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Thursday GNR: It's Religious Freedom Day! [1]
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Date: 2025-01-16
Freedom of religion and freedom of conscience have a long, checkered, and surprising history, tied up with a wide range of notions about the powers of states and about human rights. Mostly, it hasn’t existed in tribal religions, and under most monarchs. It is worth our while to review some of the developments of the last few millennia, so that we can make better sense of more recent developments and the importance of our duties to each other.
These two closely related ideas have each had wildly different meanings throughout the course of human history. In the earliest times, there was no such thing.
Surprisingly to many the Roman Empire had extensive freedom for many religions, on the one condition that everyone offered a pinch of incense to the Roman Gods, including the Emperor, once a year. Jews and Christians absolutely refused, and were thus known as the most vicious atheists, subject to the most vicious punishments.
Mithras, an exceedingly popular God in Roman times
Jews traditionally celebrated their various myths and legends of genocide and mass murder, such as the prophet Elijah ordering the deaths of 800 priests of Baal. His reward is that the Messiah cannot come until Elijah appears to announce him, an essential element of the Passover Seder.
Once Christianity became the official state religion of Rome, Christians took to destroying Roman and Greek temples, or converting them into churches, and to persecuting the various Christian heresies. There is also the sorry episode of the murder of Hypatia, the Librarian of Alexandria, supposedly by being flayed alive.
Islam declared peace with all who declared peace with Islam, and demanded that the Peoples of the Book, especially Jews and Christians, be given every respect. Some Muslim caliphates implemented this fully, while others set out to destroy all other beliefs. Some Muslim authorities in India held that Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains were all to be treated as Peoples of the Book.
Christendom later declared war on Islam to the death, provoking equally vicious responses that continue in some quarters to this day. There were also Crusades against the Poles, the Albigensians, and others.
India had basically one religion at the dawn of its recorded history, expounded in the Vedas and various later texts, but then allowed a huge, unparalleled flowering of practices and views, including devotion to a multiplicity of Gods. There is even an atheist branch of traditional Hinduism. Later on, the Brahminical authorities tolerated the growth of Buddhism and Jainism, with support from Kings such as Ashoka in India and Menandros, the Bactrian Greek king descended from one of Alexander’s generals, in what is now Afghanistan.
Invading Muslims, including Huns and Mongols, later destroyed Indian Buddhism, and attacked Hinduism, provoking the creation of the Sikh religion, which declared that all religions were to be respected.
China developed Daoism, and welcomed Buddhism, mostly. Some Emperors set out to suppress Buddhism as a foreign religion, but it always survived and came back.
The history of man’s inhumanity to man, particularly concerning clashes of religions, is too vast a subject for this post. It cannot be summarized in a book, but requires a vast library, too large for any one person to read.
Human Rights
Fast forward now to the time when Europe was inventing various concepts of human rights, an equally vast and thorny topic. I will pass over Magna Carta, and the development of guilds and other authorities countering kings, and much of the history of parliaments, and proceed to the 80 Years War.
The Netherlands were bitterly divided under Spanish Imperial rule between Catholicism and Calvinism, leading to the division between Belgium and Holland. After throwing out the Spaniards, and establishing the Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch still had to contend with Spanish sea power. Astonishingly, while keeping its established church, the Dutch decreed Freedom of Conscience in their domains. Everyone had to pay taxes to support that one church, but nobody was required to believe its teachings or attend its services. Even Jews like Baruch Spinoza were welcomed.
Meanwhile Henry VIII of England broke with the Pope and set up the Church of England. England then seesawed among C of E, Catholics, and Protestant Dissenters for centuries, including the English Civil War and subsequent Restoration. Officially this is the Catholic Church of England, where the High Church is very nearly Catholic, and the Low Church is very nearly Protestant. That allowed a considerable degree of freedom, but of course it was nowhere near enough for the Separatists, many of whom took themselves off to the Netherlands.
They couldn’t stand complete Dutch Freedom of Conscience, so some of them took themselves off again to create a colonial theocracy, which turned out to be Massachusetts, several hundred miles from where they meant to land. There they could and sometimes did hang Quakers.
Roger Williams was one of the most stiff-necked preachers in Massachusetts—so stiff that he declared complete freedom of religion, and was thrown out for his troubles. He then started the Rhode Island colony, where he created the Baptist Church, and again even let in Jews.
The Quakers in Pennsylvania also declared complete freedom of conscience, including Jews and German-speaking Protestants and Mennonites.
At the time of the American Revolution, then, the colonies were a mix of established churches, mostly C of E, with two allowing freedom of conscience to all. New York also let in Jews, who gradually spread everywhere.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia statute on religious freedom, which inspired the First Amendment. That provided that Congress could not establish a church, but allowed the states to do so. It was not until much later that the Supreme Court used the Equal Protection guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment to incorporate the First Amendment as binding on the states.
So here we are, as far as the Constitution is concerned.
There have always been churches wanting to do away with the First Amendment and impose their own beliefs on everyone, from those that declared Thomas Jefferson a filthy atheist down to the current toxic mix of Mammonites, Dominionists, Armageddonists, Young-Earth Creationists, and Christian Nationalists, all of whom are allowed to believe whatever nonsense they like, but are under some limitations when it comes to imposing it on others.
As to crackpot beliefs, we turn now to the Muppet Show’s Sam the Eagle.
Muppet Show: Chris Langham - Part 5
Yes, some of us know about Chris Langham’s later arrest for child pornography.
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