Religious Freedom: Cornerstone of Human Rights

Below is an address by Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, evangelical theologian, author, and Lecturer-At-Large for World Vision International prepared for a forum sponsored by The Institute on Religion & Democracy and The National Association of Evangelicals at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 1983. I have transcribed these words and made them available to readers in light of their continued relevance.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: CORNERSTONE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
“Religious Freedom East and West: The Human Rights Issue for the Eighties”

For the first time in the history of the nations and of the churches of Christendom there exists today a universal verbal consensus in support of the principle of religious liberty.

This consensus is the flowering of a long and arduous process of debate and reflection.

In prechristian times all societies were sacral and bound by a common religious and political loyalty. Religious freedom was first extended by Christian and by Muslim nations to pilgrims in transit to Palestine; later many nations extended it also to foreigners engaged in navigation and commerce. The Protestant Reformation enabled princes to choose their own religion, yet their subjects were expected to adopt the ruler’s faith or to move to a territory where a preferred faith was established. The protection afforded early Mennonites, however, anticipated a widening tolerance. Baptists insistently voiced an accelerating call for religious minority rights.

The United States Constitution broke new ground: it refused to leave religious liberty concerns and other human rights to determination by the majority. The very first article stipulated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” the concept of freedom of religion was embraced in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Despite the verbal affirmation of religious liberty in international and ecclesiastical documents, most societies and an incredibly large number of human beings still don’t possess it. United Nations signatory states are, moreover, unable to agree on a common definition of religious freedom. The subsequent Helsinki Declaration in 1975 espouses the principle that alone or together, individuals are free to profess and practise religion or religious convictions according to the dictates of conscience, yet the document reserves internal jurisdiction to each state to interpret this principle in its own way. Radical thinkers redefine it to mean something that generations before Freud and Marx would have found unthinkable, that religion is a product of neurosis and that deliverance from neurosis entails freedom from religion.

Today, religious freedom is bartered not only by totalitarian rulers seeking to advance official atheism, but by free world leaders as well who adjust human rights considerations to military and economic priorities. The time is highly propitious, therefore, for a conference that focuses anew on religious liberty concerns.

Despite the impressive verbal support for religious liberty, no consensus exists on its theological or sociological basis. The crisis touching religious freedom therefore runs much deeper than its atheistic totalitarian repression and its restriction by authoritarian and by insistently theistic nations.

My thesis is fourfold: first, that biblical theism alone provides adequate intellectual struts for a meaningful doctrine of religious liberty and for other human rights, while non-Theistic views render such rights merely postulatory and problematical; second, that religious liberty as a universal human right is appropriate and indispensable to human beings irrespective of creed; third, that the right of religious freedom in fact shelters and nurtures all other human rights; and finally, that evangelicals who value human freedoms as the gift of the Creator, whom we seek in good conscience to worship and serve, should engage more actively in championing religious freedom everywhere as well as in promoting the religious freedom of Christians in secular American society.

Serious discussion of religious freedom begins with the recognition of religious freedom as a basic human right, a right whose suppression strips away essential components of human dignity. Religious Liberty is not mere religious tolerance, suspended as that is upon the arbitrary will of rulers. If religious freedom is advocated only for pragmatic reasons, it can and will be sacrificed to expediency.

Modern secular scholars depict supernatural religion as hostile to human rights in view of epochs of intolerance and inquisition. But the most vicious assault on human rights has been inspired by naturalistic philosophies like Nazi Socialism and Russian and Chinese Marxism.

The most brutal repression of human rights and maltreatment of human beings has been implemented by movements launched by foes of biblical theism. Some even misrepresent revealed religion as hostile to human rights.

Western humanists, to be sure, champion human rights, although humanism as a philosophy provides no metaphysical basis adequate to preserve them in distinction from other principles which it reduces to a socio-cultural byproduct of a particular period in history.

