Religious liberty is the topic of a three-day conference Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is hosting this week with his counterparts from around the world.
Religion is under dire, often murderous, assault around the globe. The Pew Forum has found persecution of religious people to be rising around the world. In some places, intrusions on religious liberty are blatant and extreme.
In China, the Communist Party has kept up its repression of any religious gathering other than approved “patriotic religious associations.” There are reports that the “government tortured, physically abused, arrested, detained, sentenced to prison, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups for activities related to their religious beliefs and practices,” our State Department has said.
In Indonesia, Sunni is the only form of Islam allowed. Dozens of countries, outside the West, have such oppressive laws.
But there is a second tier of religious liberty offenses that is less obvious and less blatantly tyrannical and, because of that, more insidious. It’s not rooted in communism or intolerant theocracy, but in militant secularism. This anti-religious bigotry and repression is flourishing in Europe, a continent defined for more than a millennium as being the home of Christianity. Ironically, this repression is promulgated as a safeguard of liberalism.
France, for instance, bars head coverings in state schools as part of a rule that extends to yarmulkes and, perhaps out of a punctilious egalitarianism, crucifixes that are bigger than the state thinks acceptable. It also bars veils anywhere in public. Some municipalities have tried to take this idea, rooted in animus or suspicion toward Muslims, and applied it to bathing suits known as “burkinis.” This has resulted in the weird spectacle of French police ordering women to take off their clothes in public to expose more of their bodies. This is an odd view of a tolerant society.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have also reported that they have been stopped by French authorities for door-to-door proselytizing.
Austria’s vice chancellor has called for a ban on Kosher or Halal slaughter of animals in which anesthetic may not be administered before a beast’s throat is slit. One provincial legislator, as supposed accommodation, suggested that Jews be allowed access to Kosher meat so long as they register with the state as Jews. Really? An Austrian demanding the registration of Jews as an act of tolerance? Perhaps irony is not the vice chancellor’s strong suit.
When Denmark banned the Kosher and Halal slaughter in 2014, one minister said, “Animal rights come before religion.”
While Europe’s secularism regularly manifests itself in constraints on the exercise of Christianity and Judaism, the source of anti-religious sentiment today is unease with cultural changes imported by large-scale Muslim immigration.
Denmark’s efforts to deal with Islamic immigrants point to the root of the problem. “Starting at the age of 1,” a recent New York Times feature explained, “‘ghetto children must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in ‘Danish values.’”
A desire to preserve one’s culture is understandable, but these heavy-handed efforts not only undermine Europeans’ claim to liberalism and toleration, but also reveal a true weakness. A nation that tries to bar displays of other cultures’ symbols and adherence to other culture’s diets is a nation without confidence in its own culture. That lack of confidence is rooted in a silent acknowledgment that Europe has let its culture, perhaps the greatest culture man has ever seen, wither away to paper thin fragility.
Needing a government course to imbue national values is not a sign of a robust culture.
European countries’ shame from past wars and evils rooted in nationalism caused them to run away from the glories of their past. European elites shy from exalting their magnificent and unique history and culture. They chose to let their culture retract, hoping “secularism” can fill its place. But secularism is proving to be a cultural vacuum, and now other cultures are asserting themselves in that space.
Instead of asserting their own culture by living it, European governments are trying to tamp down competing cultures.
When we talk about culture, if we are honest, we are mostly talking about religion. In short, Europe buried its own Christianity and is now trying to bury the culture that’s filling the vacuum.
Of course Europe isn’t the place where religious liberty is most imperiled. But it is the best demonstration of the harm done when cultures try to replace freedom of religion with freedom from religion.
