Historically, there have been few principled defenders of
religious liberty and, in truth, there are few today. To appreciate this, it is
useful to consider the various factors needed to render religious liberty as something sensible. There is a balancing
act here. One needs to believe that religion is important but that, at the same
time, there is a value to having a personal conscious.
The obvious threat to religious liberty has been traditional
religions themselves. If you believe in capital T TRUTH and that you are in
possession of it, then why should you tolerate people who are in error? Worse,
what if these people are not only obstinate in their heathen and heretical beliefs,
but insist on passing their errors on to their innocent children or uneducated
neighbors? From this perspective, working for the Spanish Inquisition can be
seen as a humanitarian gesture. Your main job is to explain to people how they
are in error. The only people who are going to be tortured or killed are those
obstinate heretics who refuse to admit that they are wrong and have, therefore,
brought their calamity upon themselves.
To say that religion has often been a threat to religious
liberty does not mean that secularism offers any protection. Keep in mind that
to desire to protect religious liberty, one needs to still assume that
religious beliefs and practices are actually important. One thinks of the
example of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a materialist if not an outright atheist.
This did not mean that he supported religious liberty for atheists or anyone
else. On the contrary, it was precisely because Hobbes rejected all religious
dogma that he had no problem allowing the king of his Leviathan state to
enforce whatever religion he chose. Since no religion is true, the only
legitimate purpose for a religion is as a signaling device to demonstrate one’s
loyalty to the regime. The king should make an official religion, the more
ridiculous the better. The people who are willing to say that they believe this
nonsense show that they understand the importance of everyone submitting
themselves to the authority of one person as the only solution to the war of
all against all. Those people who insist on maintaining their loyalty to some other
absurdity, presumably because they actually believe it, are a threat to public
order and need to be killed. For example, Charles I had to deal with English
Puritans who cared about priestly vestments as well as incense and candles in
church. Before long, these Puritans were also objecting to Charles’ right to tax.
They then plunged the country into a civil war and chopped Charles' head off. All of this could have been
avoided if Charles had been willing to properly crack down on religious dissent.
The confused association between secularism and religious
liberty comes about because secularists have hijacked the term “religious
liberty” in an Orwellian fashion and have used it to mean something quite
different. The secularist version of religious liberty is a rigged “heads I
win, tails you lose” game in which the State is not neutral regarding religion
but actively secular. Religion is then banned from the public sphere to the
privacy of the home. Parents may be allowed to personally be religious but with
few resources to prevent their children from exercising their “religious
liberty” and leaving the faith. If the metaphysics of gender ideology can be supported with public funds more easily than the metaphysics of the Trinity then you do not have religious liberty.
In truth, religious liberty is an accidental outgrowth of
the Protestant Reformation. While Luther and Calvin were not proponents of
religious liberty and in fact were, in many respects, worse than their Catholic
opponents, Protestantism personalized the process of salvation. Either one
needed to affirm that only Jesus (and not the works of the Church) can save or
be one of the Elect, chosen from before creation for salvation. If people are saved as
individuals and not as members of any established church then
forcing people to follow the dictates of even the “right” church is useless for
actually saving souls.
The Protestant focus on individual salvation is crucial here
because it allows for both components of religious liberty to simultaneously
exist. Clearly, religion is important and people need to be allowed to practice
the “right” kind in order to save their souls. That being said, since God has his own highly circuitous route to how people might come to believe the
right things, people should be allowed to persist in their false beliefs until
God, and not the State, shows them the light. To be clear, one does not have to
be a Protestant, to be a friend of religious liberty. That being said, there are
grounds to suspect the religious liberty bona fides of anyone who has not been
influenced by Protestant thought.
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