US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on February 5 the establishment of the International Religious Freedom Alliance. 26 countries, including Britain and Israel, became founding members of the alliance. The Alliance’s declaration of principles states: Alliance members will take measures to promote and protect the freedom of religion or belief of all people, including regular monitoring, reporting, information sharing and contacts with affected individuals and faith-based communities; providing support to victims through remedies, resettlement or other means”; imposing targeted sanctions on the perpetrators, etc.
Freedom of religious belief refers to the freedom of citizens of a country to voluntarily believe in religion according to their beliefs. Citizens of any country have the freedom to believe in religion or not, as well as believe in one religion or another. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with fighting for and safeguarding freedom of religious belief. However, it is still open to question whether the measures announced in the Alliance’s Statement of Principles can achieve the desired results and whether they are contrary to its stated aim of promoting religious freedom.
Bible records the trial of Jesus Christ by Roman Governor Pilate. What is Jesus’ attitude towards this “international” persecution that violates freedom of religious belief? Jesus said, “ If my kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” In the face of unjust judgment and death, Jesus did not fight with violence but said twice, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Jesus’ attitude towards various circumstances is the main practical reason why Christianity has not been rejected by any political system in its 2,000-year history.
There are many examples to explain this. Bible does not call on believers to openly oppose or fight the Roman Empire by force. Roman Christians endured persecution until death, but changed the entire Roman empire. This is the testimony of Christians in history. The freedom of religious belief cannot be deprived by violence or achieved by violence. The kingdom that Jesus Christ defends and establishes is always in people’s minds. In a real world that has always been full of sin and pain, learning to love is Jesus’ redemption for the sins of all mankind. In the face of today’s reality, it is still the faith principle that every Christian should keep.
Faced with the current international religion status, should developed countries continue their strong attitude in the past and solve it through coercive intervention? Can measures such as “targeted sanctions”, especially those targeting religious belief issues, enable those sanctioned countries to achieve or produce the expected corresponding effects? Or, will the people of these countries suffer more? The mass characters of religious beliefs can make the incumbents of a country extremely insecure. Sanctions by western countries will bring more sufferings to the vulnerable religious groups in the sanctioned countries. In today’s world, such examples are not uncommon.
Ye Jieting, vice chairman of the Washington think tank Center for Global Taiwan Studies, said frankly, The United States decided to create the International Religious Freedom Alliance to counter the pressure brought by China’s rise. In case of this, it is no wonder that Chinese scholars reacted so negatively. Xu Yihua, an international political scholar at Fudan University, called the U.S. move a “religious super show”. It was the United States’ “building a group” in the so-called promotion of international religious freedom after it withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council in June 2018. Chinese scholars believe that the United States is forming an international alliance in the name of religion to pressure China.
The theory of religious freedom held by Pompeo and other participants came from the theories of natural human rights, separation of church and state, religious tolerance, etc. elaborated by British Locke in the 17th century. What is confusing is whether establishing alliances and using international sanctions to force other sovereign states to act on their own opinions on religious issues is contrary to the purpose of promoting religious freedom? Is the separation of church and state equally applicable to international religious affairs? Will the alliance’s strong political intentions produce more unexpected results in the international religions? Time will tell.
(Syndicated content)
Read more :
Back In Time: Rajiv Gandhi Assassinated By LTTE Suicide Bomber In Tamil Nadu
