Freedom of religion: ethics and tolerance

Religious Freedom Ethic’s Dimensions: Individual vs. Communitarian

BEN-ONI ARDELEAN
[Theological Baptist Institute – Bucharest]

Abstract:
Vivid debates were encountered in recent years on the subject of religious freedom ethics. The politic correctness attitude became many times a coercion instrument for suppressing the communitarian interests by promoting individual interests, instituting the minority tyranny that reduced to silence the communitarian interests. This might also create a disproportional representation in society for communitarian religious interests. The question is: whose religious interests should prevail? Should there be more guarantees given by the governments for the long existing, larger, and traditional religious groups, compare with the guarantees provided for the newer and smaller religious groups? Those questions provide a glimpse of the existing tension in the society on the subject of religious freedom. The present paper should answer these types of questions, explaining the tension and giving possible answers from a religious freedom normative approach.

Keywords: ethics, religious freedom, communitarian, individual, morality

The tension in the epistemology determining the in­dividual and communitarian way of constructing the society extends much beyond the metaphysic and theological debate.¹ Phillip E. Johnson considers that the proclaiming of the individual religious freedom is not part of the modernist deadlock, but it is more about creating obligations for the others.² There is a desire for the individual autonomy, but also a desire for the group solidarity³, desires that are most of the times in conflict in the ethic debates. Robert Nisbet, talking about America in the years 1950’s, affirms:

On one hand we praise the equalitarian democracy, moral neutrality, intellectual freedom, social progress, rationalism and all impersonal liberties of modern industrialization and political society. On the other hand, we continue to venerate traditions, securing the social status, corporatist hierarchies, religions and communities, having all in the context all moral implications.⁴

When you refer to religion it implies in most of the cases the idea of a group or community, someone’s believe being practiced in a group. Very rarely you met people that on individual base they have their own and singular religious perspectives. Thus is necessary to have an ethical debate over the communitarian vs. individual dimension of religion. The first ethic-philosophical references the community was found in the Greek philosophers, in the writing of Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, Tomas Aquinas, or in the roman laws. Rousseau in France or Hegel in Germany wrote about it much latter. First, community was an abstract and a universal concept, only than being understood as a group that includes moral rules and ethic principles.⁵ G. Van der Leeuw, in Religion in Essence and Manifestation⁶, talking about humanity, says that this in itself forms a community to which „we all belong and have no other options”.⁷ The communitarians considers that an isolated individual being evaluated as such is incomplete due to the fact that the social, cultural, religious, historic etc., contexts should be considered for the evaluation. By the Rawls’s ignorance veil concept, the participants of the original position meant to be ignorant for any kind of information, including those referring to believes.

MacIntyre considers that someone’s life could be known only by knowing the story behind it. But someone’s story is related to the other’s stories, which create a complex narrative that reveals the individual’s story only in the context. MacIntyre sees this context that shaped and formed the individual being more related to family, tribe or neighborhood, than to state, nation or social class. Too often the modern states present such a confused content of values for the society, without giving a minimal understanding over the values that unite the society. Out of those, there are for sure most of the times not included religious beliefs, mainly due to the plurireligious modern states. Religious believes used to create the sense of unity in the Pre-Modern societies. More than that, the belonging to a community is not given by artificial membership, nominal or instrumental, but have inner own values. Therefore Alasdair MacIntyre considers also that the justice and morality concepts are very confuse in our contemporary society, that do not agree on hierarchy or the content of those values, thus a „seriously disorder”⁸ had been produced in our society, and a disorientation in the individual’s life.⁹ The murder, that seem to be a complete moral concept, the act being seen as blamable, could not be equally treated as the lie, that gets underway from the society’s moral judgment. W. Connelly considers that concepts as democracy or freedom are included in normative considerations, in spite of their multiple interpretations, and the use of them in society is understood as normative.¹⁰

Thus the freedom in within, or for a religious group, could be effective when the state gets involved in order to create the environment for the individual to benefit of the different options, and to chose which one corresponds to its interests. More than that, the state should inform de individual over the options available. The pressure of the community to impose the individual the choices he has to make, limits his choices at the general interests of the particular community, usually defined as the community moral. The individual freedom is being limited to this environment, which makes the positive freedom to be in fact a repression in the name of freedom. Not only the religious group could be restrictive regarding the individual freedom, the individual being such victimized, but also the individual may fall into what Mihaela Miroiu calls the two excesses: assimilation and victimization.

