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One - In Algeria, in early 1996, Father Christien de Cherge, prior of the Trappist monastery, Our Lady of [the] Atlas [Mountains], in the face of mounting threats of violence, sent the following letter to Sayah Attiya, leader of an insurgent Islamic group -

"Brother - Let me speak man to man, believer to believer.  We [monks] cannot take sides.  We are foreigners.  We are monks. That binds us to the choice God made for us, to live a life of prayer, a simple life, one of manual labor, hospitable to everyone, especially the poor.  This is our free choice and binds us to the death.  I do not think God wants us to die at your hands...We love everyone, you included.  May the one God guide all our lives.  Amen."

The Monks had been abducted years earlier, in 1993, but after their release had decided to stay in Algeria - despite constant threats from Muslim groups opposing the government.  Generally speaking, the monastery enjoyed good relations with the surrounding community.  Many local Muslims came to depend on one Trappist, Brother Luc, who was a physician, for their medical care.  The monastery did not proselytize the local population, but sought to provide an example of Christian service, holiness and austerity to the surrounding peoples. 

Still, in March, soon after Prior Christien's letter, the Muslim radicals broke into the monastery, taking the 7 monks hostage.  In May, they killed each monk by slitting his throat.

Vignette two - in 1948, the nations of the world, reeling from World War II, a war worse than imaginable, worse even than World War I, a war in which the whole globe had been involved, in which the Nazi and Japanese regimes had practiced slave labor and inhumane experimentation on conquered peoples (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Chinese, Koreans) whom they considered less than human or whose lives were, in the chilling phrase developed by the German medical establishment, "lives unworthy of life" - the nations of the world, as I say, who had survived this terrible conflict but who had been horrified by its brutality and its nature as total war, these nations (or most of them) met in New York to found the United Nations. 

In order to avoid "the scourge of war," they determined it was of fundamental importance to recognize and to protect basic human rights.  The first document, or statement, they issued was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  (Do not be scandalized that a "conservative" refers to the Universal Declaration.  The redoubtable Richard Neuhaus and the Ramsay Colloquium provided a favorable evaluation of it upon its 50th anniversary in 1998.  Like all things this side of Heaven, it's a mixed bag, but it does have some good things, some true principles.)

Its Preamble states: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world" - a very solid, true, and absolutely fundamental point.

Article 18 goes on to state: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public and private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."

The Universal Declaration was "implemented" through treaties.  The most important of which is the Covenant on Civil & Political Rights.  The U.S. ratified the treaty during the administration of Bush the Elder.  Article 18 provides:

1.Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.  This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom...to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. 

2. No one shall be subject to coercion...

3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Vignette three - On Feb. 15, 2002, John Shattuck gave the keynote address to the Harvard University Human Rights Conference.  Shattuck had served as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under President Clinton from 1993 through 1998.  During his tenure, some horrible abuses of human rights occurred around the world, perhaps most notably the genocide in Rwanda.  In those days, I did not work at the Family Research Council.  I worked for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.  The Lawyers Committee, relying upon pro bono assistance from large law firms in New York and Washington, sought to protect the "rule of law" (as well as lawyers and judges) across the world, in accordance with the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  (E.g., article 8: "Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or the law.")

  So by working to remedy such abuses as the suppression of the church in China and the Rwandan genocide, I got to know John Shattuck.  He was (and is) a good man, one concerned about human rights. 

On the occasion of his keynote address, he began with the following - "I want to go back to the 3-part title of this conference, 'Religion, Democracy & Human Rights,' and tweak it a bit to make room for another theme[, thus:] 'Religion, Rights & Terrorism.'"  I think, as you will see, that this change was quite telling.

Shattuck went on to claim that "freedom of religion is predicated upon the existence of more than one religion.  But a multiplicity of religions has always meant conflict, and religious conflict often led to war and human devastation.  This was the state of reality for centuries and millennia, and it is hardly a ringing endorsement of religious freedom."  Thus, Shattuck concludes, a key, new idea emerged, that of religious tolerance.

