American religious freedom and the culture wars

Continuing my thoughts from the previous post, in the light of the current political culture wars I have been thinking about what American religious freedom really means. It seems to me that it means one can believe whatever one wants to believe, and live by that belief so long as it harms no one else, and that by simple logic means the next person who comes along is equally free to believe something different. It does NOT mean that one person can impose their beliefs on another person.

So people who oppose abortion based on their religious belief that a religious concept called “the soul” enters a fetus at conception are perfectly free never to abort a fetus. But they have no right to insist that people who don’t hold that religious belief be similarly restricted.

People who oppose gay unions based on their religious beliefs about how to interpret some biblical passages are perfectly free never to enter into gay or lesbian unions.  But they have no right to insist that people who do not hold those religious views be similarly restricted.

People like Christian Scientists who believe in using prayer instead of modern medicine to treat diseases are free to do so, but not to insist that the rest of us do so. (There is an interesting legal question when they subject their own children to that belief, and the children die as a result.)

People who believe pork is unclean are free never to eat pork, but not to ban the sale of pork to others.

I happen to think that teaching young children that they are inherently sinful and unworthy, as some religions try to do, is a form of malicious child abuse, and I am free to avoid doing that.  But I am not free to insist that everyone else cease doing it.

The alternative to such religious freedom is inevitably the imposition of one group’s peculiar religious beliefs on everyone else. We see that all over the world today, especially but not exclusively in the more militant Islamic countries. And we are repelled by it.

In Christianity it has led in the past to pogroms, the Inquisition, genocide, brutal and long Catholic-Protestant wars, and the slaughter of millions. This is not something we want in America, so those – largely evangelical Christians – in our country who are so determined to make everyone else live by their own religious beliefs ought to take note, and learn from history.