I just finished reading an advance copy of Luke Goodrich’s excellent new book Free to Believe: The Battle over Religious Liberty in America. Goodrich is a senior attorney at The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and many of the cases he discusses in the book are ones he litigated. Primarily through stories and examples, he gives valuable practical and biblical guidance on why Christians should care about religious liberty for all and how to weather current culture wars.1 In a space that is increasingly tending towards politicization and slogans, Goodrich’s balanced, accurate, and thoughtful perspective is much needed. From conversations with members of my own church community, students I teach, and fellow citizens of many faiths or none across the country, this book is overdue.
As Goodrich explains in my favorite chapter, “How Christians get it wrong,” too many Christians frame the issue the wrong way and fail to understand that religious freedom is an issue of biblical justice. When we neglect the right of all people to freely seek and follow ultimate truth, we work against God’s desire for “everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Goodrich writes that many Christians fall into one of three “camps,” which he calls the Pilgrims, the Martyrs, and the Beginners. (He focuses on Christians in the US, but his insights apply well beyond this country.)
Pilgrims want government to preserve a privileged place for Christianity. They claim that religious freedom for Christians has always been core to our national identity. And they believe that because Christianity is true, government should not restrict it. Some even claim government should promote it or at least honor Christianity’s historical and cultural contribution to this nation. Put simply, the Pilgrims view is that Christians deserve a special place in society.
Goodrich points out the various flaws of the Pilgrim approach. First, it’s unbiblical: Jesus told us we would be persecuted for our faith (John 15:20). Goodrich writes, “[t]his doesn’t mean we should desire persecution or be indifferent to it. But it does mean we shouldn’t be surprised by it or expect a privileged place in society simply because we’re Christians.” The Pilgrim approach is also historically inaccurate. It ignores this country’s sad legacy of persecution against religious minorities often at the hands of religious majorities (Puritan vs. Quakers, Protestants vs. Catholics, Christian colonists banning Jews from voting or holding office). Further, welcoming government preference of Christianity is dangerous because a government that privileges a church will soon want to control it. A church that depends on the government cannot avoid corruption and compromise in return for political security.2 And Pilgrims who rely on the government to support their faith tend to grow fearful and belligerent when they feel this support threatened. These emotions fan the flames of the culture wars and, as Goodrich points out, “can alienate nonbelievers from Christianity and from the idea of religious freedom generally” because religious liberty seems “a thin disguise for trying to maintain Christian dominance.”
Martyrs – understandably tired of fighting the culture war battles – take the opposite approach, counting religious persecution as a blessing. A timely example of such “Martyrs Malaise” is this blog post by my good friend Charles Moore, who recommends indifference to the cause of religious freedom. Although it’s true that nothing can stop God’s work, Martyrs vastly oversimplify the issue, claiming that persecution strengthens the church and disparaging religious freedom as a tool for maintaining political and cultural dominance.
Martyrs get it just as wrong as Pilgrims. Scripture teaches us to expect persecution not as good but as evil that God can use for his purposes and that he will ultimately avenge (Revelation 6:9–11). Like the Pilgrims, Martyrs lack fidelity to historical accuracy and context. For example, Goodrich points out that the “famous line about the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church comes from a document in which Tertullian demanded that the Roman governors stop persecuting the church.”3 In other words, it is advocacy against persecution by an astute leader who is not afraid to defend the life and faith of his fellow Christians from state injustice. In fact, throughout history, persecution has often hindered Christian ministry and decimated churches including in China in the ninth century, Japan in the seventeenth, and Iraq today.4 By contrast, faith flourished in times of tolerance: “Meanwhile the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up. Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers” (Acts 9:31). Some have suggested that church growth leads to persecution, not the inverse, and point out that studies fail to corroborate the Martyr argument. Finally, Martyrs’ acceptance of religious persecution can easily slip into cynicism or apathy about an injustice that is growing worse as religious restrictions rise around the world (see the most recent data from the Pew Forum and Open Doors).
Goodrich’s third category is the Beginners, Christians who are unsure about religious freedom or who just haven’t thought about it much at all.
Thankfully, Goodrich doesn’t just diagnose our failings; he spends most of the book telling us how to get it right. He calls religious freedom “a basic issue of biblical justice, rooted in the nature of God and the nature of man.” As he explains, God desires a genuinely loving relationship with us so he gives us the “freedom to embrace or reject Him” (See Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; 2 Peter 3:9; Revelation 3:20). All humans have an impulse to seek truth and goodness and live according to what we find. At its deepest, this innate longing for “transcendent truth, for ultimate good, and for eternal beauty” is a longing to find and follow God. But we can’t embrace truth authentically unless we do it of our own free will. So, as Goodrich puts it, “when the government tries to coerce us into embracing its version of truth – or forbids us from embracing our own – it is going against our very nature as human beings. It is treating us as less than fully human.” As humans, and especially as Christians, we have a responsibility to defend all people from government’s attempt to usurp the place of God.
Contra the Pilgrims, the church must remain independent of the state. But it also should not remain quiescent like the Martyrs in the face of governmental injustice. Goodrich calls the church back to true Christian witness to government, much as Anabaptists have taught for centuries. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. restated this ancient instruction beautifully: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”5 (See also Foundations of our Faith and Calling: the Bruderhof, section 12: “The church must witness to the state, serving as its conscience, helping it to distinguish good from evil, and reminding it not to overstep the bounds of its God-appointed authority.”) As an Anabaptist in the Twenty-First Century, I agree with Goodrich that we must advocate for the rights of believers to live out our faith and for the rights of non-believers to seek faith.6
How exactly should we go about defending religious freedom when even believers have a hard time responding to the contentious issues of our time? Goodrich provides some practical guidance for today as well as drawing lessons from biblical heroes.
Perhaps his most instructive example is the apostle Paul. Paul’s responses to persecution ranged from fleeing (Acts 13:50–51; 14:6; 17:10, 14) to demanding his legal rights (Acts 16:37; 22:25). Notably, when he experienced religious freedom, Paul capitalized on these opportunities to teach freely, and his ministry flourished (Acts 18:9–11, 18; 19:10; 28:16, 30–31). Paul tried to respond to each threat and opportunity in whichever way would best further God’s purposes. Sometimes that meant submitting to mistreatment, and at other times it meant defending the Christian cause before the authorities or the populace. Like Paul, we must focus on fulfilling God’s purposes. As Goodrich concludes, “our calling is not to respond to the religious freedom challenges ahead. Our calling is to respond to Jesus.”
Footnotes
- Goodrich addresses popular contemporary ideas on religious freedom rather than chronicling its history. Readers who are also interested in exploring the historical and theological roots of religious liberty should try Robert Louis Wilken’s recent book, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom.
- Constantine is traditionally blamed for initiating the fusion of church and state, but we shouldn’t forget the role of those Christian leaders who compromised their witness in order to secure his patronage. See also Russell Moore’s piece “Why Theocracy Is Terrible,” in which he warns that those who seek earthly power by claiming to represent God “are always, in every situation, oppressive because they wish to use God’s glory and God’s authority without God.”
- See T. Herbert Bindley’s translation of Apologeticus.
- Already in 1859, John Stuart Mill called the Martyr view “one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), 23.
- Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 47.
- Even ignoring the gospel mandate to love our neighbors (Mark 12:31; Matt 22:39), Christians have a self-interested reason to protect the religious freedom of non-Christians. As Pastor Martin Niemöller pointed out in his oft-quoted poem “First they came...,” if we don’t speak out when others are persecuted, no one will be left to speak for us when our turn comes.