{"id":1371,"date":"2026-08-09T04:11:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T04:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1371"},"modified":"2026-08-09T04:11:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T04:11:50","slug":"did-religion-create-religious-freedom-rethinking-the-origins-of-western-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1371","title":{"rendered":"Did Religion Create Religious Freedom? Rethinking the Origins of Western Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"
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W<\/span>hat is it we are fighting for?<\/p>\n

Western civilization.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a nourishing dish with a lot of ingredients. But in that pot, not all ingredients are of equal importance.<\/p>\n

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What America\u2019s founding generation prized most they showed by how hard they insisted on them. The Constitution would not have been ratified without the promise of the Bill of Rights. Those rights are the linchpin.<\/p>\n

As important as all of the Bill\u2019s amendments are, the First Amendment is placed first for good reason. Without the freedom to print our words, we are all isolated against those holding power and the people can no longer be sovereign. Without the freedom to say what we believe and talk about it with others, we cannot develop words worth printing. And without the freedom to follow our deepest thoughts wherever they will take us in pursuit of the Highest, our words will be doomed to mouthing whatever others tell us is true.<\/p>\n

Freedom of religion is the keystone.<\/p>\n

And knowing how that understanding came about will help us understand why we still need to fight for it. It will simultaneously allow us to dispel the clouds of sophistry that obscure what is at stake and just how much we have to lose.<\/p>\n

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In believing religious freedom comes from turning away from religion, we have erred.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Many of us were raised on a narrative that explains the rise of religious freedom in the West as the result of religion\u2019s declining influence. According to this view, as the material sciences advanced and technological progress accelerated, people began reexamining long-held assumptions about the world because the scientific method was producing such remarkable results.<\/p>\n

Religion was not exempt from that process. People overcame their hesitancy to criticize beliefs that had been accepted for centuries. Naturally, many chose to leave old beliefs behind. They then closed the door on religion\u2019s ability to force itself upon them against their will, and our modern freedom of religion was born.<\/p>\n

There is some truth to this. Spinoza\u2019s radical criticism of religion is an element in the intellectual ferment that resulted in the insistence on political freedom. And, certainly, France\u2019s revolutionaries established a government that unleashed its terror against the Church and substituted its own \u201cReligion of Reason\u201d by force. True, the Jacobins\u2019 rule of terror was short and Napoleon re-admitted religion to the national life. But he only did so as part of a deal \u2014 religion must teach its believers that obedience to Napoleon and his state is mandated by God.<\/p>\n

Napoleon, though, showed by his actions what he actually thought at his imperial coronation: When the cardinal came to put the crown on his head to show that he was subservient to God, Napoleon took the crown from the cardinal\u2019s hands and put on his head himself. Though France has changed its form of government many times since then, the role of religion in public life has never recovered, that is until radical political Islamists began to accumulate power and de facto<\/em> control of territory.<\/p>\n

But in Holland and in Britain (and its American colonies), the push towards freedom of religion did not depend on a Spinozist denial of the law-giving God of Scripture. Instead, it discovered and took as it is own the tradition passed down through Jewish law that made a case for religious freedom being a command of religion itself. The power to heal Christian Europe\u2019s fragmentation came by ending, as well, a more ancient rupture that had cast the religion from which Christianity had sprung as a satanic adversary.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the Reformation, the Habsburg and the Bourbon autocracies in Spain, France, and Austria warred violently with various Protestant movements and their aristocratic backers. England switched back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism and at each switch there were arrests and executions. Holland, then a Spanish territory, fought a ten-year battle to attain religious freedom and independence. After about a century of instability, it became clear that war would not result in a unified church establishing a unified political order in Europe. What, then, could do the job?<\/p>\n

The answer of Hugo Grotius and the Dutch intellectual circle of which he was a part, was that the religious tradition, properly understood, had the answer. Jewish law had continued to hold forth a different model than the law of Rome, to which civilization had deferred. But Rome had failed, Christian rulers were fighting against each other. Why not look then where some Christian scholars had begun to look \u2014 at God\u2019s own model for a state, the law of Israel?<\/p>\n

