arcoftheuniverse

A recent article in Public Discourse decries the persecution of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Muslims – written by a Muslim. Not just any Muslim, but rather Yahya Cholil Staquf, General Secretary of the world’s largest movement of Muslims, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), whose ranks number 90 million. Staquf and the Nahdlatul Ulama are developing a doctrinal framework to produce changes in Islam much like those that took place in another religion – Catholicism.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council promulgated Dignitatis Humanae, the landmark declaration on religious liberty. The declaration culminated a historical road along which the magisterium of the Church had remained wary of the principle because of its association with relativism, theological liberalism, and the open attacks on the Church fomented by the French Revolution and its legatees. What enabled the Council fathers to endorse religious liberty was their discovery that the principle could be grounded in teachings that were embedded in the Church’s own tradition. Certain intellectuals of the post-World War II period, including John Courtney Murray, S.J., Jacques Maritain, and Heinrich Rommen, paved the way for the declaration by showing how historic Christian commitments could be brought to bear on the case for a human right of religious freedom. When opponents of the declaration objected “error has no rights,” supporters responded, “no, but people do.” It is the dignity of the human person in her search for embrace of religious truth, which must be free, that stands at the core of the declaration: Dignitatis Humanae.

Today, Islam, the world’s second largest religion and the only one that rivals Christianity for the number of countries populated by its adherents, suffers a dearth of religious freedom, as I argue in my recent book, Religious Freedom In Islam. Out of 47 or so Muslim-majority countries, 36 are not religiously free judged by indices composed by the Pew Research Center. Among Muslim religious leaders and jurists around the world, it is likely that there are far more who support severe penalties for apostasy and restrictions on the practice of non-Muslims than those who support religious freedom. Jihadi groups like the Islamic State are brutal and global in their reach. Some 91% of religious terrorist groups are Islamic, my own study of 2007 concludes.

Might there be a Dignitatis Humanae for Islam? Skeptics would object that Islam has no pope or magisterium who speaks for the entire religious body. True, but we might ask whether and how a religion whose leaders are skeptical of religious freedom might come to form a consensus for religious freedom.

In fact, there are some seeds of freedom in Islam that possess potential for growth. Of the 47 Muslim-majority states, 11 are religiously free, seven of them located in West Africa, where high religiosity mixes with tolerance towards small religious minorities. Several Muslim intellectuals have defended religious freedom on the basis of traditional Islamic principles, including Abdullah An-Naim, a Sudanese intellectual who has called for an “Islamic Reformation,” Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist who argues for religious and economic freedom, and Abdullah Saeed, a scholar from the Maldives who has championed the abolition of blasphemy and apostasy laws. In 2008, a coalition of 138 prominent Muslim leaders signed “A Common Word,” a statement that affirmed mutual religious tolerance along with other related principles. Similarly, in 2016, 250 notable Muslim religious leaders, scholars, and even heads of state signed the Marrakesh Declaration, affirming the rights of religious minorities as stipulated by Islamic law and the Charter of Medina.

All of these seeds are represented in Staquf’s piece. His organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, has a strong influence in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. In contrast to enormous popular movements in the Middle East and South Asia such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, NU carries a long tradition of tolerance towards people of other religions. On the island of Java, Indonesia’s largest, religious freedom was in place long before the appearance of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the Bill of Rights in the United States, Staquf points out. Today, Staquf is calling for a global reform of Islamic orthodoxy that would teach equal citizenship for everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. As General Secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, he vigorously opposes extremist efforts to curtail the rights of religious minorities in Indonesia and actively seeks to foster respect for the equal rights and dignity of every human being worldwide.

What has changed in the global persecution of Christians in the past two or three years? This was one of the questions that Steven Howard of In Defense of Christians put to me in a public zoom interview on Under Caesar’s Sword this past Friday, May 8.

My response is not very much. I cannot think of a single locale where the situation is substantially different. In places like Syria and Iraq, perhaps persecution has subsided in the aftermath of ISIS’s defeat, but Christian communities there remain endangered. China’s crackdown continues apace after a short respite an account of the virus. This story on Nigeria, one of the most ignored sites of violence against Christians, tells of a new report showing that the deaths and persecution of Christians have been intense in the first part of 2020.

Under Caesar’s Sword continues to offer curricula, a film, a public report, and volume of scholarly essays, and other materials for learning about Christian responses to persecution around the world today. The project is sponsored by the Religious Freedom Institute and the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.

