And why do we defend the religious freedom of people from all religious faiths? Because no matter how profoundly disparate their beliefs, each and every person shares the same common humanity, an essential part of which is a yearning for truth, a thirst for the transcendent; and that aspect of human nature is so valuable that it deserves the strongest possible protection in law.

The religious nature of the human person is manifest; it is as clear to the casual student of human nature as it is to the academic. As noted by our distinguished panelist, Professor Pannenberg, philosophers have discussed this aspect of human nature using terms such as "exocentricity" or "openness to the world."1 Similarly, the renowned Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, described human beings as members of the species "homo religiosus." We find beautiful confirmations of the religious nature of humanity everywhere around us in this city of spires.

This human phenomenon, moreover, is not a mere brute fact without moral consequence. Instead, hunger for the divine is so fundamental that it warrants legal protection as a matter of foundational law. The religious impulse holds the potential for the highest form of human flourishing and is thus a wellspring of our universal dignity. It is among those characteristics unique to human beings that gives each and every one inestimable value. That potential, moreover, can only be achieved in freedom. Religious belief or expression undertaken under coercion or duress can hardly be described as religious at all. Free cultivation of human religious potential is also essential to social harmony. Not only does religious repression give rise to civil strife seemingly as durable as the religious impulse itself, but social cohesion depends on the transmission of those virtues typically fostered by religious participation. In the words of George Washington, the first President of the United States, "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."2

Accordingly, governments at all levels should acknowledge human religious potential, avoid interference with its full expression, and actively promote its voluntary cultivation. In light of this conclusion, the answer to my initial question becomes clear: The Becket Fund defends the religious expression of all people, not for political advantage, and not as an evangelistic tactic, but because religious freedom is a basic human right.

II.

The Becket Fund strives to promote religious freedom, properly understood, in three arenas. First, in the courts, we litigate particular cases both to serve individual persons and to enshrine in law, slowly and incrementally, policies and principles that respect the religious nature of all people. Second, in the media, we promote these same principles in the broader culture beyond the courts; mere words on the page of a law book are largely ineffective unless they are supported by deep convictions in civil society. And third, in the academy, we elaborate and refine our understanding of religious liberty by sponsoring, along with The Becket Institute, a series of international conferences, first in Rome in 1995, then in Jerusalem in 1997, and now here, in Prague in 2000.

That brings us to the topic of this year's conference, "Religious Liberty and the Ideology of the State." For this particular effort at enhancing our understanding of authentic religious freedom, we have chosen the via negativa: we will examine three examples of what authentic religious freedom is not, ways in which governments often fail to respect the religious impulses and institutions of their people. Specifically, those failures are: state-imposed atheism; state-imposed religion; and state-imposed secularism. Each phenomenon is useful to study because each demonstrates the importance and precise contours of the particular facet of religious liberty that it offends.

In the case of state-imposed atheism, the religious impulse is targeted for repression because it is considered both a source of illusion and a threat to the hegemony of the state. In an atheistic regime, religion is condemned, first of all, because it is thought to be false. (It is ironic that "truth" and "falsity" could even be meaningful categories in an atheistic regime.) Perhaps more importantly, religious expression, especially in institutional form, is considered dangerous because it represents a source of authority that does not originate in, or otherwise depend upon, the state. The spiritual authority of religion, moreover, claims superiority to the temporal authority of the state.3 Thus, religion offers a competing vantage point from which citizens may effectively critique and oppose government action.

Although this anthropology does not deny the religious nature of humanity, it errs in evaluating that nature by condemning it rather than exalting it. On this view, the religious impulse certainly exists (or else there would be nothing systematically to repress), but that impulse ought to be repressed because it has no object in reality and precludes totalitarianism.

By contrast, where a state-imposes one religion (or, less commonly, more than one), it affirms both the existence and value of the universal craving for God. Indeed, in a theocracy, satisfying that human need is deemed so urgent that the state will employ any means to that end. The stakes are so high – whether the fate of citizens' immortal souls, or the protection of society from corrosive forces – that the state considers itself justified in using force to exact religious observance.

But the conception of human nature implicit in this approach misunderstands the religious impulse. There is no exigency – spiritual, social, or otherwise – that warrants coercing religious belief or observance, by the sword or even by more subtle means. This is not because spiritual and social problems are unimportant, but because mandating religious adherence is not an effective remedy. In fact, enforced religion will only worsen those problems. Religion at gunpoint is merely the semblance of religion, not the real thing. Exacting such empty conformity does nothing either to vindicate our humanity or to promote social harmony; even the overzealous state would be disappointed with this result. Indeed, theocracies preclude genuine adherence to whatever religion they enforce, because they squelch that freedom which is a necessary condition for authentic embrace of any religion. Religious coercion also commonly meets intense resistance, risking civil strife that would tatter the fabric of civil society. In short, if a government seeks to maximize the religious flourishing of its people, as well as the individual and collective goods attendant to that flourishing, mandatory observance will not achieve that result – freedom will.

But even where religious freedom is affirmed by the state, particularly in contemporary democracies, there remains the risk of state-imposed secularism. Although this is typically the result of well-intentioned but overzealous opposition to state-imposed religion, it is occasionally based on the same contempt for religion that animates state-imposed atheism. In either case, the nominal goal is government "neutrality" with respect to religion, but the effect is the banishment of religion from public life. The laudable, institutional separation of church and state becomes the unworkable separation of anything religious from anything political. Thus, religious values must not inform any public moral debate, least of all any legislative action that might issue from such a debate. Though the state may not specifically target religion for suppression, the state remains free to act in callous disregard of it. Indeed, the "neutrality" of the state may be called into question if the state accommodates, or otherwise acts with sensitivity toward, religious expression.

