arcoftheuniverse

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.

Last week, John Allen, a journalist for Crux and one of the loudest and most persistent voices defending persecuted Christians, wrote a piece on Asia Bibi, the Christian Pakistani woman who was just released from nine years in prison, and indeed on death row, on a blasphemy charge. The Pakistani Supreme Court courageously acquitted her of the charge. Now, Bibi’s life is threatened by mobs asking for her head and the Pakistani government is providing her protection within Pakistan. She is awaiting asylum from a foreign government, but thus far certain hopeful countries have demurred, including the U.K., who is citing security concerns.

Allen then, to my great delight, used Bibi’s case as a reason to revisit the Under Caesar’s Sword project, and especially our public report. He wrote:

Although there are several annual reports on religious freedom violations worldwide, few focus specifically on anti-Christian persecution, and this is the first to ever ponder not merely the fact of oppression but how Christians respond to it.

Read the rest of what he had to say. It was gratifying to see what Allen thought worth conveying and highlighting.

To continue to follow the Bibi case, this piece by Nina Shea, also one of the most passionate defenders of religious freedom, deftly zeroes in on the salient issues and stakes.

One of my favorite writers on religion and politics is Ismail Royer of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team at the Religious Freedom Institute, where I am also affiliated. He’s got an incredible story – an American convert to Islam who was indicted in 2003 for assisting the Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba and spent over 13 years in federal prison. Now, he advocates against Islamic extremism and for interreligious peace, reconciliation — and, yes, religious freedom. His story is here.

Exemplary of his writing is a piece he published in Public Discourse last week explaining why the Bladensurg Cross, which stands astride a Maryland highway and whose removal as a violation of the Establishment Clause is soon to be considered by the Supreme Court, ought in fact to be allowed to stand.

A devout Muslim, Royer is honest about the differences between Islam and Christianity. That’s good. Religious peacebuilders, as I know from having been involved in this work for many years, are often religious pluralists, hail from the liberal side of their traditions, and tend to elide the real differences between faiths, eroding their credibility among the people who most need to be convinced. Not Royer:

Islam differs from the Christianity of America’s founders in many ways. It firmly rejects the trinity and the Christian doctrine of salvation.

But he also finds much in common in the two traditions:

But as in the Christian faith, our spiritual and moral order derives from our relationship with our Creator. Muslims worship the God who revealed Himself to Abraham and the Children of Israel, and we understand ourselves to be participants in the history of this revelation and the continuing drama of its fulfillment.

Likewise, for Muslims, God’s revelation is the foundation of our rights and duties toward our fellow man. The Quran obliges upon Muslims the substance of the Ten Commandments. It states that God has “honored the Children of Adam,” conferring on them a status that compels each of us to treat others with the dignity they are due irrespective of their religion. The Prophet warned against striking another person in the face because God created Adam in His image, and he said, “He who wishes to avoid hellfire and enter heaven should die believing in God and the Last Day, and do unto others what he wishes to be done unto him.” Thus, notwithstanding historical and current rivalries, the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage of Christian and Islamic civilizations substantially overlap in their values, foundations of order, and Semitic and Greek roots.

Most of all, the two faiths have in common an interest in opposing a repressive sort of secularism:

For these reasons, Christianity and Islam share an inherent antipathy toward the ongoing ideological revolt against God that manifests itself in the militant secularism found in parts of continental Europe and Asia, and increasingly in the United States. The Quran says of such people, “They know only the outward appearance of the life of the world, and are heedless of the Hereafter.” This amounts to idolatry with the creation as the object of worship: and while Islamic theology deems Christians to be astray, it does not equate idolatry and Christianity.

He believes that Muslims have a strong interest in the religious character of the United States:

The civilizational substance preserved in the American order is common to Islam, even if few or no Christians realize it. It is thus appropriate, even urgent, that American Muslims seek to preserve this order against encroachments by totalitarian secularism because doing so means preserving what remains of a civilizational order that proceeds from belief in God. For these secularists do not want simply to live peaceably within this order, which the constitutional settlement entitles them to do; rather, they want to scrap this settlement and replace it with their own totalizing vision of society in which good lies not in “regressive” religious traditions, but in the whim of the autonomous self.

He then takes to task both Christian and Muslims who acquiesce in various ways to this secularism. Read the rest of this incisive and compelling piece.

The Under Caesar’s Sword project has sought to discover how Christians around the world have responded to persecution (results summarized in this recently published book).

