American Religious Freedom Part III: The Future

This is the third installment of a three-part series on American Religious Freedom. Click here for Part I, and here for Part II.

In last week’s post, I argued that the most pressing threat to our religious liberty was the movement for institutionalized secularism in America. If allowed to continue unchecked, the removal of religion from public affairs (governmental and non-governmental alike) will erode the morality of our culture and open the door for government to impinge on our individual liberties in general. This week, I argue that the looming future threat to our religious liberties is political correctness, which, reacting to the recent large-scale movement of Islam to the West, has the potential to sell out Americans’ most fundamental freedoms for the sake of a cosmopolitan, multicultural society devoid of absolute cultural standards and unalienable rights.

In traditionally secular Turkey, an Islamist government has asserted its dominance and has undone many reforms put in place by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the great Turkish reformer and modernizer. Now, five prominent Catholic priests have been killed in Turkey in the past four years in spite of the fact that Christians make up only 0.2 percent of the Turkish population. What was until recently a relatively westernized, free, and peacefully multi-religious country has regressed into one of violently enforced institutionalized Islam.

Closer to home in Great Britain, there are now two million practicing Muslims, about as many as there are practicing Christians. “Mohammad” is the most popular name among all baby boys born in London (see the Daily Telegraph story here). The statistics are real, and the demographic shift over the past few decades is unprecedented and destabilizing. This is not intended to be a fear-mongering statement, nor is it a rallying cry against Islamic immigration. It is simply a statement of fact. Britain, Spain, France, and even Canada now face floods of Muslim immigrants, and they have shown themselves to be unprepared to deal with the cultural ramifications.

So how does this pertain to us in the United States?

In his fascinating book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Mark Steyn argues that Europe’s present is America’s future. Even now, he writes, we face the challenge of large-scale Muslim immigration, and we must be prepared to respond to it to preserve our liberty, our unique culture, and our rights. Western European countries have shown us what happens when a country does not adhere to fundamental values and allows itself to be transformed by the culture of its immigrants. The result has been violence, terrorism, and ethnic self-segregation, as well as growing movements of racism and xenophobia among the native populations.

The fundamental question here is this: is it possible to maintain our fundamental liberties while allowing the free exercise of faiths different from that of our Founders and the majority of Americans? My answer is a wholehearted yes, and here’s how we do it.

As with just about any question regarding American liberty, the answer lies in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and their protections for the freedom of individuals. The First Amendment, which I have mentioned in each installment of this blog, provides for the free exercise of religion as any individual sees fit. According to this concept, Muslims should be allowed to practice their faith in America, plain and simple.

For example, there is a fight going on in New York City right now to determine if the use of a building as a mosque should be permitted adjacent to the former site of the Twin Towers. If the building is declared a historical landmark, its use as a mosque will not be allowed. Thus, many New Yorkers are lobbying to have the site declared historical precisely to avoid the existence of a mosque so close to the site of a disaster created by Islamic terrorism. Now, if the site is not made a landmark, there is, constitutionally speaking, nothing to prevent the owners of the Park51 building from converting it into a mosque, and they have every right to use it as they please. Personally, I hope that the site is declared historical because it was hit by debris from the falling towers in 2001. However, if it is allowed to become a place of Muslim worship, I am willing to respect the First Amendment and the free worship of those Muslims who choose to go there. Any government effort to disallow the building’s use as a mosque on the grounds of it being an inappropriate location for Muslims to meet would violate the First Amendment right to free religion, speech, and assembly.

On the other hand, we should not sell our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the price of multicultural acceptance. Europe and Canada have spent the past decades embarking on multicultural, multiethnic crusades of tolerance and political correctness, and radical Islam has festered inside their borders. In Canada, honor killings (the murder of girls by their fathers or husbands as punishment for sexual immorality) could potentially be prosecuted lightly because Muslim immigrants have different “cultural practices.” In Ontario, the government permits polygamy de facto by sending (assumedly Muslim) men monthly welfare checks for each of their wives. In France, a national law to ban the veiling of women is about to be approved as a measure to protect the individual liberties of women who are forcibly veiled.

In the American tradition, the free exercise of religion ends when the individual freedoms of others are invaded. Honor killings violate women’s fundamental right to life, plain and simple. As honor killings begin moving south of the border, young women must be protected from a tradition of murder by their own family members, and it is the government’s responsibility to do so. As for the French banning the veil, such a law would not be constitutional in the United States because women should be allowed to wear a veil if they choose to. However, if they are forced to wear a veil by a husband or family member, their right to free expression is violated, and the state should protect this right as well.

All of this is to say that the allowance of free religious expression protects Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike (along with all other faiths) only insofar as they respect the fundamental rights of others. The moment that a Muslim husband forces his wife to wear a veil, beheads his daughter for dressing immodestly, or advocates treasonous acts of terrorism on religious grounds, his First Amendment protection ends. But until he reaches such a point, the practice of his faith should not be impeded by any governmental or civilian authority. If he is not doing harm to anyone else, Americans should heed the words of John Locke in dealing with someone in a religious minority: “Let those men consider how heinously they sin, who, adding injustice, if not to their error, yet certainly to their pride, do rashly and arrogantly take upon them to misuse the servants of another master [god], who are not at all accountable to them.” When all is said and done, we are all accountable to God for our faith, or lack thereof. If a man does no harm to his neighbor in the practice of his faith, then his religion is of no concern to anyone else.

The challenge of Islam is often presented to us as a confrontation between “Islam and Christianity,” or “Islam vs. the West.” Though the distinction may seem a bit nuanced, it is more appropriate to see the clash as “Islamic tradition vs. the American tradition of God-given rights.” As Americans, we are blessed with a government whose sworn purpose is the preservation of our inviolable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of religion, as I have written here before, is essential to the prosperity and liberty of our society. However, it is imperative that we retain the delicate balance between allowing the free exercise of religion and allowing the practices of that religion to violate the God-given rights of individuals. As patriots and adherents to the values embodied in our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights, I hope that we can all look first to these documents for our policy on the freedom of religion.

I will conclude this post with a brief word of caution. The fear aroused by Muslim immigration has given rise to frighteningly powerful movements of racism and nativism in Europe, such as the Front National in France or the British National Party in England. Such movements represent a violent backlash from native populations who have abandoned their respect for the humanity and fundamental rights of immigrants, and they are a prime example of how not to face such a challenge here in America.

For further reading, I recommend John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration,” Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America.

This concludes the three parts of this blog, but I will post a short wrap-up segment next week to truly conclude this series on American religious freedom. I hope you have enjoyed it, and I hope you have learned as much as I have and will continue the dialogue in the future. I believe it is only fitting to end such a series by simply saying, “God Bless America.”