The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  The Account highlights Calvin’s hypocrisy. If he truly believed in predestination—the idea that God has already determined which of us should be saved and which doomed—then believers had no reason to fear Servetus’s heresy. It also condemns Calvin for conspiring with the Inquisition against Servetus. Rome and Calvin were not one iota better than Pilate and Herod, rivals who had conspired to have Jesus crucified for heresy. The issue was not for the civil authorities to decide.

  Calvin was furious and made repeated attempts to convince the authorities in Basel to arrest Castellio. In his Defense of Orthodox Faith against the Prodigious Errors of the Spaniard Michael Servetus, published in 1554, Calvin stated that Servetus had not acted alone but had conspired with fanatics who opposed the death penalty for heretics. Those who defended heretics were themselves guilty of heresy. Later he said that Castellio’s defense of the individual’s right of doubt would ultimately destroy the Church altogether.

  But Castellio was already immersed in preparing a more expansive work titled Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted that came out in the spring of 1554 under the pseudonym Martinus Bellius. It comprised a collection of texts by scholars, ancient and modern, including Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin himself. In his preface, Castellio again suggested that Calvin and his supporters should tread carefully when branding others as heretics, since that was the crime for which Christ had been crucified. Moreover, Christ had declared that he would be tolerant of his enemies; how then could men be given the right to judge who were the true believers?

  Castellio’s defense of religious tolerance was a thoroughly modern work, though his ideas would long be ignored; it would be several centuries before they entered the common wisdom. He held that Christians should concentrate on what could be agreed to be essential and leave the rest up to individual conscience and the revelation of the Savior.

  The agreed essentials were the Ten Commandments, that God was the source of all good, that mankind was lost because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and that mankind was saved by Jesus Christ. Studying the Holy Scriptures uncovered no justification for definitive statements about predestiny, the Trinity, or notions of heaven and hell, and in Castellio’s view it was impossible to condemn people to death for their stance on dogmas so disputed:

  He makes himself (by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of God. Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? In view of all this uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, for each is sure of himself. Calvin would have to invade France and other nations, wipe out cities, put all the men to the sword, sparing neither sex nor age, not even the babes and the beasts. All who bear the Christian name would have to be burned except the Calvinists. There would be left on earth only Calvinists, Turks, and Jews, whom he accepts.5

  Castellio’s conclusion has come to stand as a fundamental critique of religious and political fanaticism: “By persecution and violence one can no more build the Church than one can construct a wall with cannon blasts. To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine. It is to kill a man.”6 It was Castellio who laid the first stone of the house in which tolerance and the right of free religious exercise eventually found a home.

  It’s a bitterly cold day in December 2009, and I’m walking around Geneva in the footsteps of Servetus and Calvin. The Old Town mirrors some of the asceticism, the lack of pomp found in the Protestant church service. I stroll from the railway station, passing the Place du Molard where Servetus took lodgings, then head through a cobbled alley to the square in front of the St. Pierre Cathedral where he was recognized and arrested. He sat imprisoned in the bishop’s cellar next to the cathedral for two and a half months. The building no longer exists. The city’s Hôtel de Ville, however, where the trial took place, has survived in all its splendor. I nose around in the courtyard from where the sentence was pronounced on the morning of October 27, 1553, most likely from a balcony on one of the upper floors.

  I’m in Geneva trying to fathom what led to the Cartoon Crisis. I’ve met with diplomats and nongovernmental organizations active in the UN Human Rights Council. Over the past four years, I’ve increasingly felt a need to understand the Cartoon Crisis within a broader historical and global context. I’ve immersed myself in issues of which I previously had only rudimentary knowledge, at best: constitutional law, the history of free speech and religious tolerance, Holocaust denial. The things I have learned have convinced me all the more that publishing and defending the Muhammad cartoons was the right thing to do, and that a number of crucial issues are still at stake.

  I jump onto a bus that will take me out to the Plateau de Champel where Servetus was killed, triggering one of the most important debates a society can conduct with itself: how to guarantee religious freedom and maintain social harmony. It is a struggle that each new generation must work through, and its outcome is never certain. In Servetus’s day, religious tolerance was seen at best as a necessary evil to appease the regrettable, but unavoidable, reality of multiple viewpoints. Today, tolerance is no longer exclusively about religion, but extends through notions of intellectual, political, and cultural freedom. It has become an ideal, and because being tolerant has become modern and fashionable, takes on what it involves are many. Who may claim tolerance and who may not? Where should its boundaries lie? In the debate on the Muhammad cartoons, many—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—believed Jyllands-Posten and its 12 cartoonists to be intolerant. Others—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—found intolerance in those who reacted with violence, demanding that the cartoons be banned.