Universal and permanent human rights are logically inconsistent with the humanist theses that personality is an accident in the universe and that human nature is evolving. We cannot empirically extrapolate unchanging values and final truths either from a world of impersonal processes or merely from the human situation. I commend humanists who promote human rights, even if they wholly lack a consistent philosophical basis for justifying them; far better were they to connect their social agenda with an overarching theistic worldview able to support an absolute standard of rights and other fixed ethical imperatives.

On the basis of God’s scripturally revealed purpose evangelical Christians affirm values that transcend all human cultures and societies and human rights constituting the norms of civilization. Objectively grounded human rights are logically defensible on this foundation of the supernatural creation of man with a unique universal dignity. It is no accident that much of the rest of the world overlooked rights recognized in the biblically-enlightened West, and that early leaders of the modern human rights cause were influenced by the Decalogue and the biblical doctrine of human dignity.

Secular philosophy today not only is incapable of defending human rights but, in the absence of absolute values, it increasingly also encroaches upon and erodes them by a selective reduction of human value and worth; so, for example, in sexual ethics, the rights of fetal life are neglected while those of homosexuals are energetically pursued.

The historical connection between revealed religion and freedom has nonetheless been disconcertingly ambiguous. Theists have not always championed religious liberty as they ought.

Leo Pfeffer even holds that “compulsion in religion is a heritage of the monotheistic worship which Moses commanded must, under penalty of death, be accorded to a jealous God” (Church, State, and Freedom, Boston, Beacon Press, 1953). But as much as the Hebrews protected their religious heritage against alien influences, they did not compel Gentiles throughout the Near East to adopt revelatory monotheism; in fact, they lacked missionary passion. While death was the stipulated penalty in the Old Testament theocracy for anyone in the Hebrew community who departed from strict monotheism (Deut. 13:6-9; Lev. 24:16), the New Testament by contrast presupposes pluralistic nations in which state and church occupy different spheres of influence and fulfill different functions under the one sovereign will of God. The state is not to be the servant of the church nor is the church to be the servant of the state. In New Testament perspective the state serves a limited function; it is not the source and stipulator of human liberties but rather is to preserve and promote divinely given rights in a political framework of justice and order enabling human beings to voluntarily do what God requires.

Yet Constantinian Christianity, as we are painfully aware, revived the confessional state and repressed any threat to imperial and ecclesial unity. Christianity and Islam as well as Socialism and Communism have as historical phenomena sponsored pernicious religious repression. Not until post-Reformation Christianity in sixteenth-century Holland was religious tolerance extended to Anabaptists, Jews and people of other faiths. And it is only fair to concede that evangelical Christians have not in the recent past been the active vanguard of human rights concerns, including religious liberty issues; they have neither aggressively condemned rights violations nor aggressively championed the preservation of rights except when and as their own interest has been involved. Some evangelicals, worse yet, have dismissed the concern for rights as an irrelevance, or as unnecessary detraction from evangelistic priorities, and a few even give the impression that the redeemed people of God inherit rights that mankind generally lacks or has forfeited. The historical situation invites the reactionary view that an ideal society, defined as essentially humanistic, requires the subordination of church, synagogue and mosque.

Yet a necessary link exists between Judeo-Christian faith and human freedom, as we have indicated, since biblical beliefs best anchor and illumine the values essential to social wellbeing. The evangelical view is that human rights are grounded in the revealed will of God, that religious liberty and political liberty are alike based on the Bible. The attempt to ground human rights other than theologically cannot effectively sustain itself. The crucial issue therefore arises whether religious freedom, properly understood, requires freedom from God or freedom for God, freedom from man or freedom under God for man, freedom from conscience or freedom for conscience.

A major weakness of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 was and is its failure to clarify the source and sanction of human rights that signatory powers are required to honor. Since all particular states are called upon to give constitutional guarantees of these rights, the individual states cannot themselves be the source of these rights, but rather are answerable for preserving them. Yet the U.N. Declaration does not identify the transcendent source of rights. It leaves unstated whether or not a superstate — perhaps the United Nations itself — might ultimately be viewed as the source and stipulator of human rights. Were Marxist or other totalitarian powers to dominate the United Nations, could they then manipulate the content of human rights on the premise that all particular nations are answerable to the catalogue of rights that this international or supernational body imposes? That eventuality would not only render the content of human rights fluid; it would also suspend it on the whim of totalitarian rulers.

