Thursday, May 18, 2006
The right of "religious conversion"
The World Council of Churches has teamed up with the Vatican to pick a fight with the umma over the "right of religious conversion." The question is, why?
A conference sponsored by the two groups declared today that "everyone should have the right to convert to another faith."
"Freedom of religion connotes the freedom, without any obstruction, to practice one's own faith, freedom to propagate the teachings of one's faith to people of one's own and other faiths ...," the statement said.
This also meant "the freedom to embrace another faith out of one's free choice".
The WCC, which groups mainstream Protestant and Christian Orthodox churches, said the four-day conference near Rome was attended by 27 participants from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and African Yoruba religious backgrounds.
It did not identify them individually, and it was not clear what the level of Muslim representation was or where the Muslim representatives were from.
The meeting was sponsored on the Vatican side by the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and the thrust of the statement was in line with recent calls by the Vatican and other Christian bodies for better treatment for non-Muslims in Islamic countries.
This is all well and good, but I have a question: Isn't this new "right of religious conversion" just another way expressing the individual right to the free exercise of religion? That is, if an individual has the right to practice religion without state interference, doesn't that right naturally encompass the right to convert from one religion to another? If not, how can the person be said to have the right to the free exercise of religion?
And if there is no right to the free exercise of religion, then surely it follows that there can be no right to convert.
To any Westerner it would seem, therefore, that the right to convert is inherent in the right to practice religion, and that a new right of religious conversion is both surplusage (as a lawyer would say) and dangerously limiting because it implies that the right to convert is not, after all, subsumed in the right of free exercise.
Since these criticisms are obvious, what are the Vatican and the World Council of Churches up to? The answer is that they are attacking the often heard claims of Muslim countries that they respect religious freedom, without coming out and saying that those claims are fraudulent.
Many Muslim majority countries claim they have religious freedom, but by this they do not mean freedom to practice non-Muslim religions in all their dimensions. Instead, they define religious freedom narrowly, generally to mean "freedom of worship" in some private setting. Preaching, prosletyzing, conversion, and the construction of houses of worship -- however central these may be to the practice of a religion. Saudi Arabia, for example, sustains this claim by permitting Christians and other non-Muslims to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes.
The difference between freedom of religion and freedom of worship is reflected in the the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," adopted by the world in 1948, and the "Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights," first promulgated by Muslim rights groups 25 years ago. Regarding religious freedom, the former document provides:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
The Islamic version guarantees much less:
Every person has the right to freedom of conscience and worship in accordance with his religious beliefs.
Basically, a non-Muslim under Muslim rule can think what he wants, and even make physical gestures that imply prayer or otherwise reflect worship, but only if nobody sees him. If the "Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights" is doctrinally valid, Muslims do not construe religious "freedom" to include the entire practice of a religion, including conversion or the necessary predicates thereof, recruitment (proselytization) and induction ceremonies (in the case of Christianity, baptism).
Of course, nobody official -- not even the leaders of the great Western religions -- will accuse Muslims of not respecting religious freedom. That would be too candid for these sensitive times, however true it may be that genuine freedom of religion involves far more than their freedom of "conscience" or "worship." Instead, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches are exposing the gap by defining a new right -- the "right of conversion" -- that to Western thinking is redundant with freedom of religion and can even be argued to narrow, rather than expand, the traditional understanding of that right.
I would prefer that we simply state the obvious: that "freedom of worship" is a small fraction of freedom of religion, that the "right of conversion" is inherent in religious freedom, and that most Muslim majority countries do not respect either freedom of religion or any other religion. But if we cannot say that because it will irritate Western apologists or even trigger riots across a quarter of the world, then the Vatican and the World Council's "right of conversion" leads us there by implication. Nobody riots over an implication. Unfortunately, nobody stands up for one, either.
5 Comments:
By 
Dan Kauffman, at
Thu May 18, 12:14:00 AM:
Saudi Arabia, for example, sustains this claim by permitting Christians and other non-Muslims to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes.
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Not in practice they imprison people for that.
By Final Historian, at
Thu May 18, 02:50:00 AM:
I thought that it was for having a Bible...
By ScurvyOaks, at
Thu May 18, 10:38:00 AM:
I like what the WCC and the Vatican are doing on this, because it's exactly the right point to make in response to the recent case of the Muslim convert to Christianity in Afghanistan. As you'll recall, Afghanistan's constitution both endorses religious freedom and treats Islam as a source of law. I had wondered, before this case, how those two concepts were intended to interact. The Afghan understanding was apparently this: if you're a non-Muslim, you're free (more or less) to practice your other religion, but if you're a Muslim, death is the correct penalty for apostasy.
Spotlighting the right to convert focuses attention on how contrary to true freedom of religion Afghanistan's approach is.
By 
, at
Thu May 18, 02:31:00 PM:
Isn't it illegal to preach Christianity in Israel?
By Final Historian, at
Thu May 18, 03:56:00 PM:
Cyring, I think that door-to-door preaching, JW style, is illegal. Not sure about other methods. Apparently the reason why it is illegal is because so many "preachers" were being constant annoyances.