One of the most surprising — and Christian — of these responses is forgiveness.

A fascinating recent case has emerged in Kandhamal, India, where terrible violence took place against Chrisitians (after the slaying of a Hindu monk) in August, 2008. The story is in a recent piece in the National Catholic Register.

The original violence is described here:

Christian targets in the idyllic jungle district of eastern Odisha state went up in flames following the August 2008 slaying of Hindu nationalist monk Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in his hermitage in Kandhamal.

The body of the mysteriously slain Hindu leader was promptly displayed across Kandhamal in a funeral procession. Alleging the murder as a “Christian conspiracy,” Hindu nationalists promoting the two-day display called for revenge on Christians, leading to a bloodbath.

In the aftermath, nearly 100 Christians were killed, and 300 churches and 6,000 houses were plundered in unabated violence, rendering 56,000 people homeless when thousands of Christians refused to recant their faith, as ordered by the Hindu mob.

Advocacy groups and researchers expressed anger and frustration — over a lack of justice and even compensation for victims of the orchestrated violence — in protests held in New Delhi, in Odisha’s capital of Bhubaneswar, and in Phulbani, the administrative headquarters of Kandhamal district.

And here was the response:

A decade later, the Catholic Church’s observance of the tragedy was cool and sober. A dozen bishops from other parts of the country joined six bishops of Odisha in a solemn Mass of thanksgiving Aug. 25, with a message of reconciliation.

“We are here to give thanks for the valiant witness of Kandhamal Christians: those who embraced martyrdom, those who had to live in the jungles for months for their faith,” said Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, in his homily during the Aug. 26 celebration in Bhubaneswar.

“Due to the witness of the Kandhamal Christians, the faith of the Indian Church has increased,” added Bishop Mascarenhas. Further, he said, “There are regrets in the minds of those who carried out the violence. We ask the Lord today to change the minds of those who carried out violence so that they come to the path of peace.”

Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, which includes Kandhamal, reiterated this theme of thanksgiving at the beginning of the Mass, which was attended by 3,000 people.

“What happened is behind us. We are happy with the positive changes taking place in Kandhamal,” Archbishop Barwa told the Register, in an apparent reference to the hundreds of assailants who have since apologized for the assaults on the Christians, with dozens of them even embracing the Christian faith.

There was much more to it, and worth reading the whole piece.

I have just written a blog post for the site, God’s Servant First, run by the U.S. Catholic Bishops, on the new book by Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, just published by Cambridge University Press, which I recently noted in an ArcU post here.

From the latest post:

Religious freedom advocates face this predicament: We fervently believe that our cause fosters justice and human dignity yet find that these qualities alone do little to persuade officials in the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, or the White House to make promoting religious freedom a high priority. In Washington, only the national interest talks.

Well, a formidable case that religious freedom affects our interests now emerges in a book by political scientist Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, published this year by Cambridge University Press. (Full disclosure: I was the adviser of Saiya’s doctoral dissertation, on which the book is based). Saiya’s thesis is simple: when governments violate the religious freedom of their citizens, they foment religious terrorism.

Gabriel Reynolds of the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame has reviewed the new volume, Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution, which presents the findings of the scholars involved in the Under Caesar’s Sword project, in the Catholic magazine, Commonweal.

Here are his provocative closing paragraphs:

Under Caesar’s Sword also raises the problem of how Christians ought to respond to persecution. Is it permissible to forswear one’s faith under the threat of persecution? We learn that some Christians in Iran and Saudi Arabia have chosen to profess Islam publicly, while privately maintaining their faith in Jesus Christ. Certain Christians in northeastern Kenya learn Islamic prayers and wear Muslim clothing so that, should they be attacked by al-Shabaab, they can pose as Muslims and save their lives. Then there is the related question of whether Christians should give up on evangelism in contexts where preaching the gospel to Muslims can provoke threats against those who convert and reprisals against Christians communities. Islamic law, at least in principle, makes apostasy from Islam punishable by death.

Today concern for religious freedom can no longer be taken for granted. As Paul Marshall notes in his chapter on denials of religious freedom, certain scholars in recent years—notably the late Saba Mahmood of the University of California Berkeley—have questioned whether the “rhetoric” of religious freedom is a tool of the West and its imperialism. For the contributors to Under Caesar’s Sword, however, advocacy for religious freedom is above all a response to human suffering. If we are called to be merciful to the “least of these brothers and sisters,” then we cannot forget those who suffer because of their faith.

Read the full review here.