Religious Liberty Is a Religious Value

My comments at the Grace Agenda pre-func men’s conference.

Introduction

One of the downsides of our failure to recognize that secularism functions as a religion is that as a consequence we fail to recognize that secularism as a system gives birth to certain values that are in fact religious values.

One such value would be the urge to flatten, the impulse that we call egalitarianism. This is the idea that we must make everything equal. This is a fruit that is consistent with the nature of this tree.

But there are other values that are not native to secularism, but which they like to use in times of transition, claiming them as their own. An example of this would be the value of religious liberty. This is a fruit that is not consistent with the basic nature of secularism . . . it is an orange tied onto an apple tree.

Epistemic Ju Jitsu

The president of Turkey, Erdogan, once said that democracy was like a street car. You ride it until you get where you want to go, and then you get off.

This is a phenomenon we often encounter in our discussions and debates. Non-Christians, as they engage with Christians, will often appeal to Christian values. This tricks the Christians into thinking that there is at least partial agreement. Non-believers are often very adept at this—as they call Christians to be consistent with our premises, we mistakenly think they somehow share them. But in reality they do not share them at all. On this issue, what this does practically is that they parlay our commitment to religious liberty to carve out a space for them, even though they don’t value it, or don’t value it in the same way we do, or for the same reasons.

An Islamic worldview does not value liberty of conscience or religious liberty at all. In certain more liberal Muslim societies, they will put up with you, which is not the same thing as thinking you have the right to think what you think. Other Muslims think they have a commitment to it, but this is because they have been “Westernized,” which is actually code for “Christianized.” Muslims are great so long as they act like Christians.

The same kind of thing goes for a thorough-going secular society. There is nothing inherent in the secular view of the world that would make religious liberty a necessity. In secularism, demos is the god of the system. But in the very nature of the case, it is necessary for the god to speak with a unified voice. Dissenters are disruptive of that. Nobody wants a schizophrenic god, and dissenters from the dominant paradigm make it seem like the god is scattered, or erratic, or mentally unstable. It is far easier to just shut the dissenter up.

Every society has a point past which there is no appeal. When you get to that point you have identified the god of that system. In Saudi Arabia, it is Allah. In secular democracies it is demos, the people. In a Christian republic it would be the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now obviously, for a believing Christian, this final authority in unbelieving societies would be an idol. And how can we support the enthronement of an idol?

The only way that Christians could have been persuaded to go along with secularism was because they were persuaded that society could run along fine with nothing being enthroned. We didn’t enthrone an idol . . . there is nothing there but air. But this is political atheism, and atheism is idolatrous as well.   

Now one of the features of this kind of idol is its fragility. As an idol, it does not have the authority, or wisdom, or strength, or security, of the living God. And it is also the case that the god of the system, in order for it to be a functioning system, has to speak with a united voice. This is why dissent from within the demos cannot be permitted.

The living God also will brook no rival, as the first two of the Ten Commandments attest. But because He is the omnipotent one, it has to be acknowledged that He is a bit more . . . secure than that. He prohibits the instantiation of any kind of formal idolatry, obviously. In a Christian republic, there would be church bells, but no minarets, for example. The public space would belong to Jesus. But dissent, discussion, debate, would absolutely be okay. Why wouldn’t it be?

What many people believe to be a problem of religious toleration is actually a problem with our immigration system. We are more than capable of allowing fifteen Hindus to come and visit Disneyland. But if we allowed fifteen million of them, the problem would not be presence of Hindus in America. That would be like eating 18 maple bars and then concluding that the reason you felt so sick is that you must be allergic to the maple flavor. It is not a matter of allergies at all.

Now let us say that we have a country—America, say—that has a long tradition of respecting religious liberty. We will not inquire (at this time) into the factors that created this tradition . . . because we are going to get there in a minute. All we need to know now is the fact that they have it. Now suppose in the name of that religious liberty, that country opens its borders to millions of people who represent a tradition that does not respect religious liberty at all. Not a bit.

It is sort of like when the apostle Paul says that we are supposed to reject a divisive man (Tit. 3:10). If you think that rejecting a divisive man is inconsistent with your views on broader catholicity, being a form of division, how do you handle it when that divisive man blows up your church? This goes back to Aristotle’s question about the kind of behavior that democracies like over against the kind of behavior that will preserve democracies.

Religious liberty is not a value that all humans share equally, regardless of their philosophy, worldview, or religious. Religious liberty is itself a religious value.

So if you want ordered liberty under law, with the maximum amount of liberty for dissenters, the best place to get it from would be the Christians. Simply compare the liberties of a Christian in a Muslim state and those of a Muslim in a Christian state. I trust Christians to respect the rights of secularists far more than I trust the secularist to respect the rights of Christians.

Conclusion

If there is no such thing as neutrality—and there isn’t—then there can be no moral or ethical system that springs up out of that neutrality. Soil that isn’t there cannot be used to grow anything.

The secularists take credit for religious liberty the same way squatters take credit for the house that they just seized.