No Freedom From Religion : Societies that impose the faith raise insuperable barriers for West

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion in a society that was, de facto, overwhelmingly Protestant. This freedom was also extended, if a bit grudgingly, to Roman Catholics and Jews. But the religions of the American Indians were generally confined with their practitioners on reservations. And when Native American religion was offered as the basis for a claim to land, American religious tolerance quickly reached its limit. Land ownership, by the Founders’ consensus, was simply not a religious question. By a more recent, more embattled consensus, abortion has also been recognized as a question that religion will not be allowed to decide.

The fervor with which the Indians fought to keep their land and the violence of recent clashes over abortion may remind us that in religious conflict the stakes are often extremely high. And in a shrinking world, conflicting presuppositions about what authority a religion may or may not claim are doomed to come into progressively more abrasive contact.

Secular societies all believe that the state may guarantee to its citizens the right to change from one religion to another, to abandon the practice of religion altogether and to criticize religion. Some Islamic governments--and passionate parties within some otherwise secular or tolerant societies where Islam is statistically dominant--regard changing from Islam to another religion or to atheism as apostasy and criticizing Islam as blasphemy.

The most famous victim of this view is Salman Rushdie, condemned to death as a blasphemer and presumptive apostate by the government of Iran. Another case recently in point is that of a feminist Bangladeshi novelist, Taslima Nasrin. When she dared to suggest that the Koran should be revised, Islamic radicals demanded her death and a weak government has agreed to hold a blasphemy trial.

Western, secular societies such as Britain, which has protected Rushdie, a British citizen, have the right to enforce their own understanding of what the free exercise of religion entails. Past that point, when confronted with a “domestic” case like that of Nasrin or of persecuted Christians in Iran, they must make it clear that a society that imposes a religion by force places an insurmountable barrier between itself and societies like ours that do not.