  I sit down at a café and think about the challenges of intolerance in my own life. When I married Natasha in 1981, the Soviet Union was Denmark’s enemy. Her nation was a threat to my own. When we married, neither of us had any particular interest in politics. Natasha had never been an active critic of the system, though many things about the Soviet Union appalled her. She did not see her country as a threat to the West and was surprised by people’s reactions in Denmark when she told them where she was from. People balked at her accent, avoided interacting with her. She was turned down when applying for jobs. She remained aware that no one in Denmark—besides me—had asked her to go there, and for that reason, she never blamed society for it or complained about discrimination. But she felt Denmark was rejecting her. Even now, some 30 years later, with her firm command of the language, two Danish children, friends and family, and a Danish passport to boot, Natasha does not feel herself to be Danish.

  I think that feeling has to do with the way we are in Denmark. Being Danish is about the way you look, what you eat, how you dress, the way you talk, how you interact with other people. It’s how we recognize each other. All those things will gradually change, I’m sure, and I feel they are changing already. Danish people are not more xenophobic or more skeptical of outsiders than anyone else. But they will need time to get used to the idea that you can be Danish even if your skin is a different color, you speak with an accent, and you wear unusual clothes.

  Neither Natasha nor I ever thought much about the ideological war that separated our countries. That became visible, however, whenever we visited her parents. Her father, Vasily Ivanovich Salnikov, was devoutly Stalinist. Passions often ran high when we discussed the news on TV or as we drove through the stunning beauty of the Caucasus or jogged around the track at the local athletic club. But he was also a warm, sensitive, and intelligent man who wrote love poems to my mother-in-law, taught children at an orphanage, and selflessly engaged in volunteer work for veterans of World War II.

  Our relationship was a test of tolerance, and it taught me that pigeonholing people according to one identity—communist, Muslim, atheist, whatever—is simplistic. We all possess many identities. I was extremely fond of my father-in-law. We spent many enjoyable times together. I like
to think he felt the same way, even though it must have been extremely difficult for him, having grown up in Stalin’s Soviet Union, exposed to daily doses of propaganda about the enemy in the West, to accept a son-in-law from a capitalist country. I did not care for his religion, Stalinism, and he did not believe that Russia was mature enough for democracy, though in his later days, he found some benefit to the market economy. In the end, our mutual disapproval of each other’s ideas no longer prevented us from seeing the individual behind them.

  Things go wrong when people have identities forced on them. That is true whether we’re talking about the Soviet Union and its imperative of communist ideology, or of Muslim societies that hold that no person born a Muslim can ever be allowed to leave Islam. Things go wrong too when immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Islamic world are pigeonholed as Muslims, even though some may be agnostic or atheist, and many clearly wish to highlight other aspects of their identity.

  The story of John Calvin’s confrontation with Michael Servetus points to some of our current threats to free speech and freedom of religion. That is hardly surprising. To legitimize one’s wish to censor speech one doesn’t like, or that one considers being a threat to society, it is convenient to claim justification from an ideology, a religion, a nation, or other higher idea. If your enemies can be said to have violated something sacred, then your chances of winning support among the population are greatly enhanced.

  In modern-day Europe, a number of conceptions of tolerance compete. One model takes as its point of departure the individual and his inalienable rights at birth, among them free speech and freedom of religion. Other citizens and the state itself are obliged to tolerate the individual’s exercise of those rights, even if they disapprove of them. You can believe or not; you can leave your faith, convert, and proselytize to others. You can shop from faith to faith, and if none is satisfactory, you can start your own. People are free to criticize and to believe what they want about their own religions and those of others. Faith is voluntary.

  In liberal democracies, rights are possessed by the individual. But citizens may belong to religious, ethnic, or cultural minorities also tolerated by the society as groups, even when such groups subscribe to ideas at odds with the values of the liberal democracy. Communist parties and other revolutionary groups of the left were tolerated in Western Europe during the Cold War, even though they fought to undermine the rule of law and abolish democracy. Today, liberal democracy is tolerant of Islamists who work for the introduction of a strict Islamic state; and Denmark has no law against Nazi parties. As long as anti-democratic movements merely argue their case in words, the state will not interfere to stop them.

  In liberal democracies, groups have no right to exercise power over their members, other than the right to expel them. If a member of a religious minority wishes to leave the group or fails to obey its rules, the group may not impose other punishments; if it seeks to do so, the nationstate is obliged to step in to ensure respect for the individual’s rights. Michael Walzer maps it out in his 1997 book On Toleration.7 Although the state may be less tolerant of groups than of individuals, it may force groups to be more tolerant of individuals. That is because in the nation-state, the group is a voluntary association. Sects that constrain the liberties of their members will attract few members in an open society, and the more radical they become, the fewer they will be able to recruit. In the liberal nation-state, Walzer says, the majority tolerates cultural and religious differences in the same way that government tolerates political opposition, that is, by establishing a system that by independent courts may effectively ensure the civil rights of the individual.

