There are many
countries in the world, maybe the majority, where you grow up to believe in
Freedom of Religion without ever giving it a second thought - rather in the way
you never actually argue your way to the conclusions that cannibalism and
suttee are not very nice. Big Mistake.
There are very good
reasons not to give Freedom of Religion a free pass, not least because those
who do have an interest will find themselves able to make the idea mean
whatever they want it to mean. We end up signed up to something about which we
might, on reflection, find ourselves having second thoughts.
To begin with, freedom
of religion was invented as a compromise to bring an end to religious wars in
which no side was strong enough to win – and here “win” basically meant strong
enough to slaughter all your opponents. Unable to achieve that final solution,
the warring parties agreed to grant each other a bare toleration. You would not
call it ecumenism: there was no love lost and merely terror foregone.
Over time, as states
became at least partly secular in the way they operated and even the state
church was left to operate at half an arm’s length, freedom of religion came to
mean something else. It came to mean that the state should keep its nose out:
that it should not pry into how religious organisations conducted their
affairs, nor seek to control how religious people lived their lives. The
general idea became remarkably effective, even to the extent – for example –
that states tolerated religious organisations whose committed members refused
absolutely to bear arms and fight in wars. Since fighting wars was for a long
time the major business of states, the forbearance is really quite remarkable
and extended even to countries not otherwise noted for tolerance, Imperial
Russia among them.
Today, Freedom of Religion
functions almost entirely as a Keep Out warning. Though we have government
agencies which routinely inspect schools and hospitals, slaughter houses and restaurants,
there are no agencies which routinely inspect religious organisations. Indeed,
one of the world’s largest organisations, the Roman Catholic church, succeeded
in 1929 in putting its headquarters entirely beyond the reach of anyone else’s
civil and criminal law when in the Lateran Treaty, Italy foolishly granted independent
statehood to the Vatican City.
The consequences of
keeping out of religious affairs have been disastrous. Every day some religious
organisation is in the newspapers because activities which are seriously
criminal or simply cruel have come to light. American evangelical churches turn
out to be financial scams; Catholic boarding schools and orphanages are exposed
as nests of sexual abuse and sadistic cruelty; Anglican vestries are revealed as
places where choirboys are buggered. There is less about non-Christian
organisations which seem to know better how to protect themselves from
exposure, but there seems no reason to suppose that they are free from
corruption and cruelty and, from time to time, stories emerge to support that
conclusion.
In all these cases,
Freedom of Religion has functioned to provide a screen against scrutiny. We are
so taken in that we may suppose that we are protecting freedom of conscience –
a rather different idea – when really we are doing no more than tolerate the
unconscionable. On our part, it’s basically cowardice.
As a rule of thumb, I
suggest that the bigger a religious organisation then the more it requires
regular and intrusive inspection. It will have the worldly wealth to hire
lawyers and publicists, the networks to undertake lobbying. Those need to be
matched by powerful regulatory agencies, not timid and underfunded ones. In
Italy, there is no excuse for the special status accorded the Vatican City. It
should simply be brought back under Italian jurisdiction, even if that means
sending in the tanks and closing the banks. The evidence that the special
status has been abused ever since it was granted is overwhelming – money
laundering, cover ups, collusion with crime, endless political interference …
the list is long and shocking.
But what about freedom
of religion understood as the right of religious people to live their lives
according to their beliefs? No such right can be unconditional. Treated as if
it was then it implies that things which
would not otherwise be tolerated are allowed. It means that if you invoke
religion, you get a free pass to mutilate your children’s genitals or beat
their bodies until they bleed. Or wash out their mouths with soap and lock them
in dark cupboards. Or refuse to let them wear seat belts in a car (see Tara
Westover’s Educated for that last example).
That states allow such
things is a shocking betrayal of children who are also citizens but differ in
that they are in much greater need of state protection than adults. Time and
time again, the stories tell us that religion and the abuse of children go
together but we decline to think it ought to concern us. We wash our hands:
it’s their religion, we say, when really it is no more than adults abusing
children who have no means of redress. Rather than confront the adults, we find
it more convenient to allow the children to suffer.
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019
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