Sunday, June 14, 1998
By Larry Witham

Religious liberty has become a global crusade of the 1990's.

While political freedom has blossomed in the post-Cold War world, new restrictions on religion -- from city ordinances in the United States to sectarian violence abroad -- have increased, a growing alliance of activists say.

The new enemies of religious liberty: nationalism, growing bureaucracies, resurgent Islam, holdout former Communist states and a backlash against the rise of pluralism in a growing number of countries around the globe.

Washington is getting at taste of the popular pull of the movement as two dozen bands stage a pair of huge concerts yesterday and today at RFK Stadium to protest Chinese oppression of political and religious freedom in Tibet.

What unites this new chorus of voices defending religious rights, from the U.S. Congress to human rights activists and scholars of law and religion, is an effort to place the violations against freedom of faith, from the most minor to the most egregious, on one continuum of liberty.

"You could find people of almost any religion in the world who are being persecuted today," Sen. Joseph I. Liberman, Connecticut Democrat, testified in house hearings on the issue last month.

New global freedoms have led to clashes involving old religious rivals and new proselytizers, said John Witte, director of Emory University's law and religion program.

"It is one of the bitter fruits of the religious liberty revolution around the world," he said.

Later this month, Mr. Witte will convene a Washington forum on "the problem of proselytizing in the New World order," part of a three-year, problem-solving project.

Religious freedom also has been at he heart of several recent legislative battles on Capitol Hill.

To address such human rights violations abroad, the House has passed and the Senate is considering a bill that would require the Clinton administration to impose economic sanctions on nations that persecute believers.

On the domestic front, Republicans Rep. Charles T. Canady of Florida and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch of Utah last week introduced a bill to re-establish the protections for religious groups against burdens imposed by state and local government regulation. Reviving a 1993 law struck down by the Supreme Court just last year.

Such is the broad and diverse scope of the new interest in religious liberty, said Winston Frost, dean of Trinity Law School.

"In America, religious freedom is about accommodation to menorahs and crèches and discussions in public schools," he said. "Elsewhere in the world, it means giving your life for what you believe."

Nearly every nation pays homage in its constitution to freedom of conscience and belief, and most have signed the postwar Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"What our battle is about is to promote the reality of religious freedom as opposed to amending constitutions," said Bruce Casino, president of the International Coalition for Religious Freedom.

He said the tension between those promises of freedom and a regime's need to keep "public order" is central to the loss of liberty. In this sense, he said, Greece's constitution is honest than most.

It says that "all known religions shall be free" to worship, but that religions are "not allowed to offend public order or moral principles and proselytization is prohibited."

The privacy of public order now is being evoked by increasing numbers of government authorities even in the developed democracies of Western Europe, said Jurgen Warnke, a Frankfurt lawyer with the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief.

He cited an Austrian law passed in December that creates three tiers of legality, excluding such well-known denominations as Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses from some social privileges and relegating newer faiths, from Scientology to Hare Krishna, to private worship alone.

He said nations in Easter Europe think differently about legal protections for religion. In Romania, he said, a draft constitution includes 18 legal religions but no individual religious rights.

A new Russian law, enacted in September, also puts a priority on public order over liberty. Four historic religions are given special status, while the Catholic Church is a minority that must register to operate legally. Churches that were not registered 15 years ago cannot now obtain legal status.

"Each parish must register, and whether there will be problems has to do with local officials," said Archbishop Thaddaeus Kondrusiewicz, the spiritual leader of Catholics in Russia. "Practically, missionary activity by us is forbidden."

If Orthodoxy is predominant in the East, Catholicism is the controlling heritage in Latin America.

"Twenty Latin American republics guarantee religious freedom, including Cuba," said the Rev. Julio Lillan, a Pentecostal in Venezuela and head of the Interdenominational Evangelical Federation.

Yet even in the new democracies, he noted, a growing religious nationalism has led Catholics in government to curtail the rights of Protestant evangelical working in their countries.

When Pope John Paul 11 visited the Dominican Republic in 1992 to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus, he warned Latin American bishops assembled there that the evangelical sects were like "ravenous wolves."

Last year, Venezuela's "security and religion minister" said the spread on non-Catholic faiths threatened "national security" by creating "disunion and discord, disorder and fatal anarchy."

But government suspicions of competing religious groups in Europe and Latin America pale next to active official state persecution of believers in many countries.

Human rights experts say the persecution has reached its deadly zenith in Sudan, where 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the state policy of Islamic fundamentalists.

"In the Sudan it is systematic killing," said exiled Catholic Bishop Macram Gassis. "The regime is also suppressing the majority of minority Muslims."

In the Nuba Mountains southeast of Khartoum and in the bishop's central diocese the word "jihad," or "holy war" is painted in white like the Hollywood sign in the hills above Las Angeles. The bishop said it calls for the forced conversion, slavery and rape that armed northern Muslims are imposing on the south.

"Holy war goes hand in hand with slavery," the bishop said. "They take women and children into the so-called 'peace camps.'"

"In sheer absolute numbers, this century has also been one of the bloodiest, if not the bloodiest, for Jews, Buddhist and Baha'is," she added. "In the current period, the Middle East is one of the fiercest opponents of religious minorities."