He goes on: "There are 3 different, but equally strong, rationales [for religious tolerance]...First, there's the understanding that belief of any sort, including atheism,...is at the root of all human existence, and belief cannot be suppressed without destroying the very essence of what it is to be human.  Second is the view that tolerance of differing beliefs is a strategic necessity...Finally, there is the rationale that tolerance of religious difference is essential for the internal protection of religion itself."

So - three vignettes: the murder of the Trappist monks in Algeria by Islamic radicals, the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by "the world," and a reflection upon "religious freedom" by the highest ranking U.S. official under President Clinton who was expressly charged with the promotion and protection of human rights.  What can we learn?

First, taking them in reverse order, John Shattuck missed the mark.  While he noted some true points, he comes at the whole matter from the wrong perspective.  That perspective can best be summed up thusly: he sees religion as the problem, as a source of conflict, as something to be managed.  However, the "religious impulse" is foundational, fundamental, absolute bedrock to what it means to be human.  He said something along those lines, but, significantly, he extends it to "atheism," and atheism cannot be a belief - it is the negation of belief.  Not only is Shattuck confused on this point but so were the drafters of the Universal Declaration and the Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, at least as far as this extent: it equates thought and religious belief, as well as religious beliefs and other beliefs - "Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.  This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice".  However, paradoxically, the drafters did get it partially right (i.e., that it is  religious belief that matters), for the Covenant goes on to say, "everyone shall have the right...to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching," and surely it is only in religion that one engages in "worship."

In any case, my point is this: John Shattuck and, to a lesser degree, the Universal Declaration, share a common mistake; they do not understand the absolutely fundamental nature of religious belief.  Human beings are made to desire to worship God.  As St. Augustine said, "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee."  While one may - or may not - value and want to protect "freedom of conscience" on a whole range of subjects, one should not confuse this with "freedom of religion."  A similar philosophical mistake is made when "freedom of speech" is equated to "freedom of religion."  While a hostile judiciary and a confused Supreme Court jurisprudence often make it necessary tactically for one to frame cases involving "freedom to manifest one's religious beliefs" as if it involved "freedom of speech," that is, freedom to say things others do not want to hear, the two are conceptually different.  Freedom of religion simply acknowledges the fact that human self-understanding is impossible unless human beings are free to seek God, to respond to God's initiative in seeking them.  As apologist and philosopher Peter Kreeft put it: we seek and seek after God, and then discover to our surprise - astonishment - joy! - that He is - and has always been - sprinting towards us!  A view of "religious freedom" that bases it upon "tolerance of the other" simply misses the basic point.

As I noted the UDH/ICCPR was only partially off the point here.  In other words, it was partially right.  For instance, recall the last section of article 18 of the ICCPR: "The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents...to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions."  It is hard to imagine a more important "parental right" in this era of the all-present "nanny" state. 

Even more importantly, the UDHR/ICCPR recognize that religious freedom must (does) include the right to manifest one's beliefs, to follow them (i.e., to change one's religion,), to worship God as one sees fit.  The two documents do not see "religious freedom," as John Shattuck does - as a source of problems, of conflict - but as a basic human right, a source of meaning, a "good".. 
Perhaps the source of John Shattuck's problem is indicated by the fact that he served as director of the Washington office of the ACLU before entering the Clinton administration.  The ACLU is notorious for believing "religious freedom" necessitates the "naked public square."  Clearly the ACLU sees "religion" as a problem, something that has to be privatized.   

In my past working in the "human rights" field, I learned that this misunderstanding was wide-spread.  While I began working in the human rights field in order to protect religious freedom, I soon found that nearly all others in this field shared Shattuck's point of view, that is, religion is a problem, basically a pot that is about to boil over, unless we do something to turn the heat off. 
Others in the field were simply blind to "religion."   Most being non-practicing or non-believing themselves, the importance of religion was simply not "on their radar screens."  Such people were not hostile to it, but they let it die, so to speak, by neglect.  If shown the relevant articles, they would not have denied that the Universal Declaration or the Covenant on Civil & Political Rights recognized religious freedom, but they would probably be surprised.  It is unlikely they ever noticed that it did. 