 

I am happy to have signed this letter:

April 4, 2019

Dear President Trump, Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, Minority Leader McCarthy, Majority Leader McConnell and Minority Leader Schumer:

We are a diverse group of advocates for religious liberty for all. We sometimes differ about what religious freedom requires, but we are united around the bedrock principle of ensuring that all individuals and communities are able to exercise their faith in safety and security. We write to ask you to take action to uphold this principle.

We are grieving over the most recent heinous attacks on houses of worship. The March 15th attack on two mosques in New Zealand during Friday prayer killed fifty Muslims and injured fifty more. In the weeks since, an assailant stabbed a Catholic priest in a Montreal church during Mass, and a California mosque was set on fire and vandalized with graffiti referencing the New Zealand attacks. Moreover, to our alarm, in the aftermath of the New Zealand attacks we have seen the Jewish community falsely accused as somehow being responsible for those attacks— rhetoric that further endangers that community as well.

As you know, other houses of worship have also been targeted for unspeakable violence in recent years. In the United States, these attacks include ones on Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek; Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota; First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas; and Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The words we use matter greatly, especially the words of our leaders. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to the members of Touro Synagogue, insisting that the government of the United States must give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. . . .” All Americans should be able to “sit in safety under [their] own vine[s] and figtree[s],” with “none to make [them] afraid,” Washington said.

We ask you to uphold these principles. As governmental leaders, you have a special duty to ensure that your words comport with the spirit of the Constitution and help to unify, strengthen and keep Americans safe.

Accordingly, we ask you to affirm the following principles in coming days:

• Individuals of all faiths and none have equal dignity, worth and rights to religious freedom.

• A person is not more or less American because of his or her faith. People of all faiths and none are equal and make outstanding contributions to the United States.

• Individuals must be able to exercise their religion, including attending their houses of worship and practicing their faith in the public square, without fear for their physical safety.

• Scapegoating, stereotyping and spreading false information about any person or community, including religious individuals and communities, is unacceptable.

• Americans should never foment fear about groups based on attributes like religion, race or ethnicity, and they should speak against fear-mongering by others.

• The civic and religious virtue of humble dialogue with those with whom one disagrees should be encouraged.

• Leaders should avoid using violent imagery because it can encourage violence, especially among those who are so inclined and those who are impressionable.

• An attack on one religion should be treated as an attack on every faith. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

We hope you will devote specific remarks to these principles in the days ahead. We vow to work with you to ensure that individuals and communities are able to practice their faith without fear.

Sincerely, William Aiken

President, Interfaith Council of Metropolitan Washington

Washington, D.C.

Bishop Claude Alexander The Park Church Charlotte, North Carolina

Leith Anderson President

National Association of Evangelicals

Marge Baker

Executive Vice President for Policy and Program People for the American Way Foundation

Bishop Carroll A. Baltimore

Global Alliance Interfaith Networks

Most Reverend Joseph C. Bambera Bishop of Scranton

Chairman, USCCB Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs

Jenna Baron Executive Director

Alliance for Refugee Youth Support & Education Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Rev. Dr. James E. Baucom, Jr. Senior Pastor

Columbia Baptist Church Falls Church, Virginia

Thomas C. Berg

James L. Oberstar Professor of Law and Public Policy University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota)

Anju Bhargava Founder

Hindu American Seva Communities

Rev. Dr. Steve Bland Michigan Baptist Association Detroit, Michigan

Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi President

Buddhist Association of the United States

Rev. Brendolyn Boseman

African American Ministers Leadership Council Augusta, Georgia

J. Mark Brinkmoeller

Vice President, International Interfaith Peace Corps

Former Director, USAID Center for Faith-based and Community Initiatives

Most Reverend Timothy P. Broglio Archbishop for the Military Services, USA

Chairman, USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace

Rev. Paul Bush

Concerned Clergy Fellowship Aiken, South Carolina

Rev. Jennifer Butler Chief Executive Officer Faith in Public Life

Rev. Bruce A. Cameron

Retired Lutheran Minister (LCMS) St. Louis, Missouri

Sister Simone Campbell Executive Director

NETWORK Advocates for Catholic Social Justice

Galen Carey

Vice President for Government Relations National Association of Evangelicals

Dr. John D. Carlson

Associate Professor of Religious Studies and

Interim Director, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict Arizona State University

Angela Carmella Professor

Seton Hall University School of Law

Patrick Carolan Executive Director

Franciscan Action Network

Rev. David B. Carver

First United Presbyterian Church of Crafton Heights Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Rev. Dorothy Chaney VASHTI Women of Faith Miami, Florida

