Day: February 13, 2013

Religious Liberty Versus Religious Toleration

The next essay in North’s book is Religious Liberty Versus Religious Toleration by Rousas John Rushdoony. The opening paragraphs frame the issue of tolerance versus liberty like something written today even thought it was written over 30 years ago during Ronald Reagan’s first administration.

ONE of the areas of profound ignorance today is religious liberty and the meaning thereof. The common pattern throughout history, including in the Roman Empire, has been religious toleration, a very different thing.

In religious toleration, the state is paramount, and, in every sphere, its powers are totalitarian. The state is the sovereign or lord, the supreme religious entity and power. The state decrees what and who can exist, and it establishes the terms of existence. The state reserves the power to license and tolerate one or more religions upon its own conditions and subject to state controls, regulation, and supervision.

The Roman Empire believed in religious toleration. It regarded religion as good for public morale and morals, and it therefore had a system of licensure and regulation. New religions were ordered to appear before a magistrate, affirm the lordship or sovereignty of Caesar, and walk away with a license to post in their meeting-place.

The early church refused licensure, because it meant the lordship of Caesar over Christ and His church. The early church refused toleration, because it denied the right of the state to say whether or not Christ’s church could exist, or to set the conditions of its existence. The early church rejected religious toleration for religious liberty.

American Conservatives-The Stupid Party since before 1897

This paragraph is one of many gems that I have found reading a collection of essays on Tactics of Christian Resistance assembled by Gary North in 1983. The paradigm of the evil party and the stupid party has been at work long before William F Buckley Jr. was born.

In 1897, Robert L. Dabney described Yankee Conservatism thusly:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always-when about to enter a protest-very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
1. Robert L. Dabney, Discussions, Vol. 4 (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Publishers, [1897] 1979), p. 496.

As quoted in essay The Fundamental Biblical Tactic For Resisting Tyranny by Louis DeBoer, p 16.