by Joe Miller
Europeans spent the first half of the 17th century fighting a series of wars over religion.
The conflict began when one of the German states (then a set of semi-autonomous states nominally joined into the Holy Roman Empire) handed its crown to a protestant rather than to the Catholic.
German Catholics invaded and, before long, Spain and Austria came to the aid of their fellow Catholics. The protestant German states were aided by protestant Sweden and the Dutch Republic.
The British Isles largely avoided what we now call the 30 Years’ War, but that was largely because its residents were busy fighting the English Civil War, which pitted then-Catholic Scotland and Ireland against protestant England.
Many of America’s early colonists were refugees from the losing sides of these religious wars.
The 30 Years; War came to a close with the Peace of Westphalia, a set of 1648 treaties that established the basic tenets of international law. The treaties established that while a state could officially declare Catholicism, Lutheranism or Calvinism as official religions, the citizens of a country were not required to adopt their monarch’s official religion.
A little over 40 years after the Peace of Westphalia, John Locke would publish Two Treatises of Government, a text that outlined the basic principles of liberalism. Locke was reacting both to the religious wars of the first part of the century and to the Glorious Revolution, a relatively bloodless civil war that firmly cemented Britain as a protestant state.
The principles articulated in Locke’s Two Treatises are deeply interwoven into the United States’ founding documents.
Locke’s defense of the right to life, liberty and property is clearly echoed in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is Madison’s attempt at building a working government on Lockean ideals.
Locke argues for an idea he calls “toleration,” which holds that people – and, by extension, their government – ought to permit actions and ideas that they dislike or disagree with.
For Locke, growing up in the immediate aftermath of a series of religious wars, the most important avenue for showing toleration is religion.
Locke argues that citizens should be free to exercise whatever religious beliefs they choose.
Here in the 21st century, Christians have pretty much stopped going to war with each other over religious differences.
We may poke gentle fun. I grew up in Baptist churches, and I remember being a little offended when I read Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a work in which a character (who happens to be a Presbyterian minister) describes Methodists as “Baptists who could read.” (The line appears in the film adaptation, as well.)
The occasional (mostly) good natured joking aside, modern Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians are generally happy to let each other worship as they please.
Importantly, the government does not take sides in any religious disagreements between Christians. There is no official American government position on when or how a person should be baptized. That seems so normal to Americans that it’s actually somewhat surprising to realize that most European countries do, in fact, have an official view about things like baptism.
Of course, not every issue is quite so obviously distinct from the law.
Officially, for example, the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA permit same sex couples to marry. American and Southern Baptists mostly do not.
For better or for worse (ha!), U.S. law ties a whole bunch of things (tax rates, inheritance and medical decision-making to name a few) to a person’s marital status. So, whether or not someone counts as married has real implications for their lives.
Lockean and Jeffersonian liberalism says that the state cannot decide which religious tradition has the right answer about same sex marriage any more than it can decide which religious tradition has the right answer about baptism.
Lockean tolerance says that all the state can do is treat everyone the same way. So, either the state has to recognize all marriages, or it has to recognize no marriages.
This is what it means for a state to practice neutrality. It recognizes that citizens have lots of different ideas about how best to live their lives and that its laws cannot privilege any of those specific ideas. A country’s laws have to be neutral about how to live one’s life.
That principle extends beyond just religion.
There are all kinds of things that I think are probably immoral. Adultery. Lying to a friend. Posting false things on Facebook. Stealing your kids’ Halloween candy. Eating factory farmed animals.
I think you ought not do those things, but I will defend your right to do them.
Part of living in a country founded on Western liberal principles means living with laws that allow people to do things that I don’t especially like.
The alternative to liberal tolerance takes us back to the system that generated three decades at war over the right way to baptize people.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
