The challenge to the right of faith: Quo vadis?

http://www.thejakartapost.com/Outlook2006/pol06b.asp

The challenge to the right of faith: Quo vadis?

Franz Magnis-Suseno SJ

2005 has been a bad year for religious freedom in Indonesia. More regencies introduced regulations based on religious law, thereby disregarding the legislation that stipulates that religious matters are the exclusive prerogative of the central government. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) declared the Ahmadiyah organization as a dissenting Islamic movement in July. As a consequence, armed mobs forcefully closed Ahmadiyah's compound with police mostly only looking on.

In the mean time, the closing down of "illegal" places of Christian worship by local Muslim groups, often backed by white-garbed members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), has escalated. The Alliance of Anti-Apostasy Movements (AGAP), threatened that they would shut down thousands more churches lacking proper permits.

Most disturbing is the attitude of the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. On the imposition of religious law it keeps its mouth shut. On the attack on the Bogor headquarters of Ahmadiyah the President commented, that anyway Ahmadiyah had already been outlawed long ago. Thus the violence against their properties was their own mistake? Other minorities found no consolation in this cavalier attitude.

In a similar vein, the minister of religious affairs declared that the closure of those churches was a nonissue, since they had no permits and therefore were not churches at all. Later on the government agreed to revise the infamous decree from 1969 which had made the building of churches almost impossible. This decree is the reason why so many congregations have to worship in improvised places. But first drafts of the new decree gives the impression that getting the necessary permits will become even more difficult.

There are two challenges the government cannot endlessly run away from facing: The first is its duty to uphold the law. The second is the protection of one of the central elements of freedom of religion, freedom of worship.

No self-respecting government can indefinitely allow mobs to take the law into their own hands. But this government is doing just this. It has long been recognized that the precondition for the general recovery of Indonesia is the restoration of the sovereignty of the law. But our government does not seem to have the guts to do it. The violence against peaceful Ahmadiyah has brought shame on our present government.

By letting mobs get away with violent behavior the government will only undermine its own authority, weaken the function of the police force and corrupt the judicial order. It also encourages people to become even more intolerant toward minorities. What is the use of cracking down on terrorism, but letting one's own minorities become more and more terrorized?

Freedom of religion features prominently in Indonesia's Constitution. Article 28 states unequivocally that "every person is free to embrace a religion and to worship according to his or her religion...", while Article 29 declares that "the state guarantees the freedom of every individual... to worship according to his or her religion and belief."

These stipulations leave no room for maneuver. Ahmadiyah may deviate from orthodox Islamic teachings, and MUI has the right to say so, but the government has the constitutional duty to guarantee their right to worship.

The same holds for all religious minorities. It is the first duty of the government to uphold the Constitution, thus, in this case, their right to worship. This duty implies the task of educating the people to become tolerant of minority rights. It also implies that in case an official house of worship cannot yet be used, a religious congregation automatically has the right to use other places, of course in a way that is not disruptive to public order. Any new regulation must proceed from the goal of safe-guarding the freedom of worship of every person.

There are wider ramifications. Religious freedom is still respected in today's Indonesia, if not without limitations. Most Indonesians still hold on to the tradition of religious tolerance. All the mainstream religious organizations in Indonesia, including MUI, have repeatedly declared that they do accept the existence of other religions.

But for how long? By appeasing intolerance and sectarianism the government undermines its own authority. It also endangers the ongoing healing process in regions of religious conflict that have been successfully pacified.

Besides, the latest spree of violence raises the question whether what we are facing is purely local. There could be groups that are testing how far they can go in imposing their own law upon society.

The destruction of mosques of Ahmadiyah congregations and the threatening of Christians who have done nothing other than hold a religious service once a week should, of course, not be connected with terrorism. It should be stressed, however, that geographically, the most widespread terrorist outrages up to now in Indonesia were the Christmas bombings in 2000, where, the police failed miserably to persecute the perpetrators.

But there is a subcutaneous connection between violent intolerance and terrorism. Using violence to enforce religious views upon others creates precisely that climate of an intolerant majority that breeds a mind-set that legitimizes violence against others on religious grounds. The transition from suppressing religious minorities to killing people in the name of God is not so difficult to make.

A government that does not have the courage to enforce the Constitution, that allows mob violence to dictate the law in the streets, indirectly supports the spread of attitudes that, in the end, will create a mind-set that falls more easily prey to terrorist ideologies.

Thus what will be the future of religious freedom in Indonesia? Will the government find the courage to oppose street intimidation as resolutely as it now suppresses terrorism? It is high time the government makes clear that Indonesia is and will stay a country based on Pancasila where the freedom of worship is guaranteed as one of the most sacred fundamental rights.

The writer, a Jesuit priest, is a professor at Driyarkara School of Philosophy in Jakarta.