The American political charter documents made explicit what the U.N. Declaration later obscured: that God the transcendent Creator is the source and ground of human rights, and that human beings universally bear these rights by virtue of divine creation.The Declaration of Independence expressly affirms human rights on the ground of the sovereign creative act of the moral Maker of mankind. All men, it states plainly, are “endowed by their Creator” with certain inalienable rights. This transcendent theological referent excludes the legitimacy of any tyrannical suspension of human rights and instead requires the state to recognize universally given prerogatives that belong to the dignity of the human person as a supernatural endowment.

The U.N. Declaration in 1948 included religious freedom as part of its agenda of human rights. It affirmed that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Since some religiously-specific nations rule out changing one’s religion under risk of death or exclusion from the community and restrict the right to pursue evangelism, this affirmation is doubly important. The right was transformed into a legal obligation for ratifying States in 1966 by the International Covenant on Civil And Political Rights whose Article 18 affirms everyone’s “freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice…”

Because of subsequent Muslim pressures, however, when in November 1981, after 20 years of committee work, the U.N. Declaration on the elimination of religious discrimination was approved references were deleted to the right “to adopt” (and hence “to change”) one’s religion, and only the right to have ” a religion was retained. Article 1 consequently reads that “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion…shall include freedom to have a religion….” The final article in the 1981 Declaration does affirm that nothing therein is to be construed as restricting any right defined in the 1948 Declaration or in the 1966 International Covenant, but it is disappointingly weaker as a document on religious liberty.

The 1966 International Covenant and the 1981 Declaration, moreover, blur the sense of religious freedom by perpetuating the confusing reference found already in the 1948 Declaration to freedom of “religion or belief.” Since the meaning of religion is itself widely in debate, and recent philosophers (e.g. Paul Tillich) equate the religious referent with whatever is man’s object of “ultimate concern” (and atheism is the ultimate concern of some contemporaries) freedom of religion is here rendered ambiguous. Some would accordingly ground religious liberty only in a respect for the vast multiplicity of human faiths and beliefs or even base it on skepticism over the possibility of arriving at truth of any kind.

My point is not that religious liberty should be withheld from those whose beliefs we find radically objectionable or whose beliefs may diametrically oppose our own. But it does no service to the cause of religious freedom to assume that the term “religion” (or, “religious”) has a universally agreed content, since anything and everything from devil-worship to human sacrifice has been commended as religion. Either by religion we designate specific religions or we designate nothing specific at all. Freedom does not establish human existence as a self-enclosed life without moral norms and duties. Either human rights and liberties have a fixed and definable content that excludes alternatives or human rights include the right to dehumanize human nature and religious freedom becomes freeedom for its contradiction and negation. If one infringes the rights of others or endangers the morals of others in the name of religious liberty, liberty becomes irresponsibility. Religious freedom is not a rubric that license liberty to do anything and everything in the name of religion. Either the Ten Commandments provide a divine prototype of enduring rights or religious liberty consists ultimately in freedom from God.

This is not to deny that religious freedom is an unconditional civil or legal right. No finite agency has the right to invade man’s inner spiritual life. No corporate authority, whether ecclesial or political, can be considered absolute, since the sinfulness of humanity permeates even social bureaucracies. Human beings have in respect to religious concerns a right to immunity from coercion in civil society.

In view of this the effort of ecclesiastical majorities to influence governments not to grant religious freedom to those of other persuasions and to preserve a privileged role for thhemselves has in recent times been aggressively challenged. Even where the constitutions of some nations still give special legal recognition to the Church of Rome, the civil right of religious liberty is now acknowledged. Concordats with Argentina, Portugal and Spain, for example,  been modified in the interest of civil religious freedom.

To affirm civil religious liberty, however, need not expressly presuppose that human beings have an intrinsic right to religious liberty, or even that an individual’s religious beliefs and commitments should be free from either ecclesiastical or parental coercion. What we are due as citizens need not coincide with what ecclesiastical bodies hold is due us in other relationships.

