Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
-Mitt Romney
This is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections in recent memory, with three different candidates seeking to break a different axis of the White Male Christian dynasty of US presidents. Mitt Romney, who would be the first Mormon in the White House should he win, is in a unique position in that his religion, unlike Obama’s race and Clinton’s gender, positions him at a major disadvantage from the establishment without his minority group providing him with much of a corresponding advantage.
Romney’s recent speech was meant to allay the Christian Right’s fears of a Mormon in office, and if the news reaction is any indication, was a smashing success. The thrust of his speech was an ecumenical plea to ignore the differences of our religions with a bit of patriotic “Yay Freedom!” thrown in for good measure.
What he is trying to say is “I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I’m a person of faith. I believe in God”
-Roland Martin, CNN
Shy of the Unitarian Universalist Church, hardly any marginally doctrinally versed Christian – even one who would gloss over the doctrinal divisions among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy – would consider Mormonism of the same lineage as the Christian faith. Though the Universalist idea that all religions point to God is appealing to the masses as a nice feel-good belief, I doubt most Christians will buy it. Kennedy appealed to a similar popular idea in his famous speech to which many are comparing Romney’s – that religion is private and inconsequential in the public sphere.
Romney also purported that religion and freedom are necessary for each other. He even said explicitly that one without the other will perish. The point that freedom requires religion requires a very loose definition of freedom and religion: the Greeks of ancient Athens, for example, were by any modern definition “free” in the political sense, but their religion had become an allegory for the machinations of the natural world, and the gods were effectively nonexistent by the time of Aristotle. Whether this can be called religion is debatable, but his juxtaposition of the first point – that religion requires freedom – is flatly and demonstrably false. In fact, nearly the opposite is true: it is amid the lack of freedom that religion most flourishes. Persecution is a fire that refines and purifies faith.
There are countless historical examples of this, for it is the martyrs that people of any religion esteem: the Confessing Church is arguably the best snapshot of the ideal of the Church in modern history. Forced underground after a Nazi program banned the Bible in churches to be replaced with Mein Kampf (“the most sacred book to Germany, and therefore God”) and required the adoption of a doctrine of Positive Christianity – a reformulation of the Christian faith to conform with Nazi ideals, the Confessing Church exemplified not only compassion by hiding Jews and other persecuted groups, but doctrinal integrity by continuing to meet under the banner of Orthodoxy. The Church worldwide is still indebted to the Confessing Church for the theology that came out of it during that period. It was only when the war ended and freedom in the Western sense was restored that, to the dismay of leaders like Moltmann, the Confessing Church was rendered all but unnecessary and the German Church as a whole strove to return to its prewar state.
The Church in China is another oft-cited example. The house churches that meet against the will of the State and its theologically flaccid official churches embody on a larger scale than in any Western country the devotion and sacrifice inherent to true Christianity. The Early Church is another, persecuted under the Roman Empire until Constantine instated religious freedom in Rome, securing for it a dominant material and political position that sent it on a long slide of decay and corruption.
No, though freedom may or may not require religion in the loosest sense of the word, religion if it is truly of God in no way requires freedom, or any earthly institution to persevere. False faiths may fall away under stress, but it is the mark of Godliness to be made stronger by persecution.
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