Religion, Liberty, and Krauthammer

I’m a few days late on commenting on this. So sue me. Can’t a man take a weekend off?

In last week’s column, Charles Krauthammer, known affectionately here as the Master, criticized the claim that Mitt Romney made in his recent religion speech that freedom requires religion and religion requires freedom.

But this is nonsense -- as Romney then proceeded to demonstrate in that very same speech. He spoke of the empty cathedrals in Europe. He's right about that: Postwar Europe has experienced the most precipitous decline in religious belief in the history of the West. Yet Europe is one of the freest precincts on the planet. It is an open, vibrant, tolerant community of more than two dozen disparate nations living in a pan-continental harmony and freedom unseen in all previous European history.

In some times and places, religion promotes freedom. In other times and places, it does precisely the opposite, as is demonstrated in huge swaths of the Muslim world, where religion has been used to impose the worst kind of unfreedom.

I wanted to make a few quick comments on this.

First, Europe is free, but even some Europeans bemoan the fact that European democracy is not nearly as liberal as American democracy. Simon Jenkins writes,

Americans are people of the book, treating their constitutions, precedents and treatises as of quasi-sacred import. The linguistic beauty and clarity of meaning of their early documents is unsurpassed.

An American election is more than a periodic shifting of oligarchic chairs. It is a mass assertion of the people’s right to choose and dismiss their head of state. It is the closest any big country gets to James Madison’s “pure democracy”, regularly purging the accumulated toxins of the political blood. Europe has nothing to match it.

The reader may like to read Lincoln’s address to the Young Men’s Lyceum for more about our political religion.

Jenkins further argues that the new European constitution would never be signed by an American president without the input of the people. European leaders, however, saw no problem with signing the document without first consulting the people who must live under this document.

Perhaps Americans’ tendency to hold certain things such as God, the Bible, and marriage sacred also encourages them to hold liberty and the Constitution sacred.

There is a more basic problem that threatens European liberty today: a declining population. Rampant Secularism in Europe has encouraged Europeans to seek first the Kingdom of Mammon. Children tend to get in the way of selfish and materialistic pursuits. Accordingly, European families are smaller than American families. Religion in America encourages and strengthens the family. True, there are Americans who place wealth and career above all things, but the majority of Americans place family second only to God. Despite the image many people around the world have of Americans, the average American sees his career as a means to an end, not an end itself. Most Americans only want to earn enough money to be able to support themselves and their families. This is true of Americans from many different creeds. As Europeans selfishly destroy their civilization and their liberty, America will continue to grow.

Europe is not as vibrant as Krauthammer claims. The lack of religion in Europe has much to do with that. Romney was right, freedom does require religion.

But why do we hold liberty to be sacred and beyond the reach of government? We believe that our rights come from God, not government, not society, not nature, not ourselves. The rights of man transcend all the powers of government because they come from a Power that transcends all things. Our sacred documents, our charters of freedom, declare this in majestic prose, “all men are created equal,” and, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . .” Our Founders declared that they are undertaking the dangerous task of creating a new nation founded upon Liberty “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Maggie Gallagher argues,

The reason God is on our coins and in our Pledge is not that He is practically necessary to democratic liberty, but rather that He is the philosophical foundation of it. Our rights come from a sphere outside the reach of the state. Government may or may not recognize our rights, but it can never repeal them.

Now to Krauthammer’s second point, that religion in the Middle East “has been used to impose the worst kind of unfreedom.” It is true that religion is used in the Middle East to support oppressive governments. But, let us not forget the other side to Romney’s statement, that religion requires freedom. Religion in the Middle East has become corrupted by a lack of freedom.

It is no coincidence that religion, whether it is Islam, Christianity, or even Secularism, quickly becomes the tool of the state when there is no religious freedom. Introduce religious freedom into the system and religion soon becomes a force in opposition to oppression. Even Krauthammer agrees that religion has helped make society better:

Abolitionism, civil rights, temperance, opposition to the death penalty -- a host of policies, even political movements, have been rooted for many people in religious teaching or interpretation.

But such good work on the part of religion comes only when the religious are free to assert their faith as opposed to having it dictated to them by the state. In states such as those in the Middle East, religion ceases to be religion and instead is simply a tool used by the state to control the populace. If Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the others allowed free exercise of religion (or if the people learn to assert it themselves), we would see a powerful force rise up to oppose the radical terrorists and the oppressors. The problem in the Middle East is not too much religion, but not enough religion.

In Europe we see liberty dying alone without religion. In the Middle East we see religion dying alone without liberty. Romney was right: freedom requires religion and religion requires freedom. They either stand together or they die alone.

–J.E. Heath
per-fidem.org

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