To know one’s self, or to know God, whatever that means to the individual, means to be actively involved in seeking that knowledge. One cannot plant a flag and say, “Here is what I know to be true, this and no further,” without it quickly becoming a false claim. One’s relationship with the self or an idea of a higher power should be a dynamic thing, changing as one’s own mind changes, becoming richer for the experience of striving to understand. As soon as hard and fast boundaries are placed, either by society, or dogma, one’s appreciation of the infinite becomes finite, by definition. What should be a supple, resilient practice becomes ossified and brittle.
Almost as soon as Christianity became organized, there was the majority-accepted take on it, and those that chose to interpret teachings as they saw fit. Before being collected and codified by committee, many gospels existed that were followed by diverse groups such as the Essenes and, later, the Gnostics, or “those that have knowledge,” which didn’t exactly endear them to the mainstream Christians of the time. Many of these “lost” gospels were hidden away, only to be discovered again in the mid-20th century.
As early as the second century, the emerging church denounced what they considered fringe beliefs as heretical, and by the time the Roman Empire got involved, under Constantine, these groups were persecuted, either disbanding or going underground. By the 13th century, the French Cathars drew the ire of Pope Innocent III who launched a crusade to wipe them out. The Cathars were an anti-materialist reform movement, which anyone can tell you just rankles the pervading power structure, no matter what time period it is. Whether or not they were gnostics, or if that was merely a smear to better throw them into jail and confiscate their properties is debated.
Pope Gregory IX took things further by instituting the Papal Inquisition (cue Monty Python), as a way of getting things under control. Historian, and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, Thomas F. Madden writes in The Real Inquisition, for the National Review, “For people who lived during those times, religion was not something one did just at church. It was science, philosophy, politics, identity, and hope for salvation. It was not a personal preference but an abiding and universal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. […] Heresy was a crime against the state.”
Tired of the various purges and wars of religion throughout the ensuing millennium, a desire for secularization galvanized Europe in the 17th century. A division of the spiritual and the political referred to as the Great Separation finally drove a wedge between theology and the running of the State (large S). Radical ideas such as the rights of the individual, and religious “toleration,” set the scene for the recently independent American colonies to codify these concepts in a new constitutional government, free from control of church and kings alike.
When the nascent Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became the template for the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution, was first read during the Virginia Convention in May of 1776, statesman George Mason wrote that government must practice, “toleration in the exercise of religion.” James Madison argued that “toleration” did not go far enough, and changed the phrasing to, “free exercise of religion,” a right we enjoy up to this day.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1782, “The legitimate power of government extents to acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In a 1789 letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia, George Washington himself wrote, “If I could now conceive that the general Government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of persecution.”
Our nation has provided, albeit, not altogether consistently, a rare opportunity for the individual to follow their own conscience when it comes to belief, or lack thereof. This was a hard-won victory for the seeker and agnostic alike and these rights should be valued and protected regardless of political ideology, lest we slide back into the morass of State-sponsored persecutions. Personally, I feel the best way to honor those who fought and died for us to have these rights is to use them actively and constructively in the face of spiritual tyranny.
Román Leão 