Most of us remember our Western Civilization courses in college or a World History class in high school. In those situations we learned about the evil of Christians over the ages and how the institutionalized Church persecuted everyone else. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Edward Gibbon, were taken at face value when he asserted that raw power was supported by religious authorities at the expense of the common man. This is a very truncated and dangerous view of history. Protestants and Evangelicals have swallowed this way of thinking ‘hook line and sinker’ and failed to realize that the Enlightenment writers that they take for the gospel truth had an axe to grind against the Christian faith. The truth is much more complex than what we have been taught. I am not defending the atrocities people have committed in the name of Christ against other religious groups at times in history. What I am proposing is a fresh look at the roots and wellspring of our Christian forefathers in their teachings on religious freedom. I am proposing that Christianity is the very root of Christian freedom. This is such a timely subject due to the rise of a type of radical secularism and the intolerance of radical Islam. We must be courageous people and thinking people in these interesting times. It would also do us well to understand the underpinnings of our religious freedom that was birthed at the founding of our country.
We must turn back to the earliest Christians to see how the ideas of religious freedom trickled down to the founding fathers of our own country. The earliest followers of Christ were persecuted by a pagan empire but the tide was changing by 300 years after the death of the last Apostle. Not long after the fiercest persecution of Diocletian an emperor would come to power named Constantine, and he would issue the Edict of Milan. The Edict of Milan was a turning point in history in that it would be one of the first statements of religious tolerance of its kind. Contrary to popular belief, it did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire but made it a tolerated religion. But how did this way of thinking come about? Who shaped this idea of religious freedom? Was it the pagan Romans that so many believe were enlightened versus those backwards Christians?
Fresh voices of religious toleration can be found in early Christian leaders such as Tertullian. Tetrullian stated in the early 200’s AD that it is a “fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions.” This was a revolutionary concept in the Roman Empire at that time. The Imperial Cult of Rome was fine with you worshipping your own gods or as long as you accepted the Roman pantheon of gods, as well as the Emperor as a living god. What Tertullian was calling for was a much more extreme form of religious freedom. Tertullian would actually be quoted by Thomas Jefferson during the 18th century to defend the right to religious freedom.
Another shining light of religious freedom from the beginnings of Christianity was Lactantius. Lactantius lived into the early 300’s and acted as an advisor for Constantine. Lantantius stated the following: “Religion is to be defended not by putting to death, but by dying, not by cruelty but by patience, not by an impious act but by faith […] For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by doing evil, it will not be defended but polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion, for if the mind of the worshipper turns away it is carried off and nothing remains.” One can see the influence of Lactantius on the thinking of Constantine. Constantine in writing to the Eastern Provinces stated the following: “contest for immortality must be undertaken voluntarily and not with compulsion.”
It was this radical view of religious freedom that was first birthed from the earliest thinkers in the Church. Here is a synopsis of what Christian thinking gave us as a nation as we look at religious freedom:
1) Faith is a matter of an inward choice and should never be coerced or forced. This would rule out an official state religion that makes all other expressions of faith illegal.
2) There are two realms in your experience. There is the spiritual dimension and the material world. Now, this is not to be confused as deism or what Francis Schaeffer called the ‘fact value dichotomy’ We know that we are integrated beings of flesh and spirit and what we do in the body matters. The point I am making here is more in line with what Abraham Kuyper called sphere sovereignty. In the sphere sovereignty paradigm one understands that there is the role of the Church and the role of the state. Actually, Kuyper had three spheres of influence that each had sovereignty. He added the family as the third sphere. The church exercises the keys of excommunication, the state wields the sword, and the family has the rod of discipline. One should not bleed into the other. For the state to take on the role of the Church or the Church to take on the role of the state leads to a blurring of lines that God never intended.
In this time of uncertainty about our own religious freedom in our country we should gladly turn back the pages of time and drink deep from the wisdom of the early Christian thinkers. As Christians we should stand on the solid ground that religious freedom is a non-negotiable. Also, the state has no right to declare secular humanism as the official state religion of America. We need to do the tough work of asking how does the Church inform government and how does the government ensure religious freedom? How do we have an open market place of ideas while not drifting into relativism?
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