An Offense Against Religious Freedom and Tolerance

Switzerland recently voted to ban the construction of Muslim minarets. They reasoned that the minarets are symbols of a radical religion bent on violence and terrorism. I guess the money quote from that article is this:

"The minaret is a sign of political power and demand, comparable with whole-body covering by the burqa, tolerance of forced marriage and genital mutilation of girls," the sponsors said. They said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared mosques to Islam's military barracks and called "the minarets our bayonets."

I've got to say that this is incredibly disturbing to me and represents a line of thinking that could be used against any religion in the future. The Swiss have taken a religion with a billion peaceful adherents and boiled them all down to intolerant genital mutilators and taken away their right to practice their religion.

Using this line of reasoning, we could ban any new construction of Catholic cathedrals because they are a sign of political power, comparable to pedophilia and the Crusades, and are just training grounds for future child molesters.

We could do the same with Mormon temples or any other religious place of worship. No religion is free from mistakes or radicals, but the same is true of just about any other institution. Democracies have institutionalized slavery and war. Charities have funded fraud and embezzlement. We are not suggesting banning the construction of new government buildings or stopping the creation of new charities. But it is much easier to go after religions, because they are based on faith, which public policy has a hard time grasping.

And the threat to religions comes from both sides of the political spectrum. The attack on Islam in Switzerland came from the extreme right. The extreme right here in America has a similar view of Islam and would similarly love to wipe the religion out. There was also the harsh treatment of Mormonism by the conservative right fundamentalists precipitated by the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney. Likewise, the extreme left has an uneasy relationship with religion because it (the extreme left) is trending more and more secular and does not care for fixed moralism. So on one extreme side you have the desire to exterminate all religions except for the one (usually fundamental Protestantism) that you believe is most correct, and on the other you have the desire to exterminate all religions equally.

Of course neither is right. And while I don't believe that our freedom of religion is under attack, and I don't feel like, as a Mormon or a believer in general, that I am a second-class citizen, it is fairly clear how the extremists would make it happen like they did in Switzerland to Muslims. I don't think it is too alarmist to suggest, then, that we should be on the lookout for offenses against our freedom of religion in America, like that in Switzerland.

But part of this falls on the religious, as well, to behave in such a way that makes it easy for us to retain our freedoms. The religious, and Mormons in particular, should be acutely aware of how any hint of religious in-fighting, an attempt to legislate our beliefs, moral superiority, or intolerance of other beliefs systems (including atheism) can open the door, fairly or unfairly, to limiting religious freedom.