The Warning Against Religious Persecution Is No False Alarm
By C. M. S.
The Warning Against Religious Persecution Is No False Alarm
Such a policy and such a purpose as held by the great religious federation referred to in the previous article are openly antagonistic to the liberties of men, and completely at variance with God’s guaranty of religious liberty. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” said Jehovah. In that mandate the Almighty recognized man’s right of choice—his religious liberty. “If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not,” said the Messiah. In that declaration our Redeemer recognized man’s right of choice—his religious liberty. The Almighty could take no other course without insuring the certain ruin of both religion and those who would profess it. Wherever religion has been a matter of compulsion, it has produced two classes of individuals—martyrs and hypocrites. The best people have been the martyrs, who have died for their conscientious convictions. The weak and the worthless have slain their conscience (if they had any), and have lived on. But with religion on a basis of individual choice, where God put it, and with the state operating in the field of temporalities, where God designed it should operate, liberty is guaranteed, character is developed, and there is peace. The conscience of the individual is the most sacred and the most valuable asset a nation can possess. When that disappears out of any nation, the ruin of that nation is assured. But a national religion feeds upon conscience as a vampire feeds upon the blood of a sleeping child. It is the business of a state religion to ravish and destroy the consciences of the best people in the state. The conscientious Christian must follow the leadings of the Word of God. A state religion can not permit this, and at once trouble begins. The conscientious individual follows the leading of the state; the religious weakling permits his conscience to be overridden and ravished, and he, too, follows the state as his spiritual lord and master. The man or woman who is worth while accepts no master but Christ in religious things, and, under a state-church régime, the dungeon, the gallows, or the stake stands at the end of his journey. The Purpose of the Nation’s Founders
To avoid such conditions, the founders of this nation constructed a frame of government which would guarantee the greatest liberty, both civil and religious, separating the church from the functions of government, emancipating religion from the control of political majorities, and freeing the government from the control of class or sect. On that basis, liberty and equality are guaranteed, and they can not be guaranteed on any other basis. The founders of the nation had seen the working out, at first hand, of the policy of intolerance, and sought to protect their posterity to the end of time against the recrudescence of such cruel and ruinous experiences. Shall we go back to what they fled from, and what they thought they had freed us from? To do that is to throw open the citadel of every man’s soul, and invite its invasion and its desecration. Every additional religious law placed upon the statute-books of this nation is another step backward toward conditions of intolerance and persecution, the slavery of mind and conscience; and the willingness of a portion of the public to enforce such religious laws as we now have upon Christian men, under pains and penalties, shows how poorly the lessons of past experience have been learned, and how disastrous would be the results for the whole people should the proposed policy of state-churchism ever be carried out in this land. Let that régime again be adopted, and there would not be wanting a multitude who would think they were doing God service in any persecution they might be able to bring upon those who differed from them in religious opinions and practise. “Uniformity” or Rights of Conscience?