Bishop Harry Chaney MICAH Leadership Council Cairo, Georgia

Dr. Arturo Chavez President

Mexican American Catholic College

Rev. Dr. Michael Couch MICAH Leadership Council Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Rev. Dr. Jill Y. Crainshaw Interim Dean

Blackburn Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology Wake Forest University School of Divinity

Rev. Alan Cross

Southern Baptist Convention Minister

Writer/Author, Missional Strategist, Baptist Association of Montgomery, Alabama

Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie

Director, Center for Peace and Spirituality University Chaplain

Pacific University

Rev. Fred Davie Executive Vice-President

Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

Rev. Delisha Davis

MICAH Leadership Council Alexandria, Virginia

Dr. David DeCosse Santa Clara University

Co-editor, Conscience and Catholicism: Rights, Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses (Orbis 2015)

Dr. Sabrina E. Dent

Director of Programs and Partnerships

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Dr. Miguel Diaz

U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See (ret.)

John Courtney Murray University Chair in Public Service Loyola University of Chicago

Dr. John DiIulio

Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society University of Pennsylvania

Former Director, White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives

Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas Dean

Episcopal Divinity School at Union

Rev. Dr. Pam Durso Executive Director

Baptist Women in Ministry Atlanta, Georgia

Rev. Dr. R. Guy Erwin Bishop

Southwest California Synod

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Rev. Kristen Farrington Executive Director

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Todd Fetters, Bishop

Church of the United Brethren in Christ

Richard T. Foltin Senior Scholar

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Dr. Curtis W. Freeman Research Professor of Theology

Director of the Baptist House of Studies Duke University School of Divinity

Dr. Nicole Baker Fulgham President

The Expectations Project

Rev. Dr. Willie Gable Interfaith Ministers Alliance New Orleans, Louisiana

Richard W. Garnett

Paul J. Schierl / Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law Director, Notre Dame Program on Church, State & Society Concurrent Professor of Political Science

University of Notre Dame

Dr. Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence

Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Princeton University

Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson General Secretary Emeritus Reformed Church in America

Dr. Steven Green

Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law

Director of the Center for Religion, Law & Democracy Willamette University School of Law

Jonathan A. Greenblatt

Chief Executive Office and National Director Anti-Defamation League

Dr. R. Marie Griffith

John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Director, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri

Anjleen Kaur Gumer Executive Director National Sikh Campaign

Rev. Dr. David P. Gushee

Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics Director, Center for Theology & Public Life, Mercer University Immediate Past President, American Academy of Religion & Society of Christian Ethics

Ken Hackett

U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See (ret.)

President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services (ret.)

Iftekhar A. Hai President

UMA Interfaith Alliance

Rev. Cynthia L. Hale Senior Pastor

Ray of Hope Christian Church Decatur, Georgia

Diana Bate Hardy

Executive Director and Co-founder Mormon Women for Ethical Government

Elder Lee Harris

African American Ministers Leadership Council Jacksonville, Florida

Hoda Hawa

Director, Washington, D.C. Office Muslim Public Affairs Council

Rev. Jennifer Hawks Associate General Counsel

Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty

Dr. Charles C. Haynes Founding Director

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Rev. Dr. Katharine Rhodes Henderson President

Auburn Seminary

Dr. Dennis P. Hollinger

President & Colman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary

Shirley V. Hoogstra, J.D. President

Council for Christian Colleges & Universities

Rev. Amiri Hooker

MICAH Leadership Council Columbia, South Carolina

Pastor Carolyn Hurst, MD Seventh-day Adventist Cleveland, Ohio

Pastor Jerome Hurst Seventh-day Adventist Cleveland, Ohio

Dr. Amir Hussain

Professor of Theological Studies Loyola Marymount University

Dr. Trung Huynh Enlightened Buddha Temple Sugar Land, Texas

Rev. Charles Foster Johnson

Pastor, Bread Fellowship, Fort Worth, Texas Executive Director, Pastors for Texas Children

Rev. Louis Jones, II Washington, D.C.

Rev. Dr. Serene Jones President

Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

Pardeep Singh Kaleka

Board of Trustees, Sikh Temple of Wisconsin Co-Founder, Serve 2 Unite

Bishop Lawrence Kirby Racine, Wisconsin

Douglas W. Kmiec

Professor of Constitutional Law & Human Rights Ambassador of the United States (ret.)

