Religious Fundamentalism Democracy

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church was famously late to embrace the right to religious freedom. Some have plausibly maintained that when, in 1965, the cardinals and bishops at the Second Vatican Council overwhelmingly adopted the Declaration on Religious Freedom--known by the first two words of its official Latin version: Dignitatis Humanae--the church betrayed one of its most traditional and established theological teachings. The right to religious freedom, according to international law, rests in part on respect for human dignity. Thus there is a prima facie link between the liberal democratic justification and the church's 1965 justification. But, as we will argue, the appeal to human dignity is not a preserve of modern liberal democracy. Indeed, we can imagine a government that limits religious freedom because it wishes to save souls, and this precisely out of a respect for human dignity. A similar view was held by the pre-Vatican II church. Thus the appeal to human dignity is not evidence of a fundamental shift by the church. What then does account for the church's undeniable change of direction? Human dignity by itself cannot provide the fundamental justification for the right to religious freedom. Another ingredient is needed: distrust, born of long historical experience, of government authority to adjudicate questions of religious truth. The church in Dignitatis Humanae accepted this lesson of history, a lesson available to believers of a variety of stripes as well as nonbelievers. This paper will analyze the works of Cornell West and Stephen Eric Bronner

Table of Contents

Abstract2

Introduction4

Discussion and Analysis5

Religious Freedom and Historical Experience6

Composition and Cornel West10

Ideas in Action by Stephen Eric Bronner14

Conclusion18

End Notes20

Religious Fundamentalism Democracy

Introduction

Democracy is committed to the right to political freedom--by which I mean principally the right to vote and the right to freedom of expression. No country is a genuine democracy unless it recognizes and protects, as a fundamental legal right, the right to vote at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors (Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR]). Similarly, no country is a genuine democracy unless it recognizes and protects, as a fundamental legal right, the right to the freedoms of inquiry, speech, and press, which we may call, for the sake of simplicity, the right to freedom of expression.

Obviously, a citizenry cannot participate meaningfully by voting or otherwise in the political life of its country unless it enjoys, as a matter of right, freedom of expression, which, according to Article 19 of the ICCPR, comprises freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of one's choice. The right to freedom of expression is not--as a real-world matter it cannot be absolute; according to Article 19, one's freedom of expression may be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be ...