The Protestant idea of religious freedom is not religious freedom at all

India regularly gets listed as a country a country of “particular concern” by the US Council for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). This institution is highly irrelevant and also has no business commenting on other countries’ religious freedoms, especially when it can’t do so in its own home country, the USA.

We must ignore all USCIRF reports as motivated, but we must discuss the core definition of what religious freedom should really mean, and what it has become.

The current idea of religious freedom comes from the European experience with religious persecution – where Catholics and Protestants fought bloody battles in the past – and, more recently, from the American Protestant idea of religious freedom, which is largely about the right to proselytise. America, which was initially colonised by Protestant groups fleeing the increasing secularisation of Europe, is a particular believer in the innate evil of pagan groups, and that their liberation from their beliefs is part of freeing the human soul.

According to Dr Jakob De Roover, Professor at Ghent University, Belgium, for American Protestants, “heathen religions like that of India always tyrannise the human spirit. Inspired by the devil, they are characterised by their violation of Christian religious freedom. Therefore, the story continues, ‘Hinduism’ aims to stifle the soul and subordinate the conscience to human authority (through its caste system, for instance). Stripped of their overtly theological elements, such beliefs entered American common sense and popular discourse about India and her traditions. This story about ‘Hinduism’ makes it all the more obvious to the Americans (and to others who accept this story, such as the Indian secularists) that the freedom to escape from this religion should be safeguarded at all cost.” (Quoted from an article in Firstpost.com)

While not all Protestant groups may hold such extreme views, they do believe that the right to convert Hindus is their fundamental right. The Protestant groups operating in India are often the ones most aggressive in seeking conversions.

In an earlier article, I have argued that the right to propagate and convert cannot be a fundamental right for many reasons, including the fact that it results in a lack of theological diversity, and robs the world of philosophical ideas from the eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Shintoism, among others.

As a general rule, the right to religious freedom ought to be an individual right, and an individual right only, and not the right of heavily funded church or mosque organisations to unleash mass conversions through inducements and fraud. These can also be socially destabilising. No one will object if one person feels the need to convert; when this becomes a mass obsession, it can cause social havoc.

There is also a bigger argument against conversions in the Abrahamic mould. Here if you convert, you have to give up all ideas linked to the previous religion. How can you call this religious freedom, when the new convert is expected to give up all his old beliefs in toto. How is it religious freedom if accepting Jesus means you have to give up Ganesha or Rama? Can religious freedom be a mutually exclusive affair?

Mahatma Gandhi, during the time he was leader of the Indian freedom movement, was repeatedly nudged by evangelical persons to convert to Christianity because his ideas were apparently close to that religion. But Gandhi could happily draw inspiration from Christ’s Sermon on The Mount and from the idea of Sri Rama and Ram Rajya. In both Christianity and Islam, you have to make a clear choice: you are either with us or just a target for conversion.

Religious freedom should ideally mean that the individual can choose to adopt any religious or spiritual idea from any religion, in part or in full, and not be forced to choose a binary – either you are with me or against me. The Meos of Mewat had become Muslims but retained many of their Hindu practices. This gave rise to the Tablighi Jamaat, which wanted to rid them of “shirk”, or practices not approved by Islam.

“Religious freedom” that forces the individual to choose between ideas that are essentially non-binary in nature is not religious freedom at all.

It is time the world accepted the Indian idea of religious freedom and junked the one that suits the political purposes of Abrahamic faiths.