Don’t let freedom of religion become a dangerous idea

Public outcry forced the organisers of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas to cancel a planned talk by a Hizb ut-Tahir spokesman on the religious justification of honour killings. Some ideas are not just dangerous; they are fatal. Honour killings are acts of murder.

Any attempt to defend the morality of this repugnant practice by ­appealing to the right to freedom of religion will fail. But sometimes it is freedom of religious belief and practice itself that needs to be protected from undue interference and restriction by the state.

Current debate about freedom of religion usually concerns the extent to which the liberal state should permit the free expression of religious ideas in the public sphere.

Australia is committed to upholding the right to freedom of religion, alongside the other key freedoms of speech, conscience and association.

Religious groups and communities have the right to order their affairs according to beliefs and traditions. It is a right recognised in every state by anti-discrimination legislation.

There are certain exemptions in this legislation but they do not justify what would otherwise be unlawful discrimination.

Rather, they protect the right to religious liberty and ensure that right is balanced against other rights.

But religious liberty is currently under threat in Australia from an ­aggressive secularism that wants to drive religion out of the public square.

We can see it happening in the campaign for same-sex marriage, or ‘‘marriage equality’’ as it is often dubbed. This campaign is gaining ground despite the reservations of many religious believers.

Many Christians support same sex marriage. Like everyone else, they should be free to come to their own decisions about marriage equality.

Yet many religious believers are concerned that religion, particularly Christianity, is being forced out of the public realm where it is practised, into the private and confined realm of the mind. In other words, aggressive secularism poses a grave threat to the nexus between belief and practice. And all this is being pursued in the name of tolerance and dignity.

This pursuit of inoffensiveness ­effectively imposes a tyranny of tolerance upon the individual, law-abiding religious believer. This tyranny, in turn, threatens the freedom of ­religion, which has long been enjoyed in the liberal state and allows the individual to pursue his or her conception of the good life. Stoning or stabbing young women to death because they are deemed to have brought dishonour on their communities and families can never be justified as a legitimate religious practice.

Nor is it ever defensible to bring into the public sphere the truly dangerous idea that honour killing should command respect in a tolerant multicultural society. Rather than imposing models of equality upon the individual, the state needs to allow believers and non-believers alike, with differing and conflicting points of view, to live together in peace.

Peter Kurti is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, and author of The Forgotten Freedom: Threats to Religious Liberty in Australia.