{"id":21211,"date":"2016-12-12T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T17:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/opinion-threats-against-religious-freedom-not-imaginary-or-overstated\/"},"modified":"2016-12-12T09:00:15","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T17:00:15","slug":"opinion-threats-against-religious-freedom-not-imaginary-or-overstated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/opinion\/opinion-threats-against-religious-freedom-not-imaginary-or-overstated\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Threats against religious freedom not imaginary or overstated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: <\/em>To mark the 225th anniversary of the Bill of Rights on Dec. 15, The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a 12-part series through Dec. 22 on each of the amendments, exploring why they exist and the challenges they face today. The series begins with the First Amendment, and religious liberty.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Religious freedom is a fundamental natural right and first among our liberties. This is borne out by the priority protection it specifically enjoys in the Constitution\u2019s First Amendment.<\/p>\n

Consider four brief points:<\/p>\n

First, religious faith and practice are cornerstones of the American experience. Many of America\u2019s first settlers were fleeing religious persecution. Nearly all of the American founders saw religious faith as vital to the life of a free people. They believed that liberty and happiness grow organically out of virtue. And for the founders, virtue needed grounding in religious faith.<\/p>\n

At the heart of American public life is an essentially religious vision of man and government. This model has given us a free society marked by a wide variety of cultural and religious expressions. But our system\u2019s success does not result from clever legal mechanics. Our system works precisely because of the moral assumptions that undergird it. And those assumptions have religious roots.<\/p>\n

When the founders talked about religion, they meant more than a vague \u201cspirituality.\u201d The distinguished legal scholar Harold Berman showed that the founders \u2014 though they had differing views about religion among themselves \u2014 understood religion positively as \u201cboth belief in God and belief in an after-life of reward for virtue, and punishment for sin.\u201d In other words, religion mattered. It made people live differently and live better. People\u2019s faith was assumed to have broad implications, including the political kind.<\/p>\n

That leads to my second point: Freedom of religion is more than freedom of worship. The right to worship is a necessary but not a sufficient part of religious liberty. For most believers, and certainly for Christians, faith requires community. It begins in worship, but it also demands preaching, teaching, and service. Real faith always bears fruit in public witness and action. Otherwise it\u2019s just empty words.<\/p>\n

The founders saw the public value of religious faith because they inherited its legacy and experienced its formative influence themselves. They created a nation designed to depend on the moral convictions of religious believers, and to welcome their active role in public life.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my third point: Threats against religious freedom in our country are not imaginary or overstated. They\u2019re happening right now. One example is the Obama administration\u2019s Health and Human Services mandate, commonly called the contraceptive mandate, which violates the religious identity of many religiously inspired public ministries. Government now increasingly interferes with the conscience rights of medical providers, private employers and individual citizens and attacks the policies, hiring practices and tax statuses of religious charities and ministries.<\/p>\n

Much of this hostility links to Catholic and other religious teaching on the dignity of life and human sexuality. Catholic moral convictions about abortion, contraception and the purpose of sexuality are clearly unpopular in some quarters. Yet Catholic ideas about the nature of personhood, marriage and sexuality are rooted not just in revelation, but also in reason and natural law. Human beings have an inherent nature that is not just the product of accident or culture, but universal and rooted in permanent truths knowable to reason.<\/p>\n

This understanding of the human person anchors the entire American experiment. If human nature is little more than modeling clay, and no permanent human nature exists by the hand of \u201cnature\u2019s God,\u201d then natural, unalienable rights obviously can\u2019t exist. And no human \u201crights\u201d can finally claim priority over the interests of the state.<\/p>\n

The problem is that critics of religious faith tend to reduce all of these moral convictions to an expression of subjective beliefs. And if they\u2019re purely subjective beliefs, then \u2014 so the critics will argue \u2014 they can\u2019t be rationally defended. And because they\u2019re rationally indefensible, they should be treated as a form of prejudice. In effect, 2,000 years of moral experience, moral reasoning, and religious conviction suddenly become a species of bias.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more, though. When religious belief is redefined downward to a kind of private bias, then the religious identity of institutional ministries has no public value, other than the utility of getting credulous people to do good things. And exempting Catholic social ministries, for example, from actions that directly contradict their religious identity, becomes a concession to private \u201cprejudice.\u201d And concessions to private prejudice feed bigotry and hurt the public \u2014 or so the reasoning goes.<\/p>\n

This is how deeply held, deeply rooted moral teaching and religious belief end up being branded as hate speech.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s a fourth and final point: From the beginning, religious believers \u2014 alone and in communities \u2014 have enriched American history simply by trying to live their faith in the world. We need to realize that America\u2019s founding documents assume an implicitly religious anthropology. The trouble is that this ennobling idea of human nature, nature\u2019s God and natural rights is one that many of our leaders no longer share.<\/p>\n

We ignore that fact at our own very serious peril.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Philadelphia. His book \u201cStrangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World\u201d will be published in February. Readers may email him at commof@archphila.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: To mark the 225th anniversary of the Bill of Rights on Dec. 15, The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a 12-part series through Dec. 22 on each of the amendments, exploring why they exist and the challenges they face today. The series begins with the First Amendment, and religious liberty. Religious freedom is a fundamental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-21211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21211"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=21211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}