Religious Liberty
Items on free exercise of religion, freedom of conscience, and religious persecution
An Important Anniversary
Thu 17 Jul 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joseph Loconte
Earlier this week President Bush marked the tenth anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), the legislation that authorizes U.S. sanctions against governments that violate international protections for religious liberty. The law established the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and mandates that the State Department monitor religious liberty in every nation and identify the worst offenders. Also this week, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus Task Force for International Religious Freedom (TIRF) is holding a conference to celebrate the International Religious Freedom Act and discuss its ongoing importance in U.S. foreign policy.
No Place to Call Home
Sun 29 Jun 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joseph Loconte
One of the most serious matters in religion is the issue of apostasy, that is, the act of renouncing one’s faith. Christianity has a long and troubled history with apostasy. For centuries the Catholic Church treated apostates—or those suspected of apostasy—as criminals worthy of persecution, imprisonment, and death. Protestants often took a similar line, especially when they found themselves in positions of political power.
Islam’s record of confrontation with apostates is no less oppressive and violent. The obvious difference, of course, is that much of the Muslim world continues to react to apostasy with fear, contempt, and violence.
The Renaissance and Religious Toleration
Thu 26 Jun 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joe Loconte
Erasmus of Rotterdam’s recognition that “Compulsion is incompatible with sincerity, and nothing is pleasing to Christ unless it is voluntary” is one of the foundations of Christian humanism.
Historians debate the most significant achievements of the Renaissance, the cultural revival that began in Italy and swept through Europe from roughly the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. There were scientific advances, a return to the study of the classics, and political theorizing a la Machiavelli. A visit to Florence provides an almost overwhelming sense of the artistic accomplishments of the era. Yet a crucial aspect of Renaissance history is often overlooked: its contribution to religious liberty, an ideal whose origins have implications for our own age of religious violence.
Two Kinds of Tolerance
Tue 10 Jun 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joe Loconte
Modern democracies like the Netherlands have turned the principle of religious pluralism into a pretext for moral agnosticism.
A visitor to Amsterdam, whatever his itinerary, will be greeted by a somewhat macabre mix of European Christianity and postmodern paganism. In the historic city center it is not majestic cathedrals that catch the eye. Rather, it is the ubiquitous storefront sex shops. They come in several varieties, offering merchandise, voyeurism, and intimate encounters. There are church buildings as well, to be sure, but they seem out of place. Despite the streams of tourists, they struggle to compete for attention. Some houses of worship have been converted into bars or other secular establishments. The “Old Church Coffee Shop,” for example, sits adjacent the “Sexyland Erotic Supermarket.” It is a city that seems thoroughly obsessed with sex.
McClay at the White House
Tue 06 May 2008 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay recently spoke at a reception in the East Room of the White House honoring the 265th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson. You can read a transcript of his talk here, courtesy of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.
So let it be for his ideas that we honor Jefferson, above all else. And for the cause of human freedom and human dignity that he so eloquently championed. His failings may weigh against the man, but not against the cause for which he labored so heroically. That should be a lesson to us today. Like Jefferson, we all are carriers of purposes far larger than we know. Purposes whose full realization cannot be achieved in our lifetime, or even be fully understood by us, but which we are called to carry forward as faithfully as we can—as charges to keep.
Death in a Jerusalem Yeshiva
Mon 24 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
Where Do They Go from Here?
The murder in early March of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem established some disturbing precedents. To begin with, it was the first major outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since 2004 and the first in Israel as a whole since a suicide-bomb blast in Tel Aviv in 2006. Second, it was committed by an Arab resident of East Jerusalem with no previously known ties to terrorist groups. That shook the nerves not only of Jewish residents of West Jerusalem, in which the murders took place, but of Arab East Jerusalemites worried about potential reprisals against them. Whatever their views on Israeli-Palestinian relations in general, East Jerusalemites have not usually been involved in major violence between Jews and Arabs. Third, an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, with which Israel is attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement of issues leading to a Palestinian state, praised the murder without reservation. Al Hayat al Jadida placed a picture of the shooter, Alaa Abu D’heim, on its front page, proclaiming him to be a shahid—that is, as a fighter who had given his life in jihad, he had earned instant placement in the Muslim version of paradise, complete with access to seventy-two virgins.
America’s Religious Supermarket
Fri 07 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
If anyone doubted that America has become a national supermarket of different world religions, with people changing brands at a dizzying pace, they need doubt no more. A new survey by one of the country’s most prestigious research organizations, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows how rapidly and dramatically the religious scene in the U.S. is changing. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey was conducted during the spring and summer months in 2007, and involved interviews with no fewer than 35,000 Americans.
The basic outline of the landscape is not so new to those who have studied the American religious scene in the recent past. Though 78.4 percent of adult Americans (according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in late February 2008 the total estimated U.S. population was 303.5 million people) describe themselves as Christian in some category or other, Protestants, the majority religion of Americans for most of our history, may soon be a minority. Today, they hold onto a narrow majority of 51.3 percent. Catholics comprise 23.9 percent and Evangelicals, a sub-category of Protestants, a robust 26.3 percent of American adults.
Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
Mon 15 Oct 2007 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
“This is a choice between condemning genocide and endangering our soldiers in Iraq,” was how Tom Lantos, Democratic chairman of the House committee and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor, summed up the dilemma. Should the House Foreign Affairs committee approve a resolution designating a barbarous mass killing by the Turkish government in 1915 “genocide”? If the full House votes within a few weeks to pass the resolution, which is non-binding on the administration, the White House warned that vital transportation and communication links with U.S. forces in Iraq might be endangered. Turkey could slow down or even halt the passage of U.S. military goods and personnel through the Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey. To underscore the threat, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last week in a phone call with President Bush specifically threatened a Turkish retaliation against the resolution. The day after the Congressional Committee vote, Turkey recalled its ambassador to the U.S.
Burma: Monks vs. Generals
Fri 28 Sep 2007 by David Aikman
Is it possible that one of the most repressive regimes in the entire world, the reactionary and superstitious rule of the generals in Burma, is about to fall? It would be foolish to predict an imminent change of regime in a country where the ruling military clique has successfully resisted virtually all change for nearly half a century. But it is certainly possible. For the fifth straight day, up to 1,300 young Buddhist monks splashed through the monsoon-soaked streets of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the capital of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in outright, but silent, protest against that country’s military regime. The generals, who rule the country, declared the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, were an “enemy of the people.” The monks would not desist from protesting, they said, until they had “wiped the military dictatorship from the land of Burma.”
Petraeus and Crocker: The Best of Their Generation
Thu 20 Sep 2007 by David Aikman
The performances of four-star General David Petraeus and Career Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress recently were startling for a number of reasons. First, Petraeus, the administration point man for the conduct of the war in Iraq, explicitly denied that his remarks had been even reviewed in advance by anyone above him in the military and civilian chain of command, much less cleared, before he presented them to the U.S. Congress. The White House, in effect, was not in the loop in his Congressional testimony. Second, neither Petraeus nor Crocker “promised” the American people victory in Iraq or suggested that it was even probable; the most they offered was that it was “attainable.” Third, after four and a half years of a war that has become increasingly unpopular in the U.S., here was a fighting general from that war on Capitol Hill being almost mobbed by Senators and Members of Congress who were climbing over each other to shake his hand. Fourth, after four and a half years in which the entire Iraq War has become intensely political, the key figures speaking about it to the American people were not politicians at all, but career professionals: one in the military, one in the Foreign Service.
