Evangelicals Played Chief Role in Shedding Light on Religious Persecution, Says Rights Advocate
WASHINGTON - The misunderstanding of religious freedom is widespread, noted a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.
Many share the view that religion is a problem, a source of conflict, or something to be managed, said Bill Saunders during a recent lecture at the faith-based pro-family group’s headquarters in Washington. The FRC senior fellow argued, however, that religious freedom is still the most basic of human rights.
The "absolutely fundamental nature of religious belief" is that "human beings are made to desire to worship God," said Saunders, who also serves as FRC’s Human Rights Counsel and directs the Center for Human Life and Bioethics. But thousands across the globe suffer under persecution for their religious beliefs, or this "problem" as many view it. If people were not viewing religion as a problem, then others, including Christians, were simply neglecting it.
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"The importance of religion was simply not 'on their radar screens,'" said Saunders at the lecture.
The human rights advocate has worked with persecuted Christians in Sudan, where he founded an organization to provide relief to the believers there in 1999. For over a decade he has fought not for any "special rights" for the persecuted Christians, but for their basic human rights.
While at that time Saunders found much of the secular human rights community indifferent to religious freedom and moreover the Christian community unaware of the religious persecution, today he commends evangelicals for getting the issue on America's radar screen.
"It was chiefly through evangelicals that the issue of religious freedom made it onto the American foreign policy agenda," he said. "It's Christians paying attention to Christians."
Saunders credited evangelicals for the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 and the formation of the independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which helps produce reports on the state of religious freedom around the world.
"While reports do not solve problems, they do shed light on problems," he said. "And, speaking in the vernacular, if you don't know something is broke, you can't fix it."
As the U.S. Department of State produces reports annually to track religious freedom, Saunders warns that religious persecution should not be ruled out in the United States.
"There are political streams of thought that would deny the church the freedom to speak the truth as it understands it," he said. The loss of the religious voice in the states could happen, he commented. "If the Christian voice is stifled, it will have a negative impact" on the world.
Saunders' lecture last Wednesday came one day after the First Freedom Project was introduced by the Justice Department to one of the largest Protestant groups in the nation - the Southern Baptist Convention. The project highlights the department's commitment to defend Americans' religious freedom rights and to increase education about religious discrimination.
"Before free speech, before freedom of the press, before all of these other crucial rights, we put freedom of religion," said U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Saunders also highlighted religious freedom as being at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of human rights.
"Put more broadly, and as Pope John Paul II put it, religious freedom is the 'first freedom.' It is 'the premise and guarantee of all freedoms that ensure the common good,'" he said.
