May the Pope Challenge Obama’s ‘Freedom of Worship’ Talk for the Sad, Watered Down Thing That It Is

“A healthy pluralism, one which genuinely respects differences and values them as such, does not entail privatizing religions in an attempt to reduce them to the quiet obscurity of the individual’s conscience or to relegate them to the enclosed precincts of churches, synagogues or mosques.” So wrote Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), his Apostolic Exhortation on the proclamation of the Gospel.

Yet all around us — even in the United States — we see the attempt to privatize religion, to make it an entirely interior matter in order to reduce it to quiet obscurity.

With Pope Francis’ arrival in Washington, DC this week, it was fitting that Catholic University of America together with Baylor University and the Religious Freedom Project of the Berkley Center at Georgetown University held a Religious Freedom Summit last Friday, which I attended along with The Stream‘s executive editor Jay Richards.

Much of the conversation had to do with international religious freedom. Several of the speakers made reference to a study by the Pew Research Center stating that 75% of the world’s population in 2013 lived in countries with “high” or “very high” levels of restriction on religion. But the problem is not just someplace “over there.” The threats to religious liberty in this country are real and continue to grow.

Daniel Mark, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University and member of the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) noted that appointees from the Obama administration regularly address the commissioners about “freedom of worship,” rather than about freedom of religion. Freedom of worship is the sad, watered-down, state-controlled version of actual religious freedom. Mere freedom of worship is favored by Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and their ilk.

Freedom of worship, as I write in my book The Liberty Threat, is the right to private beliefs and the practice of religion at home and in designated places of worship. It excludes evangelism, conversion, raising children in the faith, training and appointing spiritual leaders, and advocating public morality and policies consistent with faith. It reduces religion to quiet obscurity far from the public square.

Which is to say that “freedom of worship” disenfranchises free people. After all, Saudi Arabia promises its citizens “freedom of worship” while appearing on the USCIRF’s list of the world’s worst violators of religious liberty. Saudi Arabia along with Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is a “Country of Particular Concern,” a nation that “engages in or tolerates particularly severe violations of religious freedom that are systematic, ongoing and egregious.”

Why violate religious freedom with the thin gruel of freedom of worship? For the same reason states have violated religious freedom for millennia: control.

Religious beliefs offer citizens an alternative to the state. We believe in a higher authority than the state, an authority to which even the state must submit. We believe that loyalty to God and his commands is our first loyalty, before loyalty to any merely human institution. And this is precisely what statists find intolerable.

So no one should be surprised that, speaking to the Women in the World Summit in April 2015, Hillary Clinton shoved aside religious freedom in favor of “reproductive health care” (including, most importantly, unlimited access to abortion). “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she said, “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

Whether the issue is abortion, same-sex marriage or something else, religion must be controlled and, when necessary, changed to conform to the progressive, libertine agenda through “resources and political will,” that is, forcibly by the state. Granting religious freedom only allows religious people to gum up the works. They need to be supressed.

As if to directly answer Mrs. Clinton and others, Pope Francis goes on in Evangelii Gaudium:

This would represent, in effect, a new form of discrimination and authoritarianism. The respect due to the agnostic or non-believing minority should not be arbitrarily imposed in a way that silences the convictions of the believing majority or ignores the wealth of religious traditions. In the long run, this would feed resentment rather than tolerance and peace.

And while we cannot be sure how well our politicians will listen, this is the message Pope Francis needs to send loud and clear to both sides of the political aisle during his visit to the United States — and that we need to send them without ceasing after he leaves.