The lack of courage to assume your differences implicitly attracts the identification with the group considered as norm, in other words: the sin of assimilation. Being conscience of differentiations, but accepting a victim statute, being disarmed by the dominant group, attracts another sin: the sin of victimization.¹¹

Eileen Barker in the article „New lines in the supra-market: How much can we buy?” describes the continuous tension in the attempt of making compatible the values and models promoted by society. The values that are fundamental in society for the individualism or communitarianism, freedom or security etc., could bring enormous tensions and contradictions. Those contradictions could be left in their own mood to develop together in society, or could be eliminated by adhering to a standard which exclude confrontation. Eileen Barker concludes the article by saying: „the pluralism price is eternal vigilance”.¹²

The individual interest interacts permanently with the moral principles of the society. The individual could place judgments on the communitarian ethics, embrace or reject their values. His or her decisions could affect the community if these are in contradiction with the ethic principles of the community. Carl F. H. Henry insists on the need of individual morals for personal equilibrium affirming that: „fundamental, in the chaos of the social ethic, is the personal moral decline and the usefulness feeling that comes along with this decline”.¹³

Looking at this interaction that is a lot of times very tensioned, between two bearings of morality, the individual and communitarian, being submissive to the state laws, raises moral dilemmas. The dilemma is dealing with the clarification of whether or not to be submissive to state’s laws. The debate is first of all linked to the morality of decision, and not to the legality of it. The moral conflict is linked to the submission before laws that conflicts the religious beliefs, being inconsistent with the religious requirements. Transferring it to the religious entity, the moral conflict is linked to the submission of a given religious group to the requirements of the law, when is known that those laws are in contradictions with the principles of the group’s religious beliefs.¹⁴

The answers of various legislatives forums are very different. The understanding of the concept of freedom, of what is: freedom for or freedom from, or both, is instrumental for this approach. Isaiah Berlin approach for the positive and negative aspects of freedom are very important in the debate.¹⁵ If there is a legal coercion it should first have a moral foundation before establishing cohabitation norms where the individual morality fails in promoting social peaceful and understanding relationships between the members of a certain society.¹⁶ The organized or positive freedom, in Berlin’s terms, applied to religious groups „means conformity of desires, willingness and behavior, directed by the conscience, being in accord to the corporative leadership. This is due to the fact that involves the acceptance of the communitarian responsibility of being loyal to a moral exterior authority, which transcends desires, institutional leadership and the temporary caprices of majority”.¹⁷ The autonomist concept applied to religious groups reveals most of the time only the group leader’s desires and wills, serving mainly their personal interests.

Because of that, you can’t talk in a legitimist way about conscience, much less about the religious „rights” of conscience. This is due to the fact that the standard of the institutions that adopts this conception don’t attract automatically the obligation of a moral authority beyond them. Their convictions could not be appreciated as being right or wrong, as long as those institutions are not under any objective source of authority. Their actions could be evaluated as useful, profitable or malevolent. In other words, even that their convictions are totally relative, their actions could be thus evaluated as harmful, irrelevant, or probably, welcome in relationship with the effect on the other people in regard with the civil order [...] Brought to extreme, such institutions activity could undermine the social cohesion, causing an oppression of those that are weak and powerless.¹⁸

Applying the organized freedom perspective on the individual will highlight a submission of the individual to the communitarian goal. The goal is the religious freedom of all members of community. The manifestations of religious freedom from this perspective consolidate the social order and higher-up the stability of a responsible governing. An atomist freedom applied to the individual, being a freedom without obligations, could lead to anarchy because the lack of acceptance of social conventions.¹⁹

The individual will in the context of communitarian morality

The challenge to decide over what freewill means caused vivid debates. Theologians were due to explain determinism in order to define the freewill. Extensive definitions for the freewill were advanced. Therefore, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) wrote a simple and popular definition: „the two words together means in daily speaking that man has the power, privilege and opportunity to do exactly what he wants and only what he wants”.²⁰ Samuel Wakefield (1799-1895) said: „a free moral agent is the one that is the initiator of all his deeds, without any external influence or coercion”.²¹ J.C. Wenger includes in his definition more elements, affirming that freewill is:

Man’s capacity to choose between different alternatives, without being influenced by anything or anybody. Freewill means the option to think different alternatives and be able to evaluate the difference between more possible results. It also means the option of choosing between good and bad. Freewill is capable of thinking for itself and plan for its life. It is based at least partially on intelligence, but is also inspired by feelings and body desires. Freewill doesn’t reject a withdrawal in itself, because man can sacrifice some immediate advantages in favor of a higher, long term goal.²²