In Saudi Arabia, secret police monitor homes for outlawed Christian worship services and immigrant workers who violate the ban reportedly have been beheaded, she said.

In Pakistan in May, Catholic Bishop John Joseph reportedly shot himself to death in the street to protest a Christian youth's death sentence under the country's 1986 law against blaspheming Islam.

"Muslim societies are not uniformly hostile to religious minorities," Miss Shea said, noting that Jordan allows religious education for Christians in its public schools.

The growing abuses in predominantly Islamic nations have inspired a backlash against Muslim immigrants, who number 8 million in Western Europe.

In Frankfurt, Germany, recently, the mayor refused a Muslim request to build a mosque because in Turkey the government gas stood by as Muslim mobs burned Christian churches.

In Asia's young democracies, religious tolerance typically relies on political stability, said Michael Young of Columbia University.

"The higher the degree of legitimacy, the higher the government's confidence in it's ability to rule, the more space it gives religion," Mr. Young said. "The less confidence and the lower degree of legitimacy, the persecution tends to increase rather dramatically.

Communist China's new 1994 law, which seeks to control recurring outbreaks of religion expressing among the masses, has become a new kind of regulatory system, Mr. Young said.

The law says religion cannot "disrupt the unification of the country, national unity or social stability." Analysts say officials in Beijing adopted this approach after seeing the key role-played by church leaders in Eastern Europe in the collapse of Communist regimes in the late 1980's.

Mr. Young lauded Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines for their tolerance of differing religions, adding that Singapore is moving in a positive direction as well.

Yet even the democracies of the world have tightened the screws on religious pluralism.

Israel's Orthodox parties ban non-Orthodoxy clergy and last month the Knesset passed the first reading of an anti-missionary law with a three year jail sentence for anyone trying to change someone's religion.

Western Europe, preparing for economic and regulatory unity within the European Union, has narrowed the definition of religion, said Massimo Introvigne, a Catholic lawyer and professor who heads the Center for the Study of New Religions in Turin, Italy.

"In order to maintain this façade of religious freedom in European countries, they say some groups are not a religion," Mr. Introvigne said. "So why do [believers] join? And they say, 'People join because of mental control, not free will.'"

In Germany this month, a special state commission on "sects" said its forthcoming report will recommend that the derogatory term be dropped from public debate, adding that "no generalized statements on the whole spectrum of new religions [and] psycho-groups can be made."

Muscovite Viktor Kagan, a doctor with the Independent Psychiatric Association, said that the kind of state psychiatry once used to suppress Soviet political dissidents now is aimed at religious activists.

"In many regions of Russia, psychiatrists still play the old role," Mr. Kagan said. He said the thinking is, "My belief and you're belief are so different. One of us is definitely crazy, and of course it's you.

Acts of violence in free societies also have prompted governments to curb religious liberties in the name of public order.

Reacting to the Solar Temple suicides and murders in Europe and Canada in 1994 and 1995 and the Aum Shinri Kyo gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12, governments in Germany and French-speaking Europe funded "anti-sect committees." In Japan, there was an attempt to legislate new curbs on religion.

While the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana had a similar effect in the United States, the fiery 1993 debacle in Waco, Texas, when federal agents clashed with Branch Davidians, has turned public opinion against the automatic use of force against small sects, Mr. Introvigne and others said.

Still, in April the Maryland General Assembly approved funding for a task force to investigate so called "cults" meeting students at colleges and universities in the state. Gov. Parris N. Glendening signed the bill last month amid objections from critics that the task force is unbalanced because it lacks an objective scholar or a member of the targeted groups.

The more typical conflict in the United Sates is the one central to the battle over the overturned Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which said the government must show a "compelling interest" to curtail sincere religious practice.

After the Supreme Court invalidated the law last year, Congress has held hearings and the proposed new legislation "will replace as much of RFRA's original protections as possible," a House staffer said.

Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute, which files lawsuits for religious liberty claims, said that once the laws are in place, vigilance still will be required.

"Just because laws are on the books doesn't mean the game is over," the lawyer said. He said key statutes with such protections are the Equal Access Act, which allows student religious clubs, and Title V11 of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of religion and other traits.

But as with civil rights for blacks, he said, the laws must be enforced. "It takes diligence in order for us to have these rights and freedoms protected."

One link made between America and the world and the potential for religious liberty came in this year's Freedom House report on free and non-free nations.

While freedom has existed under any predominant religion, said Freedom House President Adrian Karatnycky, the correlation in modern times is between Christianity and freedom.

"Only a quarter-century, I would not have argued that there was a strong correlation between Christianity and democracy," MR. Karatnycky said. "I would have argued there is strong correlation between Protestant forms of Christianity and democracy."

The change has come because many predominantly Eastern Orthodox nations now have been freed from Communist regimes, and many Catholic societies in Latin American have shed military dictatorships.

Now, however, those Orthodox and Catholic lands are reacting to aggressive missionary work, and Mr. Witte of Emory said the proselytizers should consider a "moratorium" so that the new democracies could mature.

"That is one alternative to simply condemning those societies for trying to control missionaries," Mr. Witte said.

Another approach would be for dominant state-aligned religions to learn how to deal with pluralism, said the Rev. Vikenty Mis'kov of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has clashed in recent years with Russian clergy.