  A second model of tolerance has most notably been practiced by multinational empires in which different ethnic and religious groups coexisted, though it has now also found its way into European multicultural society of the 21st century. Groups exercise a certain degree of self-determination and self-justice, from time to time gaining the consent of the authorities to employ parallel systems of justice. The object of tolerance is the group rather than the individual. That was the state of affairs in the Ottoman Empire, in India under British rule, in ancient Persia and Egypt, and elements of it exist today in modern Britain, where the state in some cases has an approach to minorities that is similar to the British Empire’s attitude in India.

  For instance, until 1829, the British did not prohibit traditional self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, and they did so then only with reluctance, wishing to interfere as little as possible in local custom. In Britain today, minorities are often treated as collectives rather than individuals. Self-proclaimed spokespeople without democratic mandate may approach the authorities, make demands, negotiate, and enter into agreement with them on the group’s behalf. Individuals whose opinions are considered deviant by the group may find themselves squeezed out of the equation. According to a Swedish government report, a number of women from the Middle East now living in Malmö have stated that they enjoy fewer freedoms in their Swedish public housing blocks than in their homelands, because Muslim “thought police” demand they cover in public and consistently strive to constrain their liberties.8 In some areas of Great Britain, Sharia courts have been established to deprive women of rights guaranteed by British law.9 Thus, some individuals are unable to enjoy the tolerance accorded by the liberal democracy to its citizens, since the group prevents them from doing so. That model may increasingly prevail elsewhere in Europe, in neighborhoods where the state fails to exercise its sovereignty.

  Those two approaches generate very different societies. The first, liberal model furthers a religious melting pot in which loyalties and identities are changeable. People of different faiths mix with and influence another. Individuals are not bound by their affiliation to any group but are free to determine the role faith plays in their lives. Citizenship transcends religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. Any group into which the individual is born may be left at any time. The second model furthers a society in which groups are walled off from one another, allowing no movement between them. Each group establishes its own parallel society of schools, nursing homes, laws, customs, associations, and authorities.

  The future of Europe depends to a certain extent on the way in which we practice tolerance. Are we to be tolerant of the individual or of the group? Whose rights are to be held highest? Under pressure from increasing diversity, the institutions of the nation-state face a dilemma.

  One path consists of deferring to the group’s self-esteem, accepting that only the group has the right to speak critically of itself, while others who do so are called intolerant. In that case, freedom of speech is not a duty to speak; it involves refraining from saying anything critical of, or offensive to, another group. That form of “tolerance” closes its eyes to intolerance of individuals within the minority group, because to draw attention to that intolerance would be “racist.” Individuals are walled in to their groups, which exist apart from others. That, to me, is anathema. It is the kind of society I would hope my children will never have to live in, not least because they are the product of Natasha and my meeting and joining together despite belonging to very different groups.

  A second path for adapting to the multicultural reality of Europe today is to build on the American model of tolerance. Walzer calls it the model of the immigrant society.10 Tolerance is of the individual rather than the group, and it is more radical than what is practiced in the nation state. In the immigrant society, the state is not committed to one group over any other; it is neutral. All speech, even racist speech, is protected, so long as it does not imminently incite violence. Government is not an arbiter of taste, and citizens of the society must learn to tolerate one another as individuals, even within the group. Tolerance is of the individual’s personalized version of religion, culture, or ethnic affiliation rather than the religion, culture, or ethnic group itself. Thus, individual group members are obliged to be tolerant of other members�
� idiosyncratic versions of their shared religion. That tolerance entails a kind of individual freedom that I personally find appealing, though I acknowledge that groups and communities less tolerant toward the individual may be crucial for society’s continued cohesion.

  More than 450 years have passed since Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva. Since then, the West has seen wars of religion, world wars, and bloody revolutions, but also progress in science and the establishment of democratic institutions. It has engendered unique prosperity and ensured individual rights and freedoms that make its open societies attractive to immigrants striving for a better life. A culmination came with the triumph of freedom in 1989, when socialist dictatorships collapsed in the East. A new and free Europe began to emerge.

  In 1989, many in the West, myself included, were under the illusion that the ideas and values that had eventually developed from the dispute over religious tolerance had won a conclusive victory. The world may perhaps not have been approaching “the end of history” as Francis Fukuyama put it, but it was hard to see what kinds of ideas and values could challenge the West and the values that had won the Cold War.11 In 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush succeeded in mobilizing the world community into supporting some of those principles when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Giddy in the moment, Bush and Western media spoke of a new world order based on the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.