Steven A. Krueger

Catholic Social Justice Advocate Boston, Massachusetts

Most Reverend Joseph E. Kurtz, D.D. Archbishop of Louisville

Chairman, USCCB Committee for Religious Liberty

Rev. William H. Lamar IV Pastor

Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church Washington, D.C.

Rachel Laser Executive Director

Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Jason Lemieux

Director of Government Affairs Center for Inquiry

Skip L’Heureux

Executive Director Emeritus Queens Federation of Churches

Shapri D. LoMaglio, J.D.

Senior Vice President for Government & External Relations Council for Christian Colleges & Universities

Jacob Lupfer

Committee on Religious Liberty

Rev. Jo Anne Lyon Ambassador

General Superintendent Emerita The Wesleyan Church

Daniel Mach Director

ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief

Rev. Carlos L. Malavé Executive Director

Christian Churches Together

Benjamin Pietro Marcus Religious Literacy Specialist

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Rev. Dr. George A. Mason Senior Pastor

Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas President, Faith Commons

Rev. Isaac McCullough Jacksonville, Florida

Rev. Timothy McDonald First Iconium Baptist Church Atlanta, Georgia

Nipun Mehta

Founder, ServiceSpace

Arno Arr Michaelis IV Director, Serve 2 Unite

Co-Author, The Gift of Our Wounds

Dr. Vincent J. Miller

Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture University of Dayton

Elliot Mincberg

People for the American Way Foundation

Jack Moline President Interfaith Alliance

Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr.

Pastor Emeritus

Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Cleveland, Ohio

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy Executive Director

Catholic Mobilizing Network

Rev. Rich Nathan Senior Pastor

Vineyard Columbus, Columbus, Ohio

Carl Nelson

President, Transform Minnesota: the evangelical network

The Honorable Thomas P. O’Neill III Chief Executive Officer

O’Neill And Associates

Dr. Aristotle “Telly” Papanikolaou Professor of Theology

Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture Co-founding Director, Orthodox Christian Studies Center Fordham University

Suzii Paynter Co-Director

Pastors for Texas Children

Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell Pastor

First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Jonah Pesner Director

Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

Dr. Daniel Philpott

Professor of Political Science University of Notre Dame

John D. Pierce

Executive Editor/Publisher Nurturing Faith Publishing

Dr. Soong-Chan Rah

Milton B. Engebretson Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism North Park Theological Seminary

Shahid Rahman Executive Director

American Muslim Institution

Curtis Ramsey-Lucas Editor, The Christian Citizen

American Baptist Home Mission Societies

Rev. Dr. R. Mitch Randall Executive Director

Ethics Daily

Nancy Ratzan Former President

National Council of Jewish Women

Stephen Reeves

Associate Coordinator of Partnerships & Advocacy Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

Melissa Rogers

Visiting Professor, Wake Forest University School of Divinity

Former Director, White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships

James Roosevelt, Jr.

Catholic Health Care Advocate Boston, Massachusetts

Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero President

National Association of Latino Evangelicals

Rev. Alexia Salvatierra

Faith-Rooted Organizing UnNetwork

Rabbi David N. Saperstein

U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom (ret.)

Brett G. Scharffs

Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law

Director, International Center for Law and Religion Studies Brigham Young University School of Law

Dr. Stephen Schneck

Retired Director, Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies The Catholic University of America

Rabbi Julie Schonfeld Chief Executive Officer The Rabbinical Assembly

Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah

Senior Fellow and Director of the South and Southeast Asia Action Team, Religious Freedom Institute

Non-resident Research Professor of Government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion

Rev. Dr. Robert Shine

African American Ministers Leadership Council Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Suhag Shukla, Esq.

Executive Director

Hindu American Foundation

Ambassador Islam Siddiqui President

American Muslim Institution

Dr. Ronald J. Sider

Distinguished Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry and Public Policy Palmer Seminary at Eastern University

Rev. Dr. Susan Smith

African American Ministers Leadership Council Columbus, Ohio

Stephanie Summers Chief Executive Office Center for Public Justice

Sayyid Syeed President

Islamic Society of North America

Dr. Matthew A. Tapie

Assistant Professor of Theology

Director, Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies Saint Leo University, Florida

Amanda Tyler Executive Director

Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty

Asma Uddin Senior Scholar

Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute

Dr. Corey D. B. Walker Visiting Professor University of Richmond

Freedom Forum Institute Senior Fellow for Religious Freedom

Rev. Jim Wallis Founder and President Sojourners

Colin P. Watson, Sr.

