Christians throughout the world are facing various levels of persecution and maltreatment from purportedly secular and agnostic regimes. To temper such abuse, there is a tendency to appeal to the regime’s religious indifferentism, to defend Christian practice in the name of neutral “religious liberty.” But might there not be hidden costs to doing so?
The United Kingdom has recently displayed particularly tendentious treatment of Christians which provides a case in point. The UK enforces 150 meter “buffer zones” outside of abortion clinics that preclude pro-life advocacy groups from attempting to dissuade young women from their decision to abort. This legislation is unsurprising. What was surprising, however, was to see the British police arresting those in the buffer zone for silently praying. In December 2022, Catholic Isabel Vaughan-Spruce stood near an abortion clinic in Birmingham. A police officer approached her and asked, “Are you praying?” Vaughan-Spruce responded, “I might be praying in my head.” She was subsequently arrested, though charges were eventually dropped.
In March 2023, members of the House of Commons discussed an amendment to legislation which would prevent what happened to Vaughan-Spruce from happening again, permitting silent prayer and consensual conversations within the aforementioned buffer-zones. Ultimately, the amendment failed.
Many Members of Parliament spoke out against the increasing strangulation which the UK government seems to be imposing on Christians. What is perhaps most interesting, however, was the mode by which they sought to permit Christian prayer. Andrew Leyer referred to the law as “censorship” and stated that private prayer is “a fundamental right in the United Kingdom.” Edward Leigh noted that the police officer “had to actually go into her mind,” which one UK pro-life group called “truly Orwellian stuff.”
It should go without saying that arresting Catholics for private prayer is both necessarily unjust and a sign of impending doom. But whatever small victories British Christians might find on their way to the lions will be merely pyrrhic if they can only be won by pinching incense to the gods of neutral rights and free speech. Such tactics for safeguarding prayer redescribe prayer as just another private act. That this act takes place “in the mind” is irrelevant. We ought to be discouraged that worship of God is being outlawed, and not that the government is concerned with so-called private ideas.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau provides one example of an Enlightenment philosopher who promotes the separation of the public from the private and religious:
The right that the social compact gives the sovereign over the subjects does not, as I have said, go beyond the limits of public utility. The subjects, therefore, do not have to account to the sovereign for their opinions, except to the extent that these opinions are of significance to the community. Now it is of great consequence to the state that each citizen have a religion that causes him to love his duties. But the dogmas of that religion are of no interest to either the state or its members. … Each man can have in addition such opinions as he pleases, without it being any of the sovereign’s business to know what they are.[1]
Surely no Christian should agree that the dogmas of our Faith are of no interest to the state, outside of only indirect and accidental influence. Whether one’s neighbor is a Christian or a Satanist, for example, matters beyond whether that neighbor breaks secular law. Again, the implicit claim here is that the sphere of the public and the sphere of the religious are entirely divorced. Thus, religion is relegated entirely to the realm of the private, and as such, Rousseau himself uses religious “dogma” and “opinion” interchangeably. In short, this view stands in direct contradiction to the credo of the Christian, who proclaims publicly the very truth and hyper-importance of the religious dogma which he holds. No Christian can remain a Christian while simultaneously maintaining that Christianity is a mere opinion.
However, one might object that, as incorrect as the above assessment is on a speculative level, nevertheless it ought to be employed as a practical strategy for slowing the governmental crackdown on Christianity. But as mentioned above, such victories would ultimately be self-defeating, and would depend upon a lie about the nature of prayer. Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher of media theory and Thomist, famously stated that “the medium is the message,” i.e. that besides the content of the message itself, the medium through which a message is given likewise shapes the person receiving the message. He says that “a medium is not something neutral – it does something to people. It takes hold of them.”[2] While McLuhan was writing of media in the more contemporary and tangible sense (e.g. radio, television, etc.), the same basic principle applies in the present case. It may be true that the object for which the Christian hopes is the continuation of (even silent!) Christian prayer in public. Nevertheless, if the form under which such an object is pursued is antithetical to the very nature of the object pursued, then the act is self-defeating and therefore unchoiceworthy.
In moral theology, we recognize that no man may do evil that good may come, precisely because such an act would have split loyalties, as it were, to the good and to the evil. This would be to transgress the first principle of morality: do good and do not do evil. The same holds true for thinking. No man can preserve the truth of a thing by imbibing and spreading lies about it. As such, refusing to save prayer by accepting the liberal re-description of prayer as “private religious sentiment,” as I am proposing, is not merely a case of over-zealous devotion to political purity, making an ideal speculative political philosophy the enemy of practical good here and now. Rather, it follows from the intellectual and moral duty to speak and act in accord with reality. Prayer is not subjective sentiment, and we cannot pretend it is in order to keep on praying. To do so is to lie to others about the nature of prayer. Moreover, we put ourselves in danger of being shaped by the very erroneous form under which we safeguard our prayer, being imperceptibly conformed to this false definition.
Perhaps all religions suffer some death once they reach the shores of America. Granted, on the surface, the right to religious freedom ensures that the practitioners of a given religion here have all the space needed to worship as they wish. But they worship now under the forms of free association, autonomy, and a liberty of indifference. It is no coincidence that, in just a few generations, many who practice a given religion will come to see it as more of a familial or ethnic tradition than as submission to divine truth. As such, the above consideration is not merely speculative but is also pragmatic; what “saves” prayer today will tomorrow only hasten its death. Far from saving prayer, neutering its very essence serves only its enemies.
In a very real sense, then, it is understandable for the left to see Christian prayer as dangerous. They recognize, unlike the classical liberal, that ideas have intrinsic and intrinsically public significance. They recognize that religious creeds are not merely private habits and sentiments but rather that they shape the public forum, for good or for ill. Thus the leftists hold that ideas that run against the objective and public moral principles of their ideology ought not to be tolerated, and this is a common sense judgment.
Contemporary western leftism has increasingly distanced itself from classical liberalism and returned to the more traditional philosophy of governance and law, i.e. it maintains that it is part of the job of the governing authority to guide its citizens to the apprehension of the truth and a life of virtue. Of course, the contemporary leftist’s judgment regarding what is true and what is virtuous is often perverse. Yet, this error ought to be met on the foundation of our shared political realism. What folly it would be to fight dogmatic anti-Christianity by appealing to the laissez-faire religious indifferentism which gave rise to dogmatic anti-Christianity in the first place. We have enemies who believe that Christ and His Church are of great importance. Let us Christians, of all people, not pretend they are otherwise.
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract in The Basic Political Writings, ed. 2, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), Bk. IV, Ch. 8, p. 249.
[2] Marshall McLuhan, “Now the Medium is the Massage,” published in The New York Times, 03/19/1967.