My experience was completely different.  Having had a re-conversion, I understood how important "religion" was (is).  When I learned that fellow believers - particularly in Sudan - were being persecuted for the same faith, my heart burned to help them.  When I realized how very little was being done by American Christians to help them, to respond to their plight caused by serving the same god, I was ashamed.  I did not want "special rights" for Christians, but I wanted them to have the basic human rights guaranteed in the basic human rights documents.  Yet, I found a secular human rights community indifferent to religious freedom, and worse, a domestic Christian community unaware that, as John Paul II said, "the age of the martyrs has not ended."

Through my work on religious freedom, in 1994, I met a Sudanese Roman Catholic bishop, Macram Gassis, who came as often as possible to the "halls of power" in Washington, DC, to sound the alarm about what was happening in Sudan.  Among other things, he warned us that the Islamic fundamentalism that drove the Sudanese regime to murder and enslave its own Christian citizens would not, as he put it, "remain across the Mediterranean sea.  It is coming to Europe, and to America."  On September 11, 2001, his prophetic voice was proved correct.

Responding to the horrors being inflicted upon the church in Sudan, I began an organization with twin purposes: to raise funds to assist the people in Sudan and, second, to raise, throughout America but particularly in Washington, DC, to consciousness (and action!) the fact of the religious persecution of the Sudanese Christians.

I also began working with the few others who knew about the denial of religious freedom across the globe to raise the alarm about Christian persecution around the world.  Those of you who are employees of FRC or its Witherspoon interns should be proud because FRC was in the midst of the fight (as it was in the fight for religious freedom in communist China).  Around this time, I came to FRC as a consultant, and it was FRC that financed some of my trips into Sudan during which we documented the crimes against the church.  Our film, "The Hidden Gift," is available at the US Holocaust Museum; our archival footage concerning slavery in Sudan is at the Museum of Intolerance in Los Angeles; we produced many articles and books documenting what was occurring.

More importantly, those of you who are evangelicals should be proud of what the evangelical community did - it was chiefly through evangelicals that the issue of religious freedom made it onto the American foreign policy agenda.  Through grassroots mobilization, a movement was created that pressured the Congress of the United States to enact the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. The looming specter of its passage caused President Clinton to create, ad hoc, a Special Advisor for International Religious Freedom in the State Department and an Advisory Committee. Though he did so to defeat IRFA, IRFA was passed by Congress, resulting in the creation of the independent US Commission on International Religious Freedom and the (permanent) office of the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom at the Department of State.  Both the Commission and the Office of the Ambassador-at-Large now produce (are required to produce) reports on the state of religious freedom around the world.  The annual State Department Country Reports had hitherto largely de-emphasized this subject.  While reports do not solve problems, they do shed light on problems.  And, speaking in the vernacular, if you don't know something is broke, you can't fix it.

Further, this movement reached to candidate George W. Bush, and particularly concerning Sudan, he made it his business, once elected President, to push for an end to the brutality.  The bishop and I met with his Secretary of State Colin Powell.  I joined other activists in meeting with Bush's Special Envoy for Sudan, Jack Danforth.   Danforth's special missions to Sudan were, in my judgment, the key factor resulting in a peace agreement in Sudan.  (The agreement is holding.  It does not cover the area of Darfur, which you have surely heard about in the news.  The reason is that the persecution in Darfur, which is Muslim upon Muslim, broke out after the conclusion of the peace agreement covering the Nuba Mountains and the south, where the victims were Christians and animists.)

Parenthetically, let me say that the Bush administration has also gotten it "wrong" on religious freedom in significant ways that I do not have time to examine in detail here.  Suffice it to say that its failure to insist on genuine religious freedom in Afghanistan underlines a deeper unease and confusion about the central role religion plays in human beings' lives by nature, and that efforts to promote democracy without promoting genuine religious freedom handicap U.S. foreign policy and are doomed to fail.