Director of Ministries and Administration Christian Reformed Church in North America

Michael Wear Chief Strategist

The AND Campaign

Debbie Weinstein Coalition on Human Needs

J. Patrick Whelan, MD PhD

Academic Advisory Council

Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at University of Southern California

Rev. Dr. Cathy Williams VASHTI Women of Faith Raleigh, North Carolina

Rev. Merchuria Chase Williams, PhD African American Leadership Council Atlanta, Georgia

Rev. Leslie Marie Wilson Director

African American Ministers Leadership Council Waldorf, Maryland

Rev. Melvin Wilson

St. Matthew AME Church Orange, New Jersey

Rev. Dr. Nancy Wilson Metropolitan Community Churches

Rev. Patrick Young

Mobilizing Preachers and Community (MPAC) New York

E. Elmhurst, New York

* Titles and organizational affiliations listed for informational purposes only

As the world’s bishops gather in the Vatican to confront the sex abuse scandals that have arisen around the world, I share this piece that I published in America a couple of days ago. It proposes a Eucharistic response to the scandals. What I mean is conveyed best through the first few paragraphs — along with the great picture with which America accompanied the piece.

 

“The Last Supper of Christ,” by Anthuensis Clakissins, in the Church of St. Giles, Bruges, Belgium (iStock).

 

“The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.” With these words of the Lord, stalwart Catholics have sought to dissuade brothers and sisters alienated by the sex abuse scandals from exiting the fold.

While it is good to be reminded that insolvency is not the church’s destiny, such words alone will not assuage today’s disillusioned laity. This past summer’s new revelations of priestly abuses and episcopal failures in Pennsylvania, along with prospective revelations from many other states, combined with a new face of the scandals—the silence of some prelates toward the abuses of other prelates like those of former archbishop Theodore McCarrick—leave the laity seeking not salve, comfort and piety but rather reform, repentance and truth: in a word, justice. Absent justice, many will leave the church.

Can we expect the Body of Christ to deliver justice? Many Catholics, perceiving corporate evasion and bureaucratic torpor on the part of the church’s bishops, will say no and instead favor turning matters over to the district attorney, the journalist and the therapist. While these responses have elicited benefits over the past couple of decades, they follow secular scripts and again raise the question: Does the Body of Christ—qua the Body of Christ—offer a response to the sex abuse scandals? Or does it offer only creeds, catechesis and suburban Sunday school sapience that must be laid aside until this enormity is dealt with?

Catholics encounter the Body of Christ directly in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. What we have here is not an inert cosmic substance that perdures despite the sins of the church’s members but rather the action of a God who ventured into the mud to do battle with these very sins. Christ, too, faced a scandalous abuse crisis, surrounded by violence between a brutal empire and restive separatists, persecuted at birth by the local king and ultimately executed. Through the Eucharist, Jesus makes his victory over these—and all—sins available to us, here and now, in our crisis.

The Eucharist holds out an integrated response to the wounds that priestly sex abuse has wrought . . .

 

 

In becoming the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, Pope Francis evoked his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, who, near the end of his life, journeyed to Egypt to convert the Muslim Sultan to Christianity and ended up engaging him in a dialogue about peace. In last week’s dialogue with Muslims in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), our latter-day Francis raised the issue that most mars peace between Catholics and Muslims: religious freedom.

Tu quoque! Pope Francis’s interlocutors might well have pointed out that St. Francis encountered the Sultan on the front lines of the wars of the Crusades – not one of the Church’s sparkling episodes of religious freedom. Or that early modern Catholic Spain expelled Muslims and Jews, who then found refuge under a different Sultan in the far more tolerant Ottoman Empire. Or that the Church conducted inquisitions and fought a century-and-a-half of religious wars with Protestants.

Still, Pope Francis exercised integrity in not deleting religious freedom from his message to Muslims. As I argue in my just-published book, Religious Freedom In Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today, the Muslim world suffers from a deficit of this universal human right, which protects individuals and communities in their search for, practice, expression, and spread of religion. The world’s 47 Muslim-majority countries are on average far less religiously free than the entire globe and even less free than Christian majority countries. Only a few miles from the dialogue hall in Abu Dhabi are Saudi Arabia, which prohibits Christians from building churches, and Iran, which imprisons and executes Bahais.

While the Muslim world’s dearth of religious freedom demands honesty, the Catholic Church’s history forbids triumphalism – and might even offer Muslims a pathway to the future. During the era when the Church was losing its grip on its medieval temporal power, it feared religious freedom, much as many Muslims do today. Its rivals were Protestant reformers, Enlightenment intellectuals, and their political agents, who portrayed the Church as a purveyor of dungeons, superstition, and hierarchy and whose version of religious freedom sent Catholics into hiding or to the guillotine.