John J. Coughlin considers that freewill complete the intellectual capacity of man in order to create his concept of good. It determines someone to act, and the actions are evaluated by the standard of the good that every individual has. The absence of coercion could let the individual to freely act based on his freewill. This type of freedom is understood not only as negative freedom, but positive freedom, because it transform the will into act in conformity with the individual own preferences. Philosophical theories and legal norms are products of human inventions, but the standard of good and bad is set by the individual’s freewill determined under different circumstances. The establishment for the law is not therefore determined by the moral order imposed or self constituted, but by the power of the individual to impose his will over the others in the normative process.²³

John J. Coughlin affirms that through the freewill, the individual accepts some values, becoming thus the creator of his own value’s set, which further determines his existence. The existentialism reveals in fact the compatibility between the fix nature and the concept of auto-determination. Therefore there is no metaphysical creation in itself, but under the life circumstances the individual create himself through his freewill in a personal and distinctive way. The individual became in such a way the owner of himself or herself, being able to develop its ability for self perfection.²⁴

The concept of individual’s determinism placed on irreconcilable positions the theoreticians. Those adapting the Judeo-Christian perspective support the idea that the individual has the freewill that depends on his or her judgment, being intimate and interior, and based on the transcendent principles. The primate of the conscience requires that the individual should be allowed to act on the dictate of his conscience. The anthropological capacities of rationality, intentionality and conscience are seen as being good, but disordered, leading thus to a conflict in judgment. Therefore the formation of the conscience became a continuous project that allows the individual to assume responsibility for past deeds, but it also accepts that conscience could be incomplete or in error. Because of that, the primacy of individual conscience, if able to neglect egoism, selfishness or other human weaknesses, could benefit from the supernatural source of knowledge.²⁵ Constantine Galeriu considers that „the area of freedom is so large, existing in within the option, and risk, to say ‘no’ even to the good”.²⁶ Paul Evdokimov says that is that type of freedom that the Christian have in order to say to God: „your will be not done”.²⁷ From Christian perspective, God has the only absolute freedom, and the man’s freedom is limited to the capacities he has been created with. Stăniloaie says that the individual „wants to be for himself his own supreme for [...] but even under this circumstance, God allows the human being in his freedom”.²⁸

Moral values of the community in relationship with religious freedom

Antonio Rosmini in „Society and its Purpose”²⁹ is referring to the Christian’s principle of giving a special importance to the direct relationship with God. Christianity considers this virtue and intimate union with God as a mean in itself for the human being. This gives the individual an essential role in his diligent lifetime fight for a cause. The direct result of it is the respect all should have for the personal human goals in life, implicitly for the human dignity. The Gospel reveal only one truth that could be equally achieved by all individuals, which means that equalitarian principle is part of the Christian attitude, or core values, as long as a final goal could be established for every single individual. This goal could be achieved in independence one of another, without using someone to achieve the goal and without violating or obstruction anyone’s freedom.

The attachment of the idea of morality or natural rights to the concept of individual person, matured only in the XVII century when the Protestants supported the individual conscience authority in religion and morality matters, and in consequence the individualism spread in the political and social thinking.³⁰

Therefore the Christian contribution was major to highlight and implement the equality concept. Equality is being also a collateral concept with concepts as justice and equity. The Latin aequitas is a noun corresponding to the adjective aequus which means equality, even thou the equality and equity are different concepts. Aristotle and Plato distinguish between the two concepts by the arithmetic and geometric equality. Arithmetic equality gives everyone equal portions, regardless of importance, but the geometric or proportional one, gives equal portions to equal individuals (based on the merits or ability). Therefore the beneficiaries should be of the same importance or same category. The arithmetic equality, Aristotelian one, is the democratic concept of justice distribution. Plato and Aristotle name it as a „form of equality” because equalized the value of beneficiaries with their responsibilities.

The equity allows or even requires discrimination when relating to relevant differences for morality and forbidden discrimination in the absence of those differences. It is fair to discriminate when favoring the needy or meritorious, or those with abilities, and is not fair to discriminate between people that are in equal need, equally meritorious or ability. The rule is to treat similar cases the same and different cases in a different manner.³¹

Equity is in direct relationship with the concept of justice. But there is a major distinction that needs to be mentioned between the conservative and reformed traditions. The conservative conception on justice means the distribution of justice in society, maintaining the social norms, restituting the status quo where possible and a protection of a certain order in society. The reformed conception of justice requires the revision of social order, redistribution of justice in such a way that is set by the new context of justice and in order to produce a more equitable society. The second type of conception is mainly in people’s thinking when they talk about justice, mainly when this is linked to the religious freedom. The individuals want that justice that is moral, transcend the laws or preset social norms. The law protects the rights and enforces the responsibilities that correspond to the rights. The justice concept is frequently used to support the individual rights even against the social order. The distinction between the legal justice and the moral one should be effectuated here. Both are preoccupied for an equity order or society, in order to protect the individual right before the society or other individual requirements, but both have a conservative and reformative aspect.