Further, I do not want to leave the impression that the Clinton administration was unconcerned about Sudan.  For instance, a former law school classmate, now the Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh did care about the persecution in Sudan, and regularly raised it at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.  Bishop Gassis and I did have an important, ground-breaking meeting with Secretary of State Madeline Albright. 

But it is important to note how the Clinton administration viewed the matter.  Not surprisingly since he was a member of that administration, it was largely viewed as John Shattuck did - religion is "important," but almost more trouble than it's worth; it is important not to torture people, but maybe not as important that they are free to worship as they feel is best.  In short-hand, one would say that the view of philosophical liberalism was dominant in that administration (and is, of course, struggling for dominance in our culture today) - religion is important because an individual chooses to make it so; as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy puts it: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."  It is the choice for religion, not religious freedom itself, that is important.   

From that perspective, the movement to ensure that religious freedom became an important part of U.S. foreign policy had ominous implications.  As Shattuck put it in his Harvard speech: "Threats to religious tolerance also exist in democracies.  For example, efforts have recently been made by the American Religious Right to advance a political agenda within the United States government that seeks to promote special religious interests overseas."  A bizarre comment to say the least!  How does working for religious freedom for all promote special interests?  How does responding to the cries of your co-religionists invalidate your efforts to advance the common good?  It would be just as foolish to condemn African Americans for doing something about racial discrimination.  During the same week that a new feature film opens on the life of William Wilberforce, the man most responsible for ending the British slave trade, a man who acted because of his Christian convictions, I hope evangelicals know that what they do "for the least of these" - including those persecuted for their Christian faith - they "do unto" their Lord.  This is not something to be ashamed of, though perhaps we should not be surprised that the secular world fails to see its value.  I'm sure they thought Wilberforce to be a fool, too.

 Before passage of IRFA, I sat in the audience at the law school at Catholic University here in D.C. to listen to Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in the days leading up to the vote on IRFA.  In order to defeat IRFA, she bemoaned it as creating a "hierarchy" of rights.  She feared, she solemnly told us, that "religious freedom" was being "privileged" over other rights.  All rights, she claimed, were a package; together they comprised a whole; to emphasize one meant to effectively deny the others.  This from the woman who, upon becoming Secretary of State, had spoken of her special duty to ensure "women's rights"!
 
The fact is that there is no agreement on the entire corpus of human rights.  However, it is equally true that some rights are universally recognized.  Though philosophical Liberals may wish it otherwise, the fact is that religious freedom is one of these universally recognized human rights.  There is, thus, necessarily a hierarchy of rights.  And, for the reasons I have discussed, religious freedom sits at the pinnacle.  Its importance simply cannot be over-emphasized.  Our own founding father John Adams told us our republican form of government is built upon the assumption of a religious and virtuous citizenry and is unfit for any other.  James Madison recognized religious freedom as a fundamental right that precedes the state and cannot be severely curtailed or denied by it.  Put more broadly, and as Pope John Paul II put it, religious freedom is the "first freedom."  It is "the premise and guarantee of all freedoms that ensure the common good." (Redemptoris Missio 39)  In his letter, "Respect for Human Rights," issued on Jan. 9, 1999, Pope John Paul II noted: "Religion expresses the deepest aspirations of the human person, shapes people's vision of the world and affects their relationships with others; basically, it offers the answer to the question of the true meaning of life, both personal and communal.  Religious freedom therefore constitutes the very heart of human rights."   To re-vise a common Catholic phrase, if you want justice, work for religious freedom.

On September 13, 2006, in Regensburg, Germany, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, in the words of a Vatican press statement, "issued a warning to Western culture to 'avoid the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mocking of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom'".  This is a timely reminder to those philosophical liberals who do not understand that it is not freedom exercised recklessly but freedom seeking transcendent truth that really sets man "free." 

The Vatican also called the Pope's address "a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence".  This reference to religiously-motivated violence brings us back to our first vignette, with which I began this lecture.

