Good afternoon; thank you for that warm introduction and for your kind reception of me as a participant on this critical panel. Particularly as tomorrow is the 508^th anniversary of Pastor Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, I am humbled and honored to add my thoughts to those of my esteemed fellow panelists about religious liberty and our communities. I am particularly honored to do so in this state of Alabama, which was this week named for the third consecutive year by the Napa Legal Institute as first among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in enacting the legal frameworks supporting the free exercise of religion. Congratulations to all Alabamians, indeed. Additionally, as a career former U.S. Army Chaplain and now as a professor at Birmingham Theological Seminary, which I here proudly represent today, I have a long professional interest in this topic. Thus, and perhaps in an ethically utilitarian vein, I would attempt to answer a fundamental question: “Why is religious liberty vital to the functioning of healthy communities?” 

By way of beginning a response to that question, let me say that I, in one sense, lived this every day for decades during my tenure as an Army Chaplain. Our sub-section of the American profession of arms was shocked to be the subject of a 1979 landmark lawsuit, Katcoff v. Marsh, about which you can read more in Israel Drazin and Cecil Currey’s excellent work entitled For God and Country, in which two plaintiffs sued the United States Army over the constitutionality of its uniformed, commissioned Chaplain Corps. Though the litigants lost in both the original ruling and on appeal at the 2^nd Circuit Court in 1985, they achieved a fundamental change across the United States federal, and derivatively, state and local governments, to wit: chaplains do not serve to support the adherents of their faith tradition only but to additionally uphold the free exercise rights of all personnel assigned to their care.

The effect of this lawsuit has been a re-balancing of both organizational and individual chaplaincy priorities ever since, towards what the U.S. military chaplaincies now articulate as the advice and assistance to commanders in the “management of religious affairs” to support to the force. This is a uniquely American ideal, undergirded by the balanced tension of both the non-establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. To my knowledge—and I have worked with both established and emerging military chaplaincies in over fifty nations—no other country’s military chaplaincy even attempts to replicate this legal authority for its uniformed chaplaincies, as no other country specifically shares such a codified legal foundation for its uniformed chaplaincies. Each is attenuated by its own national legal frameworks, histories, ethical norms, political authorities, and civil-military ideals in the employment of its military chaplaincies. This makes the task of such chaplaincies working together amidst allied and partner nation operations nuanced, if not overtly challenging, but there it is. 

Yet, why is this important to our question today, which again is why religious liberty is vital to the functioning of healthy communities? Put simply, in my estimation and in my former military milieu, I both professionally and personally came to see four emergent truths to this question. First, of course, is the self-evident principle that my enjoyment of the free exercise of religion is a right which, in a healthy democratic polity, must be afforded to all if it is to be enjoyed by any, and that such a right is worth defending, even at the risk of my own or other lives, at least those sanctioned by the state to act in its national security interests. Corporal Demond Doss, a U.S. Army Medic, a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Maeda Escarpment (Hacksaw Ridge) in the Battle of Okinawa, comes to mind as an exemplar on this observation. Second, that this political and legal right was undergirded by a more basic political and ontological truism, and this is that it is the liberty of individual conscience from which the free exercise of religion springs, so ensuring the latter ensures the former and vice versa.

This is an ideal elucidated by many, including as a Christian ethicist, three of the champions within my moral and intellectual formation of Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few. I might add, as a parenthetical here, that I believe that is precisely this point which is the catalyst for the recent crackdown by the People’s Republic of China on underground Christian churches across that nation, particularly the arrest of Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri of Zion Church and the ongoing imprisonment of Hong Kong journalist and British citizen Jimmy Lai, as well as its ongoing suppression of Uighur Muslims and devout Buddhists. Third and deriving from these reasons, I contend that religious liberty is paramount to the healthy functioning of a democratic polity and that, should we be tempted to dismiss such a foundational liberty, we reflexively put our entire republic at risk. Here, I have been most shaped by the thought of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran Ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, and the Protestant civic theologian Miroslav Volf. America cannot function as a democracy without religious liberty, and whether one is an ardent adherent or an avowed atheist, wise citizens recognize this principle. Yet how is this so?

Fourth and lastly—and again in perhaps solely utilitarian vein—I wish to add an idea which has recently arisen in my thinking, and it is this: analogous to the creation of economic, political, and even intellectual capital, the cultivation of individual spiritual capital sets the social conditions for communal religious growth and flourishing across the republic. In democratic polities enjoying full religious liberty, a person may experience God moving afresh in their soul with both eternal and temporal impacts which far exceed that one person. Of course, theologically God is unconstrained by the feeble efforts of autocrats or dictators to restrict their people in this regard; Solzhenitsyn began the dissolution of communism with this observation. However and inversely, when a person is freed to both believe and to live out that belief—particularly its ethical demands—it of course has eternal implications for that person but it has demonstrable temporal implications for that person’s society. Historic religious leaders such as the Anglican abolitionist Fr. John Newton, Revd. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope St. John Paul II all bear out the point: when societies create the conditions for the creation of spiritual capital, God can and often does use that to enact at world-changing effect.

These four observations, in sum, capture the criticality of this topic for us today: the free exercise of religion reflexively benefits all citizens, regardless of their confessional beliefs; it is, however, individual liberty of conscience which undergirds this right of free exercise; that said, such religious liberty is vital to the continual functioning of a healthy democratic polity, and finally; the legal framework for religious liberty creates the conditions for God to create spiritual capital in men, women, and children which alters our very nation and world. Thank you for your time and attention to my thoughts today, and I look forward to our collegial professional dialogue.