Freedom of religion

• 1. Introduction

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  Freedom of religion sits at the center of some of the most dramatic moments in recorded history. Jan Hus, a Bohemian preacher, was promised safe conduct by the Holy Roman Emperor to attend the Council of Constance in 1414. Not entirely trusting in his safety, he made his will before he left. His forebodings proved accurate. He was burned at the stake on the 6th of July 