Free to be, You and Me?

A Stony Knoll act of Reconciliation

Religious Freedom. The right to worship and follow (within bounds, of course) the person or concept you and I have chosen to believe in as being true and right. Baal, Buddha, Mohamed, Jesus Christ, the Bhagavad Gita, Holy Bible, Torah, Book of Mormon, Quran. The value of a civil agreement saying that the body politic won’t restrict the right to belief and practice of citizens emerges when you read about or imagine a nation, a world, without it.

      “Christendom” is a word that combines Christ or Christian and kingdom and the memory of European states committing genocide on those who broke from the state church is accessible to us still in the book Martyrs’ Mirror by Thieleman J. van Braght. But for me as a Mennonite, it’s primarily a sampling of one case: Christians and state intolerance of emerging beliefs of one sect (Anabaptist) inside the Christian pantheon.

      The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recently issued a final report that details the century-long effort to “civilize” the aboriginal population by the theft and indoctrination of its children.

      The consequences of religious intolerance are evident all around us; underneath most every faith structure—unfortunately—lies an inherent assumption that it is the only true faith, that non-adherents are on a false track, a track that can only lead to perdition. Why this should be so is pretty obvious: if other systems of belief are given legitimacy, are tolerated as equal to mine, then basic tenets of my faith can be put in doubt. Truth becomes relative; my security is undermined. Especially if there lies at the core of my religion an obligation to save others from the consequences of their false religion.

      In an address to church groups in 2014, Justice Murray Sinclair of the TRC ended with an appeal to the churches to recognize indigenous faith as a legitimate spirituality. For Canadian Christianity this is a stretch at best, what with our history of collaboration with the Canadian state in the suppression of indigenous culture and spirituality, and more importantly, with a core tenet of our faith being that Jesus saith unto him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6).      

     Our history has been to treat such passages as being universally applicable, forgetting that they were spoken inside the Jewish faith, to people of one particular religious persuasion.

      Justice Sinclair says some things in his address that seem to me to be prophetic in relation to the context in which we find ourselves. He says he has profound respect for people who follow their religious convictions faithfully and fervently (my paraphrase), and that he has no quarrel with indigenous people who find their faith in the acceptance and adoption of the gospel of Jesus Christ (also, my paraphrase).

      In the end, state religious freedom is accurately seen as a humanist impulse translated into human rights legislation: because the beliefs of an individual cannot be governed in any case (some would argue even by the individual himself), the right to hold anyone to a certain conviction will always be a fool’s errand. History has shown that you can coerce and threaten individuals and groups to profess to believe whatever you prescribe, but such enforcement has to be superficial: “you can make me say that white is black, but when I look at snow, it seems, and will always seem, white.”

      Christian churches need to grapple with their understanding of religious freedom seriously and with reverence for all creation and for all people. I don’t see my denomination rising to the occasion: we’re much too immersed in the—dare I say, navel gazing—exercise of determining how we can survive the future given the necessity of remaining as nearly the same as we are now . . . as possible.