There is a rhetorical device employed by many on the Right: Claim to enlarge fundamental rights while actually attempting to diminish them. It is simply disguising oppression in the cloak of liberty.
Perhaps nowhere is this slight of hand practiced more flagrantly than when it comes to religious freedom. What some conservatives mean when they invoke religious freedom is actually religious supremacy. One master of this bait and switch is US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO).
Senator Hawley has aligned himself with the more strident factions of the Conservative movement including and especially those who falsely denied President Biden’s election victory He even infamously went so far pumping his fist in salutation to the insurrectionists who recently stormed the Capitol Building. The widely published photograph of his historic gesture will live in infamy.
But the junior Senator from Missouri is just as strident when it comes to religious liberty.
This is illustrated in a recent New York Times op-ed by Katherine Stewart, in which she reported:
“…Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at the King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.
The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly. “At the heart of liberty,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth-century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: ‘Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.’
“In other words," Stewart concluded, "Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right.”
This is not religious freedom, but a quest for religious supremacy. True religious freedom means that every individual is guaranteed personal freedom of conscience. What the "Show Me State" legislator is truly seeking to bend others to his theology, while arguing that there is no such thing as free will. That, in and of itself, is quite disturbing.
In 1952, the liberal legal scholar Robert L. Hale gave us this description of inclusive liberty: “A law which by restricting one liberty gives birth to a more essential one results in a net enlargement of individual liberty.”
Senator Hawley’s desire to use the state to suppress what he believes is a heresy is the inverse of Hale’s formula.
Hawley's attack upon the concept of free will goes to the heart of Judaism, debate within Christian churches (including a debate within Catholicism) and to all people of good will, whether they are religious or not. What the good Senator truly wants is not religious freedom for all, but the freedom to oppress others.
Roger Williams (1603 – 1683) the Founder of the Colony of Rhode Island, once famously declared, “Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils.” Williams was a firm advocate for religious freedom as well as the separation of church and state. He had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for not conforming to its established Puritan belief system. Williams was willing to be expelled for standing by his principles.
Roger Williams, unlike Hawley, suffered because of true religious intolerance. Williams who lived 400 years ago better understood the real meaning of religious freedom than the present-day junior US Senator from Missouri. And Williams will continue to be remembered when Hawley is relegated to the dustbin of history.