Vatican II (1962-65) did not affirm religious liberty as a positive right fundamental to human dignity and universally intrinsic to human personhood, a right shared by all human beings irrespective of their religion or lack of it. Instead, it acknowledged only What scholars call a “negative right”, that is, the right of immunity from religious coercion. The encyclical Dignitatis Humanae (1965) implies that every human person has a private realm and inner relationships in which he must individually and responsibly decide matters of religious reality and truth.

Yet Dignitatis Humane refused to separate discussion of religious freedom from the question of religious duty on the ground that privilege inescapably implies responsibility.

Every person has the right to immunity both from coercion to act against conscience, andd from impediment against acting according to conscience. Not a single human thought or act, therefore, is exempt from conscience. In short, everyone has a right to do one’s religious duty, that is, to worship God as conscience dictates. Vatican II, moreover, resisted the widespread modern notion that all religions are of equal worth. But it did not recognize any right of those holding other religions to propagate error.

The interrelation of religious freedom and conscience remains one of the most important and difficult facets of religious liberty discussion. Religious freedom is not unconditional in the sense of dissolving the obligation to be true to one’s conscience. That human beings knowingly and universally do act contrary to conscience is a basic emphasis of the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of mankind. But the right to act according to conscience is recognized, for example, in the recent provision for pacifists of alternatives to military service. But to act according to conscience is not necessarily to perform good acts. Public expressions of conscience are not wholly exempt from legal penalties.

The traditional Roman Catholic emphasis on religious tolerance implied that the church should feel humane understanding toward those who in good faith and conscience profess religions that the church considers false. Such understanding did not, notably, involve any acknowledgment of the right of those professing another religion to proclaim and promulgate it. In recent decades, however, the Church of Rome has supplemented this traditional emphasis on humane understanding by an additional emphasis on respect for others irrespective of the content of their religious beliefs. In December, 1976, Pope Paul VI declared that religious freedom is “intimately linked with the dignity and the personal dynamisms of man” (Osservatore Romano, Dec. 9-10, 1976).

Freedom of conscience means that those committed to other faiths and those claiming to be committed to none must not only be respected but also accorded equal rights. Yet this is not to affirm the inviolable sacredness of human conscience, for in that case no distinction can be made between good and bad conscience. An inner compulsion of what is immoral cannot be defended in the name of human rights or duties, not even in the name of religious freedom. When polygamy was banned earlier in this century, the prohibition turned on what, contrary to Mormonism, was perceived by the rest of American society as immoral. The Hindu practice of suttee, that is, the immolation of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband, is now forbidden. Human conscience is fallible; it needs correction and guidance by a transcendent norm or, more specifically, evangelical Christian stress, by the Word of God.

The reason no one should be compelled to act contrary to conscience is not that conscience is always right, but that no divine or good power motivates one to act against conscience. The apostolic imperative was not simply to “obey conscience rather than men” but to “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). In short, religious liberty shelters liberty of conscience, in that man is ultimately responsible not to his fellowmen but to God for the decisions he makes and the options he pursues. The apostles say nothing about an absolute or wholly unqualified right to repudiate God. What they recognize is that man chooses whom he will serve and bears the consequences of such decision not as determined by state or society but by the final judgment of God. The will of God constitutes the ultimate justification of religious voluntarism. A mechanically imposed faith is not genuine faith; a coerced commitment has value neither to God nor to man.