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[LLC] [Interfaith Space] “My Heretics and Yours”

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http://www.revdak.com/wordpress/?p=122

"My Heretics and Yours"

The Rev. Tom Goodhue, director of the Long Island Council of Churches, is an old college and seminary friend of mine. LICC is actively engaged in interfaith dialogues through their Long Island Multi-Faith Forum. Over 100 trained speakers from eleven different religious traditions represented on Long Island go to places of worship, schools, hospitals, prisons and more to promote greater interfaith understanding.

In an editorial last month, Tom mused on the challenges of dealing with groups that might be considered "heretical" by others in their tradition. How should one deal with such groups as Messianic Jews (generally not accepted by Jews), Ahmadiyya Muslims (often rejected by both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims), followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, or even Mormons (who are not considered Christians by many other Christian groups)?

Rev. Goodhue proposes no conclusive answers. But he does suggest some approaches that can help in the encounter among religions of whatever persuasion. (What follows is only a summary; you can find his full editorial at the link below).

1. Be humble.
2. Remember your roots.
3. Listen carefully before jumping to conclusions.
4. Try to remember that heterodoxy is not heresy.
5. Go visit even if you disagree. Maybe especially if you disagree. Unless your own faith is really weak, observing someone worship in a way different from yours will do you no harm.
6. Don't pretend an offshoot represents the wider community.
7. Be honest.
8. Be honest with yourself. Many who profess conventional theology live as if they were agnostics, and nearly all of us have some beliefs that fall between unusual and downright weird. In fact, every tradition teaches something that seems ludicrous to nearly everybody else.

I encourage you to take a look at the full editorial:

• "My Heretics and Yours"
  The Prelude, Long Island Council of Churches, May 2007

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under National, Theory, Traditions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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http://www.ncccusa.org/ecmin/licc/prelude_may07.html#tom

From Our Executive Director:
MY HERETICS AND YOURS

Nearly every time friends get divorced, I have noticed, it is hard to preserve your relationship with both of them. This strikes me as sad, unfortunate, but probably almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, otherwise known as sin. One of the greatest challenges in ecumenical and interfaith work is navigating the treacherous waters that surround every denomination or faith community that has undergone any sort of split or schism - and haven't we all? Should you invite those who have just broken away from the Catholic or Episcopal or Lutheran Church to your local clergy association? Should you invite a Mormon to an ecumenical Christian group? An interfaith one?

Ecumenical/interfaith etiquette gets particularly dicey when one or both factions see themselves as the one true faith and their adversaries as heretics. It gets surreal when a religious movement sees itself as guardians of their faith but most others see them as having abandoned it.

• Many followers of Jesus of Jewish ancestry, for example, call themselves Messianic Jews. They see themselves as Jews, but most Jews say they are Christians, or at least no longer Jews. If "Messianics" are invited to your local clergy association, rabbis probably will not come. And if they are not invited, some Christian clergy will probably leave the group in protest.
  
  
• Members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who believe Jesus died in Kashmir seeking the Lost Tribes of Israel and that the Mahdi (Messiah) was born there in the 19th century, call themselves Muslims, but most followers of Islam say they are not. If the Ahmadis are invited to your interfaith group, most Muslims may leave. Many might leave if the Ismailis were invited, too, though opinion about this sect seems to be divided. One local Muslim chaplain observed that "Bahais recognize that they grew out of Islam and became a new religion, but the Ahmadis do not." Jews often make the same distinction between Methodists and Messianics.
  
  
• Followers of the Rev. Sung Moon say they are Christians who believe he is the second coming of Christ (well, sometimes they say this and sometimes they deny they do) but most Christians insist that this puts them among apostates.
  
  
• Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claim to be Christians, but most Christians think that any denomination that teaches that the Angel Moroni dictated another non-biblical revelation has deviated fundamentally from orthodox Christianity.

I realize that I may have offended many readers by now, but I mean no disrespect to anyone: I am simply trying to describe things as they are. Messianic Jews, Ahmadis, and Mormons may be wonderful people. The Mormons might even be right that Native Americans are a Lost Tribe who spoke ancient Egyptian, though this seems unlikely to me. People have the right to venerate either the Book of Mormon or the Rev. Moon even if I think they are wrong. I am not the Almighty and this is a free country, thank God.