Again, the problem with this approach is anthropological: "neutrality" is understood to require the state to ignore the religious nature of humanity, to pretend it does not exist, rather than to acknowledge, accommodate, and promote it. But the human desire to seek the truth, and especially religious truth, cannot be overlooked, much less eliminated. Moreover, convictions derived from religious inquiry unavoidably inform moral decisionmaking, which, in turn, unavoidably informs political decisionmaking. It is mere fiction (alas, happy and useful to some) that these intimately entwined aspects of human thought and social action can somehow be extricated from one another. Similarly, human beings will never cease to distinguish the sacred from the profane, and so will always require, to varying degrees, exceptions to ordinary rules of behavior for purposes of religious observance. In short, it is quite simply impossible to ignore or eliminate these hard-wired patterns of human being, whether for the sake of drawing a neat-and-tidy distinction between religion and politics, or for any other purpose.

Even if forced to acknowledge that human beings are religious by nature, and that their religiosity bears implications for all aspects of their lives, including the political, the secularist might respond that the role of religion in politics should still be minimized. But this view reflects a different anthropological mistake, the same one implicit in state-imposed atheism: the notion that cultivation of human religious potential is harmful to society and the state, rather than essential to their well-being. By treating religious contributions to public debate as out-of-bounds or merely tolerable, the state needlessly deprives itself (and, in turn, the people it exists to serve) of the rich, moral and political resources that so many religious traditions hold in stewardship for the benefit of all. In the same way, by failing to affirm the singular importance of religious observance in the lives of its citizens, and by insisting instead on regulating extraordinary and mundane behavior on the same terms, the state harms those religious communities and institutions that serve as the seedbeds of virtue. Thus, democracies that embrace religious freedom can avoid lapsing into state-imposed secularism by acknowledging that the presence of religion in public life is not merely inevitable, but invaluable.

III.

Thus, over the next few days, our study of these three, unfortunately common problems – state-imposed atheism, state-imposed religion, and state-imposed secularism – will impart a fuller understanding of the precise contours of authentic religious freedom. But there is still another reason to explore these particular phenomena at this time, and in this place. At various points over its long, rich history, Prague has endured each of these three plagues.

In the Fifteenth Century, attempts to impose religion by force included burning Jan Hus at the stake and the Hussite Wars that followed. From virtually its founding in the late Tenth Century, the Jewish community in Prague has fallen victim to the acts and omissions of theocratic governments. Prague Jews were confined to the ghetto for over seven hundred years, were prohibited from holding public office, and were temporarily expelled from the city on several occasions. With little or no recourse to the law, thousands of Jews were killed by angry mobs incited by pernicious rumors. This horrific experience gave rise to one of the richest and enduring legends of Prague, the story of the Golem, the giant man of clay and protector of the Jews, brought to life by Cabalistic incantation.

It has been secular states in the Twentieth Century, however, that have committed the greatest offenses against the religious communities of Prague. At least two-thirds of the Jewish population of Prague perished at the hands of the Nazi regime. Most of the remainder of the century was marked by the official atheism and brutal religious repression of communism. Among Catholic clergy alone, the regime urged the appointment of collaborators as bishops, refused to allow validly consecrated bishops to function, and imprisoned or exiled influential and effective priests. In 1974, Cardinal Stefan Trochta, one of the predecessors of our honored guest Cardinal Vlk, died after a six-hour interrogation.

And most recently, the problem of secularization has emerged along with democracy since the "Velvet Revolution." Notwithstanding the long history of governmental repression of religion in Eastern Europe, many, and especially religious adherents, view the prospect of Western-style democracy with more fear than hope. As President Vaclav Havel has put it:

The main source of objections would seem to be what many societies see as the inevitable product or by-product of these [democratic] values: moral relativism, materialism, the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for everything supra-personal, a profound crisis of authority and the resulting general decay, a frenzied consumerism, a lack of solidarity, the selfish cult of material success, the absence of faith in a higher order of things or simply in eternity, an expansionist mentality that holds in contempt everything that in any way resists the dreary standardization and rationalism of technical civilization.4

Religious communities, of course, have an essential role to play in addressing these problems, because they have singular access to hearts and minds of their people. By forming their own in the virtues that make for good souls and good citizens, strong religious communities assure that their traditions persist and thrive. But they also assure that the public square will remain clothed with the values of which it is so often stripped in other Western democracies, and which are necessary for the acceptance and longevity of democracy in this part of the world.

This poignant history adds the palpable dimension of felt, human experience to our reflections together. Ours is not an exercise in abstraction, but of ideas in action, rooted in experience of the past and directed at prospects for the future. I thank you in advance for your presence here, for your thoughtful contributions to discussion, and for your interest in these matters of such great importance. Thank you very much.

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Footnotes:

1. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 34-35 (1985) (discussing Plessner, Scheler, and Gehlen).

2. Farewell Address by George Washington (Sept. 17, 1796), in I J. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1908, at 220 (1908).

3. Jacques Maritain, Man and the State 153 (1951).

4. Vaclav Havel, "Forgetting We Are Not God," First Things, No. 59, at 37-39 (January 1996).

© 2000 The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
all rights reserved

This paper was presented at a conference entitled "Religious Liberty and the Ideology of the State," in Prague, Czech Republic, in August, 2000. It will be edited for publication. Do not quote without written permission of The Becket Fund.