Last Tuesday, an Ohio Right to Life staffer named Lizzie Marbach tweeted, “There’s no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.” About ten minutes later, Congressman Max Miller—an Ohio Right to Life endorsee—replied:
This is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen.
Delete it, Lizzie.
Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion.
You have gone too far.
Conservatives (and a few liberals) quickly pounced on Miller, calling him a hypocrite. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar declared:
Stating the core beliefs or principles of your faith isn’t bigoted as Lizzie did, its religious freedom and no one should be scolded for that. It’s also wrong to speak about religious freedom while simultaneously harassing people who freely express their beliefs.
Now, you may agree with Omar. I certainly do. But, in fairness to Miller, his understanding of “religious freedom” is positively classical.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were very good at absorbing various religious and ethnic communities into a single polity. They considered this pluralism a mark of their ability to craft laws that were based, not on local customs or superstitions, but on reason.
Yet they also knew that pluralism cuts both ways. If these sects wanted the Rome’s protection, they had to prove themselves. Their commitment to Roman pluralism had to supersede belief in their sect’s “exclusivist” dogmas.
Over time, Rome devised a standard loyalty test. All citizens were expected to offer a sacrifice to an idol of the god-emperors. As Fr. John Strickland explains,
The state did not really care what its subjects believed. Rome, as the heir to Hellenic civilization, celebrated religious diversity as part of its pluralistic culture. But a sacrifice to the emperors was proof that whatever convictions one held, he was prepared to accomodate them to the demands of the worldly order.
In other words, the Roman government fully agreed with Congressman Miller. It were happy to accomodate Christians, so long as they avoided any dangerous claims about the superiority of their creed.
But as Fr. Strickland points out, “With these demands faithful Christians could of course not comply. And so state-sponsored persecution ravaged the Church off and on for some two hundred and fity years.”
This Roman idea of “religious freedom” is still found today, of course—and not only among non-Christians (like Congressman Miller), but even among devout Christians. Peter Hitchens, for instance.
In 2018, Mr. Hitchens published an essay in First Things defending the Elizabethan persecutions. In it, he writes:
think we can guess that many English Roman Catholics quietly did as Elizabeth hoped they would do. They attended Anglican services (such people were known as “Church Papists”) and continued as loyal subjects of the crown, while hoping for better and easier days in future. By our standards, this is severe repression. By the standards of the age, it was gentle tolerance. But others chose openly to defy the laws meant to suppress Catholicism’s seditious threats to the sovereign government of England, despite the fact that doing so would identify them with a foreign enemy. We can salute their bravery (whether we agree with them or not), and I do so. But we cannot pretend they did not know that their defiance, however pious, would be treated as treason and disloyalty, and with good reason.
His “good reason” for executing Catholics is the Anglo-Spanish War—“an event that shows beyond doubt that the Catholic threat to Protestant England in those years was urgent and real.” How the War “proves” that English Catholics posed a lethal threat to the English government Mr. Hitchens never explains. England and Spain had been rivals for centuries, and (with maybe a dozen exceptions, like Guy Fawkes) English Catholics remained staunchly loyal to their country.
Mr. Hitchens also cites the life of Edmund Campion, whom he accuses of “placing himself in the service of a foreign power and committing earthly treason”—why? For attending seminary in France.
In short, Mr. Hitchens praises those English Catholics argues that English Catholics might easily have played along with the new Protestant regime without seriously compromising their own conscience:
The main Anglican services, for those who do not know them, are both beautiful and unobjectionable. They contain nothing contrary to Catholic belief, and are in fact carved out of the monastic cycle of prayer, with its familiar canticles and Psalms. No Catholic who attended Matins or Evensong would have been compelled to say or do anything that outraged his conscience. Even the rare services of the Lord’s Supper (four times a year, according to the Prayer Book’s instructions) are carefully ambiguous.
An evensong here; a “pinch of incense” there. Why not play along—for the good of the Realm?
Of course, there were Roman Christians who made their little offering to the god-emperors, merely to appease the authorities (“traditores”)—just as there were English Catholics who comformed to the Anglican Church, for the same reason (“Church Papists”).
No doubt many of them acted from fear of persecution. Yet no doubt many others acted from a sincere “conservatism”: a belief in the duty of individuals to subordinate their own private convictions to the public good.
There’s a part of me that finds this conservatism deeply attractive. I have an instinctual dislike for boat-rockers. So did St. Paul, who began his career as a Pharisee and died a proud citizen of Rome. And so did St. Peter, who commanded his fellow Christians to “submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake”—especially “the king as supreme.”
But maybe conservatism is a luxury we can’t afford. How else are we supposed to understand the Master’s warning, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword”?