Religious Freedom and Personal Choice
I am fully in favour of religious freedom. In fact, I think that is a vital sub-component of personal liberty in general. The right to believe and worship, if you believe in something to worship, as your conscience compels you, is a necessary part of being free in general. But that freedom resolves to the individual, not to groups, not to the state. You have every right to allow your beliefs to effect the choices you make in the world. But the moment you try and hold another person to the standards of your beliefs you go from exercising your freedom of religion to attacking theirs.
Any of the current debates around freedom of religion today seem to center around someone who is basically claiming that their freedom of religion gives them the right to suppress someone else’s. The gay marriage debate, for example. Marriage is not a religious invention, it is a social arrangement, one that can be found in pretty much every culture regardless of what religion holds sway there. The people opposing marriage between consenting same sex adults because their religion says it is bad are suppressing the religious freedom of those adults.
When you make the move from exercising your own freedom of religion to suppressing other people’s you are on the road to theocracy, which is the opposite of freedom of religion and ultimately of freedom in general. The moment you use state power to impose your religious tenets on people who don’t share them you are there. Now I understand, some people want to think of North America as being formed as a Christian land. And maybe most of the people who moved over here from Europe were some form of Christian. But for starters they were different forms.
Most of the founding fathers of the United States, for example, were Deists. Deists believed that the way to discover god was in observation of the natural world and they rejected most religious scripture. So they would hardly have been in favour of using religious scripture to deny rights to others. Which is why separation of church and state was written right into the nation they formed.
This, of course, glosses right over the fact that the indigenous peoples of North America who were definitely not Christian. And even if we pretend that the Americas were once Christian, or intended to be that way, our immigration has brought in many people of different religions. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, and any number of other creeds. We let them come here, and we told them that they had religious freedom. Can we then in good conscience force our beliefs on them?
And don’t think for a moment I’m forgetting about the Atheists. If their consciences have directed them to the thought that there is nothing to believe in, nothing to worship, then they must have the freedom to act in accordance with how they believe the world to be. They must not be held to standards selected from religious writings. They must even be free to espouse their lack of belief. Freedom of Religion demands nothing less.
Freedom of Religion must be a personal choice. Each person is free to believe as their conscience directs. It is the only way that a society full of so many conflicting ideas about the divine, or lack of divine, can function. And if we attempt to restrain anyone’s personal choice on such a personal issue, we are abdicating our right to such choice ourselves. If we attempt to impose our beliefs on others, we are walking down the road to theocracy and all its dangers.
Nietzsch E. Coyote 