They are heroes in a battle most Americans think has already been won. On Wednesday evening, they are to be honored for their contributions to strengthening religious freedom at home and abroad.
Although the US is home to the greatest experiment in religious freedom ever, and the great majority of Americans support that principle, surprising gaps in knowledge and understanding remain when it comes to practicing that freedom. And support for it seems to rise and fall.
Only a slim majority (56 percent) of Americans said in a 2007 survey that freedom of worship should extend to people of all religious groups, no matter what their beliefs (down 16 points, from 72 percent in 2000).
“A great many Americans don’t define religious liberty as a universal right for everyone,” says Charles Haynes, one of the honorees. He is senior scholar at Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, which conducted the survey.
At the same time, others see a weakening in federal courts in recent years of the First Amendment provisions relating to religion, a development that could endanger the rights of minority faiths.
In defense of the 44% who did not support freedom for all religious groups “no matter what their beliefs”, they were probably thinking, “What if these sincerely-held beliefs include blowing up infidels?”
There is a not-insignificant subset of a major religious group out there (hint, starts with “M”) that believes this today.
I guess 9/11 made that “no matter what their beliefs” seem like a bigger deal today than it did in 2000.
I think folks (at least I am) are having trouble seeing “blowing up infidels” as a “religious” conviction..
Just because one believes something, that doesn’t make it a “religion” does it?
One can believe anything one wants, but when it comes time to ‘blow up an infidel”, hasn’t that ‘belief” come smack up against civil law?
Believe what you want, just do not act unlawfully because of your “belief”, murder for whatever reason is NOT justified. And, exhorting folks to act in that manner is also illegal.
Grannie Gloria
Even if we think “blowing up infidels” is a religious conviction, this belief is protected under the constitution unless we act out our belief (or promote our belief in such a way that it is acted out). Constitutionally we are protected in our beliefs, but not necessarily in our acts.
And that is the problem Virgil. At some point point, to prohibit the act is to prohibit the belief, as Jews have learned in trying to keep koshier.
#5…The type of belief I’m talking about is “blowing up infidels”, not the belief in keeping kosher.
Early in our history, there was a line of cases that basically held, you can believe what you want, but you can still only have one wife. Of course, then, marriage was universally believed to require participants of different sexes, so the point of these cases may have dulled a bit.
Actually, perhaps the major “religious freedom” controversy in the country today is not from Thuggish beliefs in the religious sanctity of murder, but the animal sacrifices in Santeria. Practitioners are being stepped on because of sanitary and animal cruelty regulations that conflict with their beliefs and practices.
My guess is that Americans are at least as squeamish about Santerian practice as about suicide bombers.