For thirty-six years I exercised a right I never once thought about. When a form asked my religion I wrote atheist, and nothing happened. No official read it. No magistrate called me in. Nobody in my street thought me a danger to the town. I assumed that was simply how the world is, the way I assumed the air outside my door would be breathable.
It is not how the world is. It is how this corner of it became, and the becoming took a long time and cost a great deal, and the argument that made it possible was a Christian argument. I did not know that when I was using the freedom. I find I want to say it now, carefully, because it is the sort of claim that sounds like a Christian scoring a point, and I would have heard it as one.
Start with the world Jesus was born into. Religion there was not a private conviction. It was the loyalty test of the state. You sacrificed to the gods of the empire because the empire’s fortunes were held to depend on it, and a man who refused was not an interesting eccentric with unusual views. He was a civic risk. Rome was tolerant of a great many gods and almost entirely intolerant of the man who would burn incense to none of them, because the objection was never theological. It was political. Socrates was executed for impiety three centuries before any of this, and the charge was corrupting the young, which is to say destabilising the city. Belief and citizenship were the same fabric. There was no thread you could pull out and call your own.
Into that arrangement came a teacher who was handed a coin and asked whether a faithful Jew should pay Roman tax. The answer split the fabric. Give Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give God the things that are God’s. Two claims, two jurisdictions, and a line drawn between them that nobody in that courtyard had drawn before. Later, on trial for His life and with every incentive to raise an army, He told the governor that His kingdom was not of this world. He had already refused the throne when a crowd tried to put Him on it.
Underneath the politics of that sits the theological reason, and it is the one I find hardest to argue against. In an earlier piece I used the image of a robot built to say I love you. It says the words perfectly, every time, and never once means them, because love that cannot be withheld is not love. It is output. If God wanted worship of that kind He would have made a universe of machines and been adored without interruption. He made creatures who can refuse. Free will is not a design flaw He tolerates. It is the only condition under which the thing He is asking for can exist at all.
Take that seriously and a conclusion follows for any human authority. If God Himself declines to compel the human heart, no king, bishop or parliament has grounds to try. Compelled belief is not a lesser version of faith. It is not faith. And people worked this out early.
Around the year 212, a North African writer named Tertullian sent a letter to the Roman governor of his province, arguing against the persecution of Christians. He did not ask for a favour or an exemption for his own people. He argued from a principle available to anyone: that worshipping according to one’s own conviction is a right belonging to human beings as such, and that one man’s religion neither harms nor helps his neighbour. Then the line that historians of the idea keep returning to: “it is no part of religion to compel religion.” That is one of the earliest explicit demands for religious liberty we have, and it was written by a man from a persecuted minority with no power to enforce anything.
A century later, Lactantius made the same case from a very different position, as a Christian scholar inside the household of the Emperor Constantine. His argument was that religion defended by killing ceases to be religion, that it is protected by dying rather than by slaying, and that God has no use for worship extracted under threat. In 313 Constantine and Licinius issued the agreement we call the Edict of Milan, which granted Christians and everyone else in the empire the liberty to follow whichever religion they chose. How directly Lactantius shaped that document is debated by historians and I would not want to claim more than the evidence carries. What is not debated is that the reasoning was in wide Christian circulation, and that the man making it was standing at the emperor’s elbow.
I have to be honest about what happened next, because it is the part that makes the argument credible rather than triumphant. That liberty did not hold. Within seventy years Christianity was itself the state religion, and the church that had asked Rome to stop coercing belief learned to do the coercing. What follows is a long and shameful record. Forced conversions. Heresy trials. Wars fought across Europe over which form of Christian worship a territory would be compelled to practise. If you want to argue that organised Christianity has been an enemy of freedom of conscience, the material is abundant and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What interests me is who kept objecting, and on what grounds. In 1612 an English Baptist called Thomas Helwys published a book and sent a copy to King James the First with a note written in his own hand. The king, he said, is a mortal man and not God, and has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects. Then he pushed it as far as it will go. Let them be “heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever”, he wrote, and it is still not for earthly power to punish them. That is freedom of conscience extended to Muslims, Jews and unbelievers, written in England in 1612 by a Christian, addressed to a Christian king. Helwys was imprisoned in Newgate and died there within about four years.
A generation later Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts by fellow Puritans for saying much the same thing, walked out into the winter, and founded a colony at Providence with liberty of conscience written into its foundations. Not toleration granted by the strong to the weak. Liberty as a right, for Jews, for Quakers, for those the colony’s own ministers regarded as dangerously wrong. He argued for it from scripture, at length, against his own church.
That is the pattern I keep finding. The principle stated early, betrayed repeatedly by the institution that produced it, and then dug back out of the ground by people inside that same institution arguing from its own texts. The correction always came from the tradition itself. It is worth asking why the tradition kept generating men who would go to prison over it.
None of which is a debt anybody has to pay. This is not an argument that atheists owe Christianity gratitude, and I would have hated that argument when it was aimed at me. It is a smaller and more interesting point. The freedom I used for thirty-six years to hold Christianity at arm’s length was not a neutral fact of the universe. It was built, deliberately, by people who believed that a mind under compulsion cannot love and cannot know, and who took that from the God they worshipped.
I used that freedom to say no for most of my life. Later I used exactly the same freedom to say yes. Nobody made me do either, and if anyone had, neither would have been worth anything at all. That is the whole of it. The right to refuse is the only thing that makes the acceptance mean something, and Christianity understood that about human beings before anybody thought to write it into law.