Said the president of the National Reform Association in an address at Winona Lake, Ind., in August, 1910:— Uniformity [in religion] is essential both to peace and progress. The opinion of the majority must be decisive. Even in the matter of men’s consciences a degree of uniformity is necessary. We would allow the greatest amount of individual rights of conscience consistent with the necessary uniformity.14 In this program, uniformity in religion is more “necessary,” more “essential,” than individual rights of conscience. But the dearest right of a human being is his right to follow his conscientious convictions in matters of faith and religious practise. That right, the most sacred right of the human soul, the right whose exercise is most vital to the formation of a good and true character, must be sacrificed to the “necessary uniformity,” if the program of these fast-federating religious forces is to become operative in this country. That would put human law, or human statutory interpretation of divine law, everywhere above divine obligation as the individual soul sees and understands that obligation. Against such arguments as that, against that kind of uniformity, John Knox protested with a price upon his head for doing so. Against that, protested Martin Luther when he revolted against the uniformity which Rome was requiring, under threat of such punishments as she could inflict with her multifarious instruments of torture. This program of making the state the tool of the church to enforce its dogmas, rituals, and ordinances; of compelling uniformity in religion by means of the pains and penalties of human law; of teaching religion in the public schools at state expense; of establishing a standard of religion, and abolishing whatever is out of harmony with it; of substituting a clerical oligarchy for the rule of the majority of the people in civil things,—this program the great federating religious forces of our day are committed to, and propose to carry through at any cost. Will it result in persecution? Will Christians suffer under such a régime?—They have suffered already, while the program was still incomplete, and before this powerful federation was accomplished. Between one hundred and one hundred fifty conscientious, God-fearing Christians have, during the past twenty years, suffered fine or imprisonment or both for alleged violation of oppressive religious laws in the United States; and that, too, in spite of the equality of men guaranteed by the Constitution; in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment of that Constitution, which declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, . . . nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws;” and in spite of the further fact that most, if not all, of the constitutions of the States in which these modern religious persecutions took place, guarantee to their citizens the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. Christians Suffer for Their Faith
The persons persecuted under those laws were Christians, observers of the seventh day of the week, acknowledged to be the best of neighbors, and in morals above reproach. In what did their crime consist? They considered that under the provisions of the national Constitution, which guaranteed that their privileges and immunities as citizens of the United States should not be abridged, and which further guaranteed them the equal protection of the law, they were entitled to six days in which to labor for the support of their families. Those who rest and worship on the first day of the week are free from punishment if they work the other six days. Equality in the administration of the law would necessitate that they who rest and worship on the seventh day of the week should also be free from punishment if they labor on the other six days of the week. If it is the law-protected privilege of the first-day observer to work six days in each week, it should also be the law-protected privilege of the seventh-day observer to work six days in each week. No just rule of equity will adjudge otherwise. Yet in spite of the self-evident truth and justice of that proposition, these men were arrested, fined, and imprisoned. What does this teach?—It teaches that wherever and whenever a religious ordinance is enacted by the civil powers, there will be zealots to enforce its provisions upon conscientious Christian men, and there will be conscientious Christian men who will prefer to suffer persecution under such laws rather than to violate their consciences and deny their God. So as certainly as a portion of the religious element succeeds in compelling legislators to enact religious ordinances into laws, and to interpret and enforce what they believe to be the law of God, so certainly may we look for a zealous revival of the most bitter persecution in this country. Congress Warns the People
Said the Congress of the United States in 1829:— Among all the religious persecutions with which almost every page of modern history is stained, no victim ever suffered but for the violation of what government denominated the law of God.—United States Senate Report. In that same document a warning voice is lifted against just such movements as we have been discussing, confederations of religious organizations for political purposes. It says:— Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are, in the opinion of the committee, always dangerous. . . . All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, try, the civil power soon bends under it; and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence. There never was a time in the history of this nation when that warning was more appropriate than now. Religious organizations are now combining to create a “power which lawmakers and lawbreakers will fear and respect.” That means that they expect the civil power to bend under the force of their united strength and influence. That means the dominance of a clerical party over our legislators, the subserviency of the state to the church, the violation of the rights of conscience, the inauguration of a reign of clerical tyranny in the home of freedom. With every year the party which is seeking to inaugurate that régime is gaining adherents and winning influence in high places; and American citizens must decide, and decide quickly, whether they will join that party, and go with it into the field of oppression and persecution; or whether they will stand by the fundamental principles of the national government, guaranteeing the equality of men before the law and absolute freedom of conscience for all. Every religious law is a threat of persecution; every Sunday law is a religious law, and therefore a standing menace to the inalienable rights of men. This is proved by the fact that if the government can legitimately enforce one religious requirement upon the people, it can just as legitimately enforce every religious requirement in every church creed. Once the principle is admitted of state interference in religious things, there is no place where the bounds of its operations can be established; and when that condition is reached, the religious rights and privileges of every soul in the nation are placed in jeopardy. The warnings of history ought to be sufficient to enable every intelligent American to see the danger in what that powerful confederacy proposes, and turning his back upon it, to throw the weight of his influence in favor of justice, equality, and religious liberty. There are the two parties, and it means much to America with which party the majority of her citizens choose to ally themselves.