In Algeria, in the martyrdom of the Trappist monks, we see actions that are contrary to every notion of human rights- gentle Christian, prized by their neighbors, killed by militant Islamists.
But, notice the following.  First, the Trappists were loved by their neighbors, that is, they were loved by Muslims who lived beside them.  Second, though they were killed by Muslims in the name of Islam, for what end?  Religious or political?  One can at least argue that it was for political ends (opposition to the government of Algeria), i.e., that religious language was co-opted in the service of political violence. 

Such a conclusion may offer some hope, hope of avoiding the clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington put it so evocatively.  Of course, the power of that evocation is that there has been a long history of conflict between Islamic and Christian civilizations.  From its birth Islam fought Christianity - it swept over Byzantium, North Africa and Spain, and was only stopped at the gates of the Vienna in the seventeenth century.  Benedict XIV alluded to all this in his Regensburg address (after all, the Byzantine Emperor whom he quoted was speaking scarcely 40 years before Constantinople fell, never to arise again).  And, yet, his address provoked riots throughout the Islamic world.
 While "the West," by and large, assumed Islam was "over" following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Hillare Belloc did not.  In powerful words, he warned in the 1930's that it would rise again, that its spiritual principle was not dead.  And he has been proven right.
 
In the 1990's, it, or a twisted form of it, slaughtered the monks in Algeria and bombed the churches in Sudan.  It thunders, so to speak, at the gates of Vienna once more.  (Such persecution is not practiced only by Islamists.  According to the Religion Watch report of the World Evangelical Alliance, Christian persecution in India by Hindu extremists dramatically increased in 2006 and is expected to continue increasing in 2007.) 

But it is not the only threat to religious freedom.  Another finds its headquarters in Hanoi or Pyongyang.  It simply and flatly denies religious freedom, believing the old lie from the French Revolution that religion is both "bad" and capable of being extinguished upon the altar of "Reason." 

These are real threats, reflecting powerful forces moving in the world to stamp out religious freedom.  However, because of the insistence of evangelicals and others, the U.S. is not, cannot legally be, indifferent to those threats.  Largely as a result of evangelicals' involvement in politics, it is part of US foreign policy to oppose these threats, to work for religious freedom.

That is good news.  But there is a deeper good news, though it is opaque and difficult to penetrate.  Let me illustrate it through one last story, about a man whom the church commemorates every year on Feb. 23.

Around 160 A.D., an old man, 86 years old, was burned at the stake in what is now Turkey, but which was then Asia Minor.  He had been a disciple of the Apostle John, and met with Ignatius journeying to Rome to be martyred - Ignatius himself had been a disciple of Peter and the others in Antioch.  Thus Polycarp was a true link to the Apostolic Age.  He was also a bridge to the future; his disciples included Irenaeus, who became bishop of Gaul (France) and wrote a refutation of Gnosticism that is, even today, still read, and Papias, who gave us the most ancient listing of the books of the New Testament. 

Polycarp was burned at the order of the Proconsul Statius Quadratus.  The reason? Because he refused to burn incense to the emperor, Marcus Aurelius.  (Remember him, the pagan philosopher king so valued by historians as a "good emperor"?) As we might say, in the words of the Universal Declaration, Polycarp was subjected to "coercion" in matters of "worship" in violation of his human rights.   
Polycarp did not seek this end - he did not go out of his way to incur the wrath of the emperor - but neither did he refuse it.  He accepted it with what we might call "a heavenly indifference."  From Polycarp's Acts, one of the early Christian classics, we learn his last words, words heard later, in respectful imitation, on Christian lips throughout the Empire -

"Quadratus: I have wild beasts.
Poly: Call them.
Quadratus: I can have you burned to death.
Poly: Do what you please."

As John Paul II told us in his encyclical letter "On the Threshold of the Third Millennium," the age of the martyrs is not a thing of the past; it is not "what happened" to saints like Peter and Paul and Polycarp centuries ago.  No; as the suffering in Sudan and Algeria, in Viet Nam and North Korea, teach us, it has returned.  The political pundit I respect most, our own Chuck Donovan, thinks it highly unlikely it will happen in the U.S.  But I wonder.  There are political streams of thought that would deny the church the freedom to speak the truth as it understands it.  If that happens, can the age of martyrs be far behind?