Should there be compulsion in religion? Specifically...
Should your own religious group have a right to compel you (e.g. through threat of expulsion) to embrace its beliefs?
Should an outside religious group have a right to compel you to embrace its beliefs?
I would respond with an affirmative "
no" on both accounts.
Religious belief is an affective and intellective act of the 'will', whereby a person attaches him or herself to a particular conception of truth as mediated through a symbolic / mythical system and (most likely) community rituals intended to bind members of the community together around this shared understanding of truth.
If a person is a raised in a given religious tradition and has been intiated into their creedal community through their entry rites, upon adulthood they are free legal persons: there should be no coercion exerted upon them by other people - whether parents, family members, friends or religious hierarchs - to try and elicit belief which violates their conscience and agency as an individual.
Should the supreme, all-loving, omnipresent and imperceptible God of revelation actually exist, would He truly wish to be served by unwilling devotees who offer Him worship without true faith, for fear of sanction, expulsion, shunning or punishment from the community in which they have been raised?
If such a God were the 'real' Deity, then He is a cosmic dictator unworthy of worship and Satan in the traditional Christian-Islamic story was wholly justified in disobeying and rebelling against his arbitrary will.
On the other hand, should a person freely consent to belong to a religious community and abide by its doctrines, this is where 'legitimate' but limited and proportionate religious coercion can come into play: inasmuch as a church, mosque, synagogue or temple community alone gets to decide who should 'qualify' as a member in good standing, in tandem with the rights and obligations which flow from the privilege of that membership.
In the Catholic Church, this is what "
excommunication" means (notwithstanding is rarity of use in modern times anyway): an excommunicated person is not expelled from the community, shunned by family and friends or subject today to any civil consequences. He or she is not a person who has decided to stop attending Mass because he or she no longer believes in the Nicene creed (they have full immunity under law to do so if that is there inclination, even as their baptism - in the church's mind - makes them permanently a Christian in some spiritual sense) and wants to attach themselves to a different belief system.
Rather the excommunicated is a member of the church who wishes to remain a member and is still obliged to attend Mass etc. but is prohibited while at Mass from receiving the sacraments (the Eucharist, chiefly) because they have been deemed to publicly violate the 'rules' of the church to which they freely submit themselves, in some way. Excommunication is thus a purely religious penalty designed to act as a 'penance' for the excommunicatee, in the hope that they will reconcile themselves to the community. It does not expel them from the community (canonically, the excommunicated remains a Catholic), nor do Catholics practise shunning (indeed, the excommunicated person is
obligated to still attend church, that is take part in our community rituals, just not put themselves forward for Holy Communion until the dispute with the church has been resolved).
But should a person at any time decide, of his own volition and reason, that he no longer believes in the faith of the community - the community must embrace him with respect and love, not shun or expel him from their company but rather accept that he/she no longer wishes to pay the tithe, attend mass or keep the sacred law (i.e. whatever obligations a religious community has) because he/she has attached themselves to another conception of truth and perhaps another community.
The second question goes without saying: of course their can be no compulsion or coercion of people outside of one's religious community!
I call such theopolitical projects by the name: "
integralism". The sacerdotal impulse that seeks to impose one vision of "
the Good" on society, undermine the institutions of secular, pluralist democracy and use the coercive instruments of state power on "believers" and "non-believers" is the same, no matter in what religion it crops up.
Protestants have "Dominionism", Catholics have "Integralism", Shi'ites have "Velayat-i-faqih", Marxist-Leninsts (a secular 'religion') have "dictatorship of the proletariat"....
In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI had condemned the ideology: "
forms of religious integralism exploit religious freedom to disguise hidden interests, such as the subversion of the established order or the grip on power of a single group. Fanaticism, contrary to human dignity can never be justified, even less so in the name of religion."
The church Tertullian addressed this nearly 2,000 years ago:
Chapter Five moves back in time and from theory to application, revealing the potential and the limitations of natural law theory in an actual political setting. It analyzes the political rhetoric of Tertullian, the Carthaginian Christian theologian who argued, against Roman policy, for universal religious freedom, using the term libertas religionis perhaps for the first time on record.
This chapter provides a fresh reading of Tertullian’s writings as they concern religious freedom and related themes, drawing attention to his reliance on natural law argumentation. I analyze his epistemological commitments and link them to the commitments of the use of natural law by the other writers in the book. Finally, I argue that the effectiveness of Tertullian’s argument for universal religious freedom relied heavily on his use of natural law as a mediating device between human and divine law, with implications for the utility of natural law reasoning in a pluralistic public sphere.
"...Let one man worship God, another Jupiter; let one lift suppliant hands to the heavens, another to the altar of Fides; let one — if you choose to take this view of it — count in prayer the clouds, and another the ceiling panels; let one consecrate his own life to his God, and another that of a goat. For see that you do not give a further ground for the charge of irreligion, by taking away religious liberty, and forbidding free choice of deity, so that I may no longer worship according to my inclination, but am compelled to worship against it. Not even a human being would care to have unwilling homage rendered him..."
- Tertullian (155 – c. 240 AD), Early Church Father in Chapter XXIV.
CHURCH FATHERS: To Scapula (Tertullian)
"...
It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion — to which free-will and not force should lead us..."
- Tertullian (155 – c. 240 AD), Early Church Father in Ad Scapula, Ch. II
Christians typically look back with shame, especially Catholics, at our history - the times when we departed from the doctrine of religious liberty expounded by the Fathers, as in the Spanish Inquisition or the Baltic Crusades. Yet, our doctrine - for all that - still remained on paper.
I think St. Paul probably had a key role in this, where in his epistles he 'reconfigures' the focus (in a number of case) from thinking about Israel as a whole to speaking of 'individual' faith in Jesus on the part of 'individual' Jews and Gentiles. Consider his famous remark:
"I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.” (
Romans 14:14) and in a slightly later verse of the same chapter: "
The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God" (
Romans 14:22).
Paul supplemented this with a form of universalism and even proto-humanism: "
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (
Galatians 3:28)
St. Paul redefined 'faith' in his letters as being one's own interior 'conviction' before God - which a person has for oneself and another person has no business judging. In this respect, its for the individual - not the 'people's' covenant with their tribal god - to decide if foods are 'unclean' according to their conscientious convictions, or if they are free to eat what they like (i.e. no kosher or halal).
Well, that puts a helluva onus on individual subjectivity in determining religious truth doesn't it?
Framed simply, the state should not be confessional or exercise coercion in religion. By contrast,
Dignitatis Humanae (Vatican II's decree on freedom) affirms that: “
the state exceeds the limits of its authority, if it takes upon itself to direct or to prevent religious activity” because it exceeds its remit by invading the free arena of personal conscience if it does so, which is subject to God alone. And if we look to Pope Nicholas I in his directive to the Bulgars in 866 we find that he tells the Khan of those who refuse Christianity: "
violence should by no means be inflicted upon them to make them believe. For everything which is not voluntary, cannot be good". The Emperor Constantine, first Christian ruler of Rome, then enshrined this in the
Edict of Milan (313): "
we thought to arrange that no one whatsoever should be denied the opportunity to give his heart to the observance of the Christian religion, or of that religion which he should think best for himself".
