Friday, June 01, 2007

Religious Freedom Leads to Peace

In light of Angela Wu's WSJ article on religious freedom in Malaysisa I wanted to follow up on my recent post on religious freedom.  In it I wrote:

One of the best ways to maintain peace within a country is by guaranteeing religious freedom. Despite much of the rhetoric about religion being a source of violence, this is only true when religious freedom is suppressed. In that type of environment, religious groups are incentivized to try gain political power in order to prevent other groups from forcing them to follow a different religion. When all of them try to grab the same reigns of power, violence often ensues. The US is an excellent example of how insuring religious freedom and creating a genuine free-market for religion helps lead to internal peace.

I then asked the question:

Despite hyperbole to the contrary, when was the last time you heard of one religious group physically attacking another in the US?

To which one of my readers responded:

Fox News tells me daily that Islamic terrorists want to kill us good Judeo-Christians, and did so on 9/11.

This actually underscores my point on two counts.  First, the attack was carried out by a religious group from outside the US, not by an American religious group.  Second, the attack was not carried out against a specific religious group in America, but rather against America in general.

Perhaps I should have been more specific with my question: 

When was the last time you heard of one American relgious group physically attacking another in the US?

One of the best ways to promote domestic peace is to protect religious freedom for all.

1 comment:

jeremy h. said...

In the U.S., one famous example is Alan Berg. The whole category of Christian Terrorism is not one group attacking another, but is religiously motivated. It also seems that Northern Ireland is a major modern counter-example to your causal mechanism.