The judge should be impartial, but also equitable when he establishes the sentence. The procedure is given by the fact that the judge treats everyone equally, without taking care of differentiations, as the only thing that matters is the one of quilt and responsibility in the civic cases. When this is being established the judge can pronounce an equitable sentence. Impartiality is when you administrate the same treatment for all people alike, giving them the same benefits and responsibilities. The justice and injustice, bias and impartiality are terms exclusively used to designate the treatment for the human being. The social dimension of justice is a way to protect norms that are accepted by the majority of a society because these are in their advantage. But where there is no uniformity mainly because of profitable social arrangements for some social categories, it doesn’t mean that justice is missing. Affirmations as: „all people are equal”, are not affirmations that recognize deeds, but they refer to rights. When these are included into the laws, the individual has the right to require an equal treatment. The right to religious freedom included in the international norms, requires this equal treatment on the base of intrinsic human dignity of every single human being.

Ideological perspectives on the equality concept determine the place and role of the equality in the society. Andrew Heywood in Political Ideologies makes an incursion throughout different political perspectives.The liberals believe in a universal moral norm given by our belonging to humanity. This implies a formal equality, considered also political or opportunity equality. But the social equality could be obtained with the price of suppressing the ability. The conservative embrace the legal and moral equality, considering that the society has a natural hierarchy, and the material inequality could produce economical benefits. For the socialists is essential to establish the justice and equity, the social cohesion and fraternity, such making room for the positive freedoms. The anarchists insist on the political equality understood as an equal right necessary for the personal autonomy. They consider that political inequality will make room for oppression. The anarchic-Communists believe in the absolute social equality set by the collective ownership over the production. The Fascists reject equality considering that humanity is made of radical inequalities, both between their leaders and their followers, but also between different nations and races of the world. ³² All those perspectives on equality concept are valuable as they all could provide a projection on the type of societies that could exist under particular governments.

The right to equality could suggest few things: equality treatment, equality chances or equality in meeting the basic needs. The treatment equality means a huge time consume in order to appreciate all the individuals, making sure that no individual is being ignored, setting apart for each individual an equal time and energy in evaluation as you give everyone else. Impartiality is when those conditions are not met. Equality chances means that all have the right to equal opportunities for personal development. Those having special abilities will magnify the opportunities; therefore the resulting benefits will be unequal because of abilities or the consumed effort. For this to happen be necessary to eliminate all the restrictions that could get on the way in achieving the personal interests. The equality in meeting the basic needs is covered in the liberal democracies by the concept of welfare and implies the right of everyone to have the minimum subsistence necessary for life, without caring for the level of the personal contribution to get it.³³ The right of equality is imperative to be respected in the society in order to ensure a favorable climate for religious freedom. All individuals should be equally treated by the state, giving them equal opportunities, regardless of their faith or religion they profess or practice. Only by doing so, the state is adopting a correct ethical attitude toward the individuals. There is no need of extra evaluation’s criteria, but the humanity of every single individual has to be sufficient for the state to apply an equal treatment for all members of the society.

Conclusions

The liberal democratic states should be neutral in the treatment toward different religious groups. In connection with the liberal democrat states support for individual, based on the human dignity ethic principle, makes it imperative for the states to be neutral toward any individual’s believes. The individual’s believe should be than respected and guaranteed by the state. The tension arises when communitarian interests, such as promoting traditional values, are being challenged. Well known minority tyranny is being a lot of times imposed over the communitarian interests on the bases of no discrimination principle. This could discriminate large religious groups favoring minor religious groups, or individual’s believes. It also could atomize society’s values, as almost no standard could be imposed. On the other hand, if the governments favor the large religious group’s interests, individual believes are being implicitly discriminated. The acceptance of the human rights standard in liberal democratic states is not avoiding the ethical debate over whose interests should prevail. The secularist’s solution of excluding religiosity from the public square, isolating it in the private realm, proved in recent history to be a disastrous strategy. Therefore the only solution possible is to build a network of moral principles on which to construct the religious freedom state. It shouldn’t be religious state or irreligious state, but it should provide freedom for all religions, thus accommodating individual with the communitarian interests in religious matters. This paper included some of the ethical debates linked to this, projecting possible implications and options available, showing in fact that there are a lot of moral principles to consider for guaranteeing religious freedom.

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BEN-ONI ARDELEAN – Doctor in Political Science (SNSPA) and Doctor in Theology (University of Bucharest), being beside his academic activity highly involved in civic arena, both national and international.

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