Religious liberty is not only a fundamental human right but it shelters also the whole broad spectrum of human rights. It is the mainspring of freedom. The right to worship and serve the true and living God carries with it all the divinely vouchsafed rights and duties. Religious liberty involves much more than the right to hold one’s faith and to express it both in worship and practice, to propagate the Gospel and to persuade and teach it to others, and to give religious education to one’s children. It embraces also the right to peaceful assembly and association, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, and freedom to leave one’s country and to return. Deprivation of such rights impairs religious freedom. If curtailment of one’s political and civil liberties rightly raises anxieties about religious liberty, curtailment of one’s religious liberty inevitably prepares the way for many strictures on political and civil liberty. Freedom is comprehensive and indivisible in principle; it cannot be fragmented without jeopardy to the whole. Thus the whole bastion of universal rights and duties rests upon a theological basis in a double sense. Although the U.N. Declaration (1948) did not address the question of the interdependence of human rights, the priority of religious liberty has during the past generation gained increasing recognition. Paul VI remarked that among fundamental human rights “religious liberty occupies a place of primary importance” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 30) The statement of the central committee of the World Council of Churches (Chichester, 1949) is even more pointed: “Religious freedom is the condition and guarantee of all true freedom”. The Bible grounds true freedom at every level expressly in God: Israel’s deliverance from totalitarian pagan enslavement is God’s free choice; civil government is divinely ordained to maintain a free course for justice and order (Rom. 13:3ff.); Christ Jesus frees humans enslaved to sin (John 8:36); and the creation itself will one day be set free supernaturally for the liberty for which it now yearns (Rom 8:21f).

Despite international covenants that complement and supplement the U.N. Declaration, religious intolerance continues in many countries. Although totalitarian regimes active in the United Nations legally recognize the right of religious freedom, such governments are among the first to abridge it and to substitute in its place religious tolerance suspended upon the will of the state. The political tolerance level varies from totalitarian state to totalitarian state, but restriction runs the gamut from official efforts to destroy religion to discrimination against those who personally cling to religious faith. Despite constitutional guarantees totalitarian countries repeatedly violate assurances of religious freedom even while they seek to persuade the outside world that religious rights are respected. States whose official philosophy is atheistic routinely practice religious intolerance. The fact that Marxist persecution often strengthens religious commitment and purifies religious belief spurs the totalitarian bureaucracies to greater refinement of their systematic and sporadic restrictions on religious freedom.

No governments have been as inhumanely intolerant as the Nazi socialist regime in Hitler’s Germany and the communist regimes in Stalin’s Russia and in Mao’s China. Post-Mao China, for the moment at least, seems to be relaxing religious intolerance more than post-Stalin Russia, Bulgaria, and Romania. After President Carter raised the subject of China’s resistance to the importation of Bibles, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping in 1981 initiated a constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of worship, although China’s official policy remains the abolition of religion. While atheistic states acknowledge the freedom of individuals to hold any religious commitment privately, they seriously restrict the right of individuals to publicly express or practice religious beliefs and their implications. Both in Russia and in China the communist regimes approve a pro-government ecclesial agency to negotiate with all churches, and groups that seek to preserve their independence have difficulty functioning legally and are suspected of being unpatriotic and in league with foreign powers.

In the Soviet Union Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders remain in prison, unfree to teach the irreligious convictions in their own country. OneFreeWorld agency, CREED, has a caseload of almost 100 persecuted Christians in Russia for whom it intercedes. Only after almost five years in the basement of the American Embassy, where they sought refuge after serving discriminatory sentences in prison and labor camps, did Siberian Pentecostals recently get permission to emigrate to Israel. Observance of prescribed rituals has been impeded, religious teaching curtailed, church properties taken over or restricted in use, publication and distribution of religious literature hindered or prohibited. KGB officials have disguised themselves as secret carriers of scarce religious literature to gain entry into Christian homes; once literature was accepted and stored police have conducted house searches and placed the occupants under arrest. Wives and mothers and friends of imprisoned Christian workers have been arrested and fined for gathering to pray for the release of prisoners.

In Romania restrictions on trained pastors are such that some Baptist clergy serve a dozen churches; not only printing of religious literature, but even its duplication by typewriter, is impeded. Recently 300 Baptists had to align themselves between their local church and bulldozers to keep city officials in Iasi from levelling it. After it had been damaged in a 1977 earthquake government officials for the next five years refused to grant permission for needed repairs and then tried to demolish it.

