The Religious Freedom Plank of the Evangelical Reform Movement

With the release of An Evangelical Manifesto, the evangelical reform movement has begun to speak to religious liberty issues.  That's good news.  Here's a relevant snippet from the document:

We repudiate on one side the partisans of a sacred public square, those who for religious, historical, or cultural reasons would continue to give a preferred place in public life to one religion which in almost all most current cases would be the Christian faith, but could equally be another faith.  In a society as religiously diverse as America today, no one faith should be normative for the entire society, yet there should be room for the free expression of faith in the public square.  Let is be known unequivocally that we are committed to religious liberty for people of all faiths, including the right to convert to or from the Christian faith.  We are firmly opposed to the imposition of theocracy in our pluralistic society. . . .

We must repudiate on the other side the partisans of a naked public square, those who would make all religious expression inviolably private and keep the public square inviolably secular . . . . Nothing is more illiberal than to invite people into the public square but insist that they be stripped of the faith that makes them who they are and shapes the way they see the world.

In contrast to these extremes, our commitment is to a civil public square -- a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too.  Thus every right we assert for ourselves is at once a right we defend for others.  A right for a Christian is a right for a Jew, and a right for the secularist, and a right for a Mormon, and [a] right for a Muslim, and a right for a Scientologist, and right for all the believers in all the faiths across this wide land.

Given that Os Guinness served as a drafter for this document, it's not a surprise to find this kind of language in the document.  (He also served as a drafter of The Williamsburg Charter.)  But it is gratifying to see the language adopted as part of the evangelical reform movement.

We have long needed more Christians, and more evangelicals in particular, to preach and teach that there should never be any governmental or civic hierarchy of faiths and to take stands against policy proposals and rhetoric that suggest otherwise.    Too many Christians have been reluctant to take this stand, seeing it as somehow contradictory to the belief that the Christian faith is the one true faith.  There is no contradiction.  One does not have to believe that all religions are equally true in order to believe that the government should treat all religions equally.  It is both a Christian and a civic obligation to protect equal rights of conscience for all.   Greater acceptance of this equality principle clearly would not end all church-state debates, and the principle itself does not represent the full scope of religious freedom.  But it can serve as a crucial point of unity amidst our disagreement about other church-state issues. 

A philosophical commitment to this principle is good; a pledge to act on that commitment is better.  The next step is to pledge to go to bat for this principle in some specific debates about policy and law over the next year.  If more evangelicals take this step, the cause of religious freedom will be advanced in important ways.