Eventually the Catholic Church found its way to religious freedom, which it proclaimed in its landmark declaration, of 1965, Dignitatis Humanae. Animated by this teaching and by the Second Vatican Council’s more general endorsement of human rights, Catholic churches came to challenge dictators and champion democracy in Poland, the Philippines, Chile, South Korea, and many other countries.

How did the Catholic Church travel from fearing freedom to fomenting freedom? Not by adopting the logics of its rivals but rather by developing a new teaching from its own history and tradition. Twentieth-century intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray looked back to Tertullian, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas for the notion that faith must be totally free. The Church’s favorable experience in the United States and in post-World War II Western Europe taught it that living under a constitution that provides genuine religious freedom need not be a threat. While opponents of religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council objected that “error has no rights,” proponents rejoined, “true, but people do.” Freedom carried the day.

Like yesterday’s Catholics, today’s Muslims widely fear religious freedom, perceiving it as a western export that is packaged with individualism, the breakdown of the family, secularism, and U.S. domination. While the Western media often opines that what Islam needs is a Reformation or an Enlightenment, Muslims are as unlikely as Catholics once were to view these episodes favorably. Regimes based on Enlightenment ideology in Syria and Egypt became torture capitals of the world in their suppression of traditional Islam. The Reformation’s fracture of Christendom is hardly an attractive future, either.

Yet, Muslims may find in their own history and tradition grounds for embracing religious freedom, much as the Catholic Church did. The Quran contains one of the strongest statements of freedom in the texts of any religion: “There is no compulsion in religion.” Muslim pioneers of religious freedom like Mustafa Akyol and Abdullah Saeed argue for the principle on the basis of the Quran, the rationalist tradition in Islamic thought, and periods of tolerance in Islamic history. Today, eleven Muslim-majority countries, eight of them in Western Africa, are religiously free. Muslims will also welcome empirical evidence that religious freedom is inversely correlated with civil war, terrorism, and poverty, all problems to which Muslim-majority countries are disproportionately prone.

Both Catholicism and Islam long predated modernity, were sharply challenged by it, and then fought back. Through embracing religious freedom, the Catholic Church reached a rapprochement with modernity, but on its own terms. Might Islam travel the same pathway? The subject is one that today’s Francis would do well to raise repeatedly in his upcoming journeys to the Muslim world.

 

One of the nastiest armed conflicts in recent times was the war in Northern Uganda that lasted from 1987 to 2009, fought between the forces of the cultish Lord’s Resistance Army and the army of the Government of Uganda. Many remember the Kony 2012 video, which brought attention to the conflict and garnered over 100 millions hits on the internet. Beginning in the late 1990’s, a peace process was initiated by the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI), a groups of religious leaders, Catholic, Protestant (including Pentecostal), and Muslim, that pioneered peace negotiations, lobbied for the Amnesty Act of 2000, which allowed thousands of child soldiers to leave the bush, and encouraged Ugandans across the region to practice forgiveness.

I was reminded of the initiative by this recent article in Commonweal, which recounts the work of the ARLPI. I was involved in documenting these efforts myself from 2012 to 2015, when I oversaw the production of a video, “Uganda: The Challenge of Forgiveness,” and conducted a research project, “Forgiveness: Unveiling an Asset for Peacebuilding,” studying dynamics of forgiveness after conflict in Uganda, whose results are here. One of the stars is Archbishop John Baptist Odama, who chaired the ARLPI and traveled through the bush to spark peace negotiations with Joseph Kony.

 

 

Lamin Sanneh, one of my intellectual heroes, has just died at age 76. He was D. Willis James professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School and a professor of history at Yale University, and a superb scholar of global Christianity, Christian-Muslim relations, and religion in Western Africa. His most recent book,  “Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam”(2016), was pivotal to my understanding of Islam in Western Africa, particularly its capacity for peace and interreligious harmony.

This obituary in the New York Times tells his life history well.

It begins thus:

Lamin Sanneh, who was born into poverty in a tiny river town in Gambia and became a world-renowned scholar of Christianity and Islam, providing key insights into how each religion took hold in West Africa, died on Jan. 6 in New Haven. He was 76.

His son, Kelefa, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Dr. Sanneh was born a Muslim but converted to Christianity as a teenager and became a practicing Roman Catholic, giving him experience in both Islam and Christianity and an unusual perspective for a scholar of religion.