The right of religious freedom clearly has immense political significance. For it affirms a fundamental sphere of life in which civil government has neither divine authority nor human competence to act. In the last analysis political liberty and restraints on government alike rest on the sovereign God who has published His will in conscience and Scripture. Duties to God are not to be invoked to undermine the state’s legitimate authority, nor are the state’s political powers to be deployed either to prohibit or to propagate religion. Neither on the grounds of race, color, religion, culture nor political conviction are human beings to be deprived of religious liberty or of the other human rights it shelters.

In recent years social revolutionaries have confused and clouded the understanding of religious liberty by invoking it against government hostility to churchmen who demand swift and radical political alternatives. Special concern for the exploited and oppressed was indeed a hallmark of the biblical prophets; nowhere does the passion for individual worth and social justice run deeper than in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. But the authentically biblical character of political concern is rendered problematical when its ecclesial champions approve violence and fund and promote revolutionary means for achieving social change, or where they tie their call for justice to Marxist analysis and solutions. An essentially politico-economic program, one that lacks sound biblical supports at that, is then advanced under the banner of religious liberty despite the fact that socio-historical implementation of Marxist ideology has notably impeded religious freedom and suspended human rights on the will of the ruling class. Religious freedom does indeed include, as the World Council of Churches Fifth Assembly in Nairobi put it, “the right and duty of religious bodies to criticize the ruling powers when necessary” on the basis of religious principles. But politicization of the church’s message should not be sanctified as indispensable to the preservation of religious liberty.

Ecumenical leaders acknowledge subtle and important shifts in the World Council’s orientation of religious liberty as proposals for economic change and altered social structures were advanced under this canopy. As national socio-political changes were comprehended as aspects of the Gospel, a program that had earlier been assimilated to human rights discussion generally was now linked expressly to religious liberty. Political activities were thereby declared religious; coercive and revolutionary overthrow of social structures in a Marxist direction became biblical rebellion and was promoted as an implementation of human rights and more expressly as a matter of religious freedom. The discussion of individual rights was transmuted into a question of collective rights with the objective of implementing new social structures, and criticism was concentrated more on the deficiencies of the Western democracies than on repression-laden totalitarian lands. Clearly, not all politico-economic criticism that rises from religious conviction should be taken uncritically as an authentic expression of religious freedom concerns.

My observation is not intended to excuse or to gloss human rights violations in dictatorial societies hostile to communism or in democratic societies that also need more fully to implement the rights they affirm. Human rights infractions should be protested wherever they occur; indeed, no earthly paradise of fully achieved human duties and rights anywhere exists.

The fact that the United States has economic ties to Saudi Arabia, military pacts with Turkey, and deep links to Israel in the interest of stability in the Near East, is no reason for ignoring vital religious liberty concerns in those countries. Most Muslims lands provide little or no freedom to change one’s religion. In Saudi Arabia and in Turkey it is almost impossible to establish a church even for expatriots. In Indonesia, where many Muslims become Christian, the legislature has banned the works of a Christian author responding to publications that distort and attack Christianity.

The Israeli Knesset currently is formulating a human rights policy. The proclamation of Israel’s independence in 1948 gave assurance that the state of Israel “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education, and culture, will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions, and will loyally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter.” Unlike Islamic countries in the Middle East which declare Islam to be the state religion, Israel does not make Judaism the religion of the state; Israeli leaders characterize the state as Jewish only in an ethnic or national sense. Israel proportions its approval of missionaries to the size of their ecclesial constituencies and encourages the displacement of missionary effort by dialogue. The government, in fact, pays the salaries of Christian and Islamic clergy on a proportionate basis.

In 1977 the Knesset, after some clamor for an anti-missionary law, adopted an anti-enticement law with steep penalties for any donor or recipient. The minister of justice, defending the law on the ground that the Holocaust has precipitated “a natural desire to see to it that no people will be lost in the Jewish faith in an undue and unjustified process, denies that its intention was to impede “normal educational and philanthropic activities.”