So how should we relate to those who have broken away from another faith community? The LICC Board and the Multi-Faith Forum have both been pondering this lately, and we do not, of course, all see this issue the same way. Some faiths, as Arvind Vora explains, do not automatically see those who have grown out of their religion into something different as having broken away from it. For others, particularly Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it is important to draw boundaries between one community and another. For those of us in the "Abrahamic faiths" (which I think should be called Abraham-Sarah-and-Haggaric faiths), here are some thoughts I hope will be helpful:

1. Be humble. Nearly every religion urges humility before the Almighty, and it takes more than a little chutzpah to think that we are in a position to say how God will judge anyone else. No group has a monopoly on piety. Muslims, Bahais, Unitarian Universalists and others may love Jesus, too, even though they do not follow him the way I do. Heresy (embracing beliefs opposed to orthodox doctrine) and apostasy (abandoning what you believed) are important theological concepts, but we should be slow to hurl these labels. The Secret Files of the Inquisition, a docudrama that airs on PBS in a few weeks, reminds us that we Christians have often slaughtered those whom we brand as heretics. As my rabbi taught (Matthew 7:1), "Judge not, lest you be judged."
   
   
2. Remember your roots. The Rev. Richard Visconti, the ecumenical officer for the Diocese of Long Island, remarked at our most recent Board meeting that he tries to remain open to those who have broken away from his denomination by recalling that "nearly all of our denominations began in division." So it is in interfaith relations: The children of Israel looked impractical and impious to their neighbors when they refused to worship many gods the way everyone else did; they must have seemed like dangerous supercessionists when a prophet slaughtered the priests of Baal. The followers of Jesus ventured beyond the acceptable limits of Judaism when they insisted that their rebbe was not just a great teacher but also uniquely God in human flesh. Muslims outraged Jews and Christians when they claimed that their later Scripture was more authentic than the Torah and the New Testament. When Bahais embraced a new revelation after Mohammed they abandoned a core belief of Islam.
   
   
3. Listen carefully before jumping to conclusions. More than once in the history of the Church, schism has resulted from misunderstanding. As the Rev. Emmanuel Gratsias explained at our Annual Meeting a few years ago, the centuries of separation between "Eastern Orthodox" and "Oriental Orthodox" Christians turns out to have been largely a matter of mistranslation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints rejected polygamy in 1890 and repealed the ban on black leadership decades ago, but I regularly hear Mormons condemned as if both were widespread today.
   
   
4. Try to remember that heterodoxy is not heresy. Let's face it: we are all peculiar in some ways—in my case, in quite a few ways. I like jalapeno in my coffee, which is a little odd, though you might like it if you tried it . . . . Vegetarianism, pacifism, and Saturday worship do not make Seventh-Day Adventists a cult. Odd perhaps, but not heretics. They have pretty good arguments for all three of these, in fact. They are a conservative evangelical denomination, not a sect.
   
   
5. Go visit even if you disagree. Maybe especially if you disagree. Unless your own faith is really weak, observing someone worship in a way different from yours will do you no harm. The LICC is a Christian organization, but we offer financial education seminars in congregations that do not belong to the council and in faith communities that are not Christian: we don't want Mormons to be ripped off by predatory lenders any more than we want Methodists to be exploited. The LICC is happy to welcome non-Christian congregations and organizations into the Friends of the LICC. Board members of the Long Island Multi-Faith Forum have visited the Ahmadiyya mosque in Amityville and the Forum has gladly presented its Building Bridges program to the Ethical Humanist Society in Garden City and to secular humanists in Suffolk, even though neither are members of the forum. It is commendable that Ahmadis and Humanists want to understand the beliefs of their neighbors. If the atheists do, too, God bless them!
   
   
6. Don't pretend an offshoot represents the wider community. During the recent dust-up between Presbyterians and Jewish organizations over responsible investing in Israel and Palestine, both sides met with groups that had miniscule followings and then said, "But we have met Jews/Presbyterians who agree with us!" Visiting the Ahmadis is good; pretending that they represent mainstream Islam is not. Some churches claim to be Roman Catholic and offer "Catholic" weddings but never tell people that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't recognize them. As Monsignor Don Beckmann notes, "Truth in advertising," is important in matters of faith as well as commerce.
   
   
7. Be honest. Many people say "we all believe the same thing" or "we all worship the same God" but neither is true. At most, there are similarities among many religions and some of us worship the same deity. It is understandable that we might wish the feuding friends would just stop fighting, but you may recall what happened to Rodney King when he asked, "Can't we just get along?".
   
   
8. Be honest with yourself. Many who profess conventional theology live as if they were agnostics, and nearly all of us have some beliefs that fall between unusual and downright weird. In fact, every tradition teaches something that seems ludicrous to nearly everybody else. And the history of the Church, at least, seems to be that every denomination has its apostates. The Church condemned Marcionism as heresy in the second century, for example, but I keep hearing Christians claim that Jews, Christians, and Muslims do not worship the same God. And surely Docetism, the notion that Jesus of Nazareth was not really human, continues to be the most seductive form of apostasy for otherwise mainstream Christians. As the Apostle Paul put it, "all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) A little honest self-examination might do us all some good.

Shalom/Salaam/Shanti/Pax,
Tom