human future.

What Kind of a World Community?

At point after point after point, a simple but profound question rises out of the issues confronting the world in the global era: What kind of a world community do we want to build and live in together? There can be no good answer to this question unless we first resolve the issue of living with our deep differences, and currently there are few solutions on offer.

What follows is one proposal for a constructive solution and an exploration of eight steps that are needed if we are to rethink the issue. If taken together, these steps could achieve a grand global revaluation that would usher in the possibility of a robustly healthy multifaith world that comes nearer than any so far to advancing freedom and justice under the conditions of advanced modern pluralism. The time has come to face down the ugly crowd of prejudices that clamor around this issue, and then to rescue the freedom and the right of soul freedom and place them at the heart of the global discussion where they belong. How we deal with our deepest religious and ideological differences in public life will be a defining issue for the future of humankind.

It is time, and past time, to ponder the question. What does it say of us and our times that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could not be passed today? And what does it say of the future of freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief if it can be neglected and threatened even in the United States, where it once developed most fully—that it can be endangered anywhere? Who will step forward now to champion the cause of freedom for the good of all and for the future of humanity?

2

For All the World

The first step in the revaluationis to recognize that soul freedom is for the good of all, down to the very last human person, that educated elites in the Western world must overcome their personal prejudices about religion in order to take it as seriously as it deserves, and that no solution will be possible without a partnership between responsible religious believers and responsible secularists.

The term religious freedom was first used by Tertullian, a Christian apologist in the third century. But it has been argued that the long, hard quest for freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief goes back all the way to the Jewish conception of humanity made in the image of God—and in particular to their historic exodus from Egypt under the ringing cry of Moses to the Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Judaism is the religion of freedom and responsibility par excellence. No people have suffered more than the Jews, yet no people have done more for the freedom of the world, not only through their history but through the beliefs and ideas they have brought into the world and sustained down the centuries. But wherever the rise of freedom may be traced, it is certainly true that the rise and recognition of the freedom and the right has never progressed in an unbroken straight line, and it did not come from a simple discovery of truths that were courageously won and then never lost.

The long, painful struggle for freedom included lurches and setbacks along the way, and the victories owed much to a tug of war between passionate ideas on one side and powerful interests on the other. Thus human rights are a part of the ceaseless, ongoing struggle between right and might, conscience and reason, principle and policy. A celebrated example of mixed motives was France’s Edict of Toleration in 1598 after Henry IV had earlier switched faiths from Huguenot to Catholic. “Paris is well worth a mass,” he is supposed to have said. In the end, Henry the royal Catholic convert was assassinated by a fellow Catholic, and his edict was later revoked by a royal successor, but the edict was still a significant landmark in the slow emergence of toleration for all believers.

In particular, the rise and recognition of freedom of conscience represents a complex interaction between three factors:

The growing assertion of human rights, such as freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of association

The equally important adjustment to social realities, such as the expanding pluralism in modern countries

The far more variable facts of political regulations, according to the personal interests of kings, cardinals, governors, judges and university deans—or modern politicians eyeing interest groups and electoral votes

For their own pragmatic reasons, leaders of nations down the ages could decide either to relax regulations and allow more freedom, or to tighten them up and enforce more rigid conformity. Interestingly, those who increased toleration, such as Henry IV of France and William of Orange in the Netherlands, usually had multiple motives, whereas those who sought to coerce conformity often did so out of a single-minded obsession. In fact, a common feature of those who deny freedom of conscience in their pursuit of conformity is intransigence, personal or bureaucratic. This is true not only of Louis XIV’s draconian revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, but also of the heavy-handed denials of freedom of conscience by equality commissioners and university administrations today.

Against all such intransigence and its repressions of freedom, this book unashamedly argues for right over might and principle over policy. It affirms the primacy of soul freedom for all, and for the good of all, and therefore for people of all faiths and none. No one should miss the importance of those last four words. On the one hand, soul freedom reaches out to all religious believers. Freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief is for all religious believers and is opposed to none. On the other hand, and let there be no misunderstanding here, it reaches out to secularists too, and to any who do not believe in God, gods or the supernatural. Soul freedom includes all ultimate beliefs and worldviews, whether religious or nonreligious, transcendent or naturalistic.

Allow me, then, to set out the principles and pitfalls of soul freedom, and the prospects for a global public square that does justice to what Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, admirably calls “the dignity of difference,” and therefore achieves a growing measure of cosmopolitan civility—and show how it realistically can be built over the course of the next generation.1

At the same time, this argument recognizes the strong social, political and technological tides now running against freedom, and it is important to identify the powerful undertow of these factors, regardless of whether their source is comfortably distant or awkwardly close to home. Readers of this book will be among the world’s educated—if only because it requires literacy and education to read a book of serious ideas. Today, however, that by itself raises an immediate barrier against this argument. For we are at a curious and unusual place in history where many of the world’s most literate and tolerant people can become the world’s most illiterate and intolerant when it comes to the subject of this book—religion and religious differences.

As we shall see repeatedly, a prominent feature of the problem in the Western world is that where there is a disdain for religion, there is often a discounting of religious freedom too. The first may be understandable, but the second is inexcusable. If the overwhelming majority of the world’s peoples firmly believe in someone or something higher than themselves, and yet almost the same overwhelming majority also faces mounting restrictions on their ability to practice the faith in which they believe, there is something wrong with this situation, and that something must be changed. It is unquestionable that freedom of religion and belief includes secularists, but by the same token freedom of religion and belief must be taken seriously by secularists too.