Ugly incidents, largely on the part of Orthodox Israelis, who also protest the secular character of the state, sporadically exhibit religious hostility to Christians. Such incidents have included damage to church properties, destruction of the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem by arson, and disruption of a performance of Handel’s Messiah, in this case by a Mormon choir. Outbursts by extremists must be distinguished from government policy, but unless they are boldly challenged by those who approve government policy that policy is easily weakened for the sake of political considerations. American Jewish leaders quickly and commendably joined Christians in expressing dismay to the Israeli ministry of religion.

I offer in conclusion five brief observations focusing religious liberty concerns in evangelical perspective.

1. We must be alert to government encroachment upon religious freedom in America no less than elsewhere. Critical issues include public school exclusion of a forefront emphasis of the nation’s charter political documents, the supernatural creation of man as a creature divinely endowed with inalienable rights; discrimination against religious speech in voluntary meetings on public school campuses; the state’s redefinition of the legitimate scope of church ministry so that religious schools, orphanages and nursing homes (activities that churches conducted long before government awakened to them) must comply to government requirements not merely in matters of health and safety but philosophically; and finally, a denigration of the meaning and value of human life through legalization of abortion by choice.

2. At the same time religious movements must not misuse or exploit public institutions for religious ends. Religious liberty involves specific responsibilities of the churches and other religious movements not only to society but also to the state. Church bodies are obliged to keep the civil laws unless the governing regime is notoriously corrupt and itself subverts the norms of civilized society or unless those laws contravene conscience in which case dissenters should inform the authorities and be ready to suffer the consequences rather than to try to circumvent them. The courts properly investigate the sincerity with which beliefs are held and the propriety with which they are applied. In the name of Islamic religion Muslims put to death members of their own family if they defect to atheism or convert to a non-Islamic religion; Jonestown approved mass murder; others found violence as a means of social improvement. There is legitimacy in the requirement that leaders of religious movements respect crime laws, the exclusion of essentially political activity from nontaxable religious ministry, and the taxation of churches for related business income. When Jonestown became a base for Marxism it became susceptible to government investigation and exposures; its murder-suicide of over 900 members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple church was evidence that investigation came too late.

3. We must earnestly protect the religious freedom of all who come to our shores, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian or whatever–even while we passionately proclaim to all the Gospel of Christ. Religion that can perpetuate itself only by depriving others of liberty is not worth having. An evangelical faith is truly strong if and when it becomes a symbol of freedom of religious belief to those who face death because of human rights violations even in this 20th century or who rot in prison because they would live in good conscience. Voluntary religion, unaligned with a confessional state and unsupported by public taxation, has enabled American evangelicals to number 55 million and to help extend Christianity worldwide as the first living faith with a global presence. We must assure those who come with other faiths, even those that disallow their adherents to change their religion, that we have nothing to fear from a society in which all are free to worship God as they will, and that we shall help to preserve for all who come to America the right in good conscience to change their religion if they aspire to do so or to worship if they so prefer in the tradition of their fathers. “Choose you this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15) is as appropriate and indispensable to evangelical proclamation as is “you must be born again” (John 3:3).

4. We face a specially opportune moment, I think, for American Jews and evangelical Christians to forge an exemplary alliance that puts principle above propaganda, makes a common stand against religious intolerance at home and abroad, and yet fully sustains the freedom to promulgate religious beliefs and to evangelize. European Jews were once great believers in the tolerant pluralistic state; America as a pluralistic nation has been a land of religious freedom for Jew and Christian alike. Instead of silence when Christians misread the violence of fanatics as official attempts to eliminate a Christian presence in Israel, or when Jews brand American evangelistic efforts as expressions of anti-Semitism, let us be counted on the side of truth and liberty knowing that Messiah at His coming judges us all by the light we have had and that in the present civilizational darkness freedom of religion is a bright beacon of promise.

5. In that same spirit I extend a hand also to humanists and others who, even if their alien and contrabiblical philosophies seem to many of us unpromising, nonetheless, would share in the defense and promotion of authentic human rights in a bleak age of totalitarian tyranny. It is not the role of government to judge between rival systems of metaphysics and to legislate one among others; rather its role is to protect and preserve a free course for its constitutional guarantees.