Happy Feast of All Saints! Thanks Lord for all our wonderful saints; so many sign posts, all pointing to Jesus. I just returned from an incredible one-day symposium called Reflections on Religious Liberty at Princeton University sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute with funding from the Templeton Foundation. The speakers were Charles Harper, Robert George, Philip Hamburger, Angela C. Wu, Thomas F. Farr, Joseph Weiler, and John M. Finnis. The talks were complex, nuanced, and challenging.
One of the most stimulating was Dr. Joseph Weiler’s who defined the essence of religious freedom as the interior freedom to say no to God. If you are free to say no to the Creator you are then simultaneously affirming personal moral agency and placing yourself in a position of giving, possibly, the only answer God is really interested in; a freely offered yes. Dr. Weiler drew ideas on religious freedom from Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI , especially Pope Benedict’s Regensburg University address (“There is no compulsion in religion”), the talk that was so thoroughly mishandled by the media and so widely misunderstood by Catholics. This is a profound conception of religious freedom. Freedom is first and foremost of the soul. It reflects the reasonableness of God in making room for human beings to be fully human. Religious freedom understood in this way allows for man to get to know God as he really is, or not. It is pursuit of truth by comtemplation of heart, mind, and existence; it is the basis of all freedoms, inalienable, and is not compatible with coercion.
Dr. Weiler is an Orthodox Jew and teaches law at New York University. His talk took us on a tour of European constitutions to illustrate the existence of what has been called spiritual capital and the national cohesion that develops through the exercise of religious liberty. He referred to the image of the beer-swilling atheist soccer fan raising to his feet to join the crowd in the UK in singing God Save the Queen, as well as the agnostic Dutch state funding religious and secular schools, the UK’s nondiscriminatory policy, Germany’s opting out policy, the Irish Constitution’s Preamble mentioning the Trinity, and the Polish Constitution’s attributing all good things to God but allowing room for those who attribute these same good things to another source. What really is meant by separation of church and state when state national identity is so tied to religious thought?
Dr. Weiler’s was an inspiring talk during an inspiring event! Thank you Witherspoon Institute and all the speakers!