Religion—Together We Can Find the Cure

Does it betray a deficiency of humanity to fail to acknowledge features of humanity that are common to most human beings? That is too harsh, but it is worth stating simply why the issue of religious differences is important, even for people who, as an article of their own faith, summarily dismiss all religion as unworthy of serious consideration. Call religion stupid, call it reactionary, call it evil or call it any of the names by which it is dismissed today in intellectual circles, but there are reasons why it would be madness beyond folly to ignore the place and role of religion in human affairs.

Unfortunately, atheism today is as badly served by certain strident and intolerant atheists as religion is by certain of its worst proponents. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist states what is obvious to all but those referred to: “In the field of religion there are dogmatists of no-faith as there are of faith.”2 Rabbi and philosopher Jonathan Sacks puts the point with equal bluntness:

Atheism deserves better than the new atheists whose methodology consists in criticizing religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing and demonizing religious faith and holding it responsible for all the crimes against humanity.3

But with the new atheists dominating intellectual opinion in much of the Western world and calling crudely for the end of faith, it bears repeating why freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief is vital for the good of all—even for those who disagree with religion.

First, soul freedom, as the answer to how we live with our deepest differences, is vital because negotiating diversity underlies so many of the other great issues in the global era. It may sound abstract and far less important than other urgent problems such as terrorism, famine, HIV/AIDS, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation and shortages of water. But how we live with our deepest differences lies behind so many of the other issues and the way they will be handled. It is therefore crucial and indispensable for answering the others—a golden key to the future, though to a troublesome problem.

Without freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, the escalating culture warring that we already see in many advanced modern countries could spread. We may see a plague of global tensions that could wrack the world and block any progress toward a wiser future for humankind.

Second, soul freedom, as the answer to how we live with our deepest differences, is vital because it touches on the quest for certainty by countless numbers of humans today. For the vast majority of humanity throughout history as well as today, religion has been and still is the ultimate belief that is the very deepest source of human meaning and belonging. Soul freedom, or freedom of thought and conscience, which includes religion and ideology, is therefore foundational and precious to all human beings. It touches on the deepest roots of the meaning and belonging that makes life livable in ways that science alone can never satisfy or even address.

That simple anthropological fact about religion, meaning and belonging has been reinforced today by history, sociology and the cognitive sciences. It is reason enough to take religion seriously, even when disagreeing with it. Nothing is more essential and precious to humans than meaning and belonging, nothing is easier and more natural than answering the ultimate questions through religion, nothing is more vital than freedom of thought and conscience in dealing with meaning and belonging, and nothing is more dangerous than to twist or suppress the human desire for certainty over meaning and belonging. All this should at least be remembered and respected by those who disagree with religion vehemently, and especially by any who have strong aversion to particular religions.

To dismiss all religion without a thought, as if all religions were the same, and as if the critics’ own philosophies of life were not the functional equivalent of religion, is a thoughtlessness bordering on contempt for our human need for meaning and belonging. Religious believers often need reminding that freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief includes the nonreligious and the antireligious, but the nonreligious and the antireligious also need reminding that their secularist beliefs are ultimate beliefs too.

In today’s world it is unself-critical as well as elitist and parochial to dismiss religious beliefs out of hand. No one who understands the state of modern philosophy, for example, can ignore the powerful and sophisticated arguments of eminent modern philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff, all of whom provide powerful rational justification for a warranted faith. It is also foolish to discount faith at the practical level. There is no solid reason to think that humanity will change over this issue. Current talk of a “religionless world” and the “end of faith” is little more than propaganda and wishful thinking, and the claim that religion in the modern world is simply “vestigial” and a “remnant state” left over from earlier times will prove no better.4 With due respect to the diehard advocates of the secularization thesis, religion shows no sign of disappearing from the earth and is not likely to.

Without freedom of thought and conscience, all distortions or denials of the human need for certainty spawn a breeding ground for restlessness, fanaticism and conflict.

Third, soul freedom, as the answer to how we live with our deepest differences, is vital because it touches on many nonreligious and pragmatic considerations that are crucial for governments and the ordering of nations. As the history of religious freedom proves beyond a doubt, vital secular interests are at stake in settling this issue—such as peace, social harmony, stability, political liberties, favorable business conditions, economic prosperity, success in handling immigration, democratic development and longevity, and even lower infant mortality. Correlation between freedom of thought, conscience and religion and these social goods does not mean causality, but what links many of these issues and makes a successful outcome important is the fact that they depend on how diversity is managed. Coerce conformity and stifle diversity and there will be damaging consequences, even in nonreligious spheres such as the economy.

The lesson of history is clear on this point, amplified most loudly in the blunders of James I and Charles I of England over the Puritans who left to flourish in America, and the equal blunders of Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin of France who drove out the Huguenots and helped to sap their own strength and boost the fortunes of their national rivals, the Dutch and the English. It should be pondered by all who would drive religion from public life and from society today.

Without freedom of thought, conscience and religion, all drives toward conformity—whether from totalitarian governments, liberal universities or the gatekeepers of our public squares—end in some degree of coercion that stifles not only freedom but many secular considerations that are more crucial to the powers-that-be than religion itself.