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Grotius pointed out that God did not command Israel to establish comprehensive religious uniformity in the world. In the Jewish law sources that the Dutch and British scholars were just beginning to study seriously, the Seven Noahide Laws are considered the only thing binding as God\u2019s law on the entire world. Although everyone is meant to learn lessons from the Bible, things like the kosher laws or resting on the seventh day were binding as law on Israel alone. Non-Jews need only observe the Noahide laws to be permitted in the Land and even to offer voluntary sacrifices in the Temple.<\/p>\n

What worked in the Holy Land will work for the whole world. Grotius argued that as long as each nation kept these laws, the rest of their civil order could reflect the distinct traditions and needs of each different nation. Religious uniformity on these points alone was all the uniformity that was required. A civil international order, then, was possible without endless religious war. On that basis, the Peace of Westphalia was established and the modern Western international was born.<\/p>\n

For a thousand years and more, Christianity had generally looked at the literature of the rabbis as the ultimate heresy. Again and again, it would be seized and burnt, in the belief that at last religious uniformity would result. But despite all the persecution the medieval mind could imagine, not only did Jews preserve their law and religious independence, but Christianity itself descended into a century of armed struggle and chaos that only resolved itself through an intellectual re-engagement with the ongoing Jewish law tradition. By seeing the vital relevance of the concept that religious toleration could strengthen rather than weaken civilization, the West made a giant step forward.<\/p>\n

This was part of the reason why so many of the American patriots looked to the model of Israel in establishing their own freedom. It followed naturally from this that, for the first time in centuries, Jewish citizens enjoyed their own rights, the same as everyone else, as all equally derive them from God.<\/p>\n

The battle for religious freedom today is ever the same. There is a renewed effort to force the West into a throughgoing ideological conformity in which difference is heresy, punishable by the diminution or elimination of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the right to liberty, and even the right to life. The Jews\u2019 unwillingness to give up their religion to the demand for uniformity beyond the requirements of civil order always brings out the hatred of those whose only concept of order is tyranny and whose only concept of unity is a brittle uniformity. That hatred\u2019s unwelcome reemergence in the West underlines just how much is at stake and how urgent it is that we fight to preserve civilization\u2019s most important treasure.<\/p>\n

Enough of the twisted webs of the haters. They seek only to blame, and neglect the heritage that is theirs that can bring the order they claim to believe in. They destroy the humility upon which the pursuit for all and any truth is dependent. They close their eyes to the liberating truth that has enabled them their freedom.<\/p>\n

They seek to blind you as well.<\/p>\n

Turn like our Founders, like Grotius, towards a liberating clarity and the unifying truth.<\/p>\n

In believing religious freedom comes from turning away from religion, we have erred. We have confused others as well, who see that error and think similarly, that that is definitive of the West.<\/p>\n

It is not. The many good people who have criticized the West for discarding God were not wrong. But the answer is neither the substitution of another religion of coercion or of fleeing religion. What is needed instead is to do like Grotius and the founders: \u00a0engaging religion more deeply.<\/p>\n

The emerging and presence of Muslim thinkers taking courageous stands against the religious imperialists in their midst testifies to the truth grasped by Grotius and the pioneers of democracy in the West \u2014 that at the deepest level, it is religion itself that commands freedom to worship and empowers each nation to freely determine its civil order under a simple code that provides the basic order necessary for a peaceful world.<\/p>\n

Read more Sophie Cunningham Says Biological Men Should Not Play in the WNBA<\/a><\/p>\n

That is the deep humane religion and the livable future that invites us all.<\/p>\n

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Does Biden\u2019s Pardon Mean Anthony Fauci Must Testify?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Story That Refuses to Die<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Nazis and the Mullahs<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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