An article by former Bridgefolk director Gerald Schlabach on religious freedom appears in the current issue of Commonweal magazine. The article, “Outvoted, Not Persecuted: Four Lessons about Religious Freedom” takes the experience of Mennonites, historic peace churches, and other minority churches into debates among American Catholics about whether their religious liberties are being threatened.
The full article is available for Commonweal subscribers at http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/outvoted-not-persecuted, but the following excerpts convey the arc of Schlabach’s argument:
It has been fifty years since John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with a clear signal that the long era of what some call “Constantinianism”—in which the church could depend on civil authorities to help defend the faith—was over. … Yet old habits die hard. … When religious liberty seems negotiable at one moment and a bedrock Catholic principle the next, cynics may be forgiven for thinking that the principle is only as strong as its ability to maintain the church’s own power and privilege within the social order.
As a Mennonite theologian who has entered into communion with the Roman Catholic Church, I cannot concur with such cynics….
To help unlearn what remains of this Constantinian mindset, Catholics would do well to accept a few lessons from churches that have never been able to expect the state to support them. Their experience is one shared by many Christians—including Catholics in many times and places—who learn to live in the creative tension of diaspora.
Lesson 1: If we wish to frame our public advocacy in rights language, we will have to do the hard work of communion that allows us to advocate for communal as well as individual rights. … No religious community can preserve its freedom in the public square without doing the hard work of building real consensus through participatory communal practices that solidify the community’s moral cohesion. …
Lesson 2: If we as Catholics need to embrace a “remnant” ecclesiology in order to solidify a cohesive political witness, then we will have to recognize the full implications of life in diaspora—which means not confusing Catholic identity with American identity. …
Lesson 3: If we expect to continue the Catholic tradition of engaging culture for the sake of the common good, we will have to accept the complexity that comes from living in overlapping moral communities. … My point is that in complex modern societies the longstanding Catholic moral category of “material cooperation in evil” may be impossible to avoid, except for casuists wielding the sharpest of razors. Sooner or later, even while advocating energetically for more just laws and policies, any church that wades into these waters must accept that it has gained all the deference it is going to get. Churches in minority traditions have known this for a long time. To be outvoted is not to be persecuted. …
Lesson 4: If Catholics are going to successfully defend their own religious liberty, they must vigorously defend the religious liberty of others. …
In closing, a word about “diaspora.” … Diaspora is the model that can teach us how to live faithfully, knowing that our primary citizenship is as Catholic Christians in the transnational nation called church, while contributing to our host society—indeed, contributing all the more robustly precisely because we know that our American citizenship must always be secondary and tenuous. As a distinct nation within many nations, Yoder argued, Jews have sometimes been more Christian than Christians. They had no illusions that they could be in charge; and yet with their rich intellectual life, cultural productivity, and capacity for bi-cultural translation, the contributions of diaspora Jews to culture, to law, and to human rights have been proportionately greater, not less.
This above all is the lesson that Catholics wishing to defend religious liberty while working for the common good might learn from peoples who have sustained their identities by participating in culture and politics without controlling the reins of power. The church always has God-given resources of its own. It is freest when it depends first—and remains ready to depend only—on those gifts.