Religious freedom must be protected even from the religious

Well worth a read. Some more…

There have been some fringe groups in the religious world skeptical of freedom of religion for some time. Among Protestants, the theonomists, a group whose polemical volume belies their small number, have been around since the 1980s. More recently, the integralist movement has reemerged within Catholicism, calling for a close relationship between State and the (Roman Catholic) Church and boasting some significant intellectual advocates such as Adrian Vermeule. And in recent weeks there has been debate around what influential evangelical pastor John MacArthur did or did not say on the issue. One need not take a side in the discussion of how to interpret MacArthur’s words to sense that there may well be some ambivalence toward freedom of religion emerging within the ranks of mainstream conservative evangelicalism, even Baptists—an interesting development, given the importance of Baptists to the history of religious of freedom.

And…

The question of why religious freedom is now under pressure from both the nonreligious and the religious is an interesting one and does not permit of a single answer, although there is a connection between the objections of both sides. For secularists, religion is now a problem because the notion of harm has extended beyond the issue of physical well-being and ownership of property ….

There is nothing particularly surprising in the narrative above. But why is the question of religious freedom becoming a talking point within religious circles?

One reason is no doubt reaction to the moral chaos we see around us. The First Amendment may be sweeping in its provisions, but the Founders were no doubt assuming that such freedom would be understood to operate within a broadly agreed-upon moral framework. They did not want the federal government legislating on, for example, the practice of baptism, but they assumed that the populace would be in sync on the basic moral framework necessary for a free society. Christian social morality was therefore safe and the question of whether it was rooted in Trinitarianism, deism, or even an atheism that still considered the basics of that morality correct was irrelevant. Now Christians see that in a post-Christian, postmodern world, the First Amendment can actually be used to delegitimize traditional Christian morality, especially with regard to such things as sex. The desire to enforce a sacred order for morality, whether Catholic, as in the case of integralism, or Protestant, as in the case of theonomy, is thus understandable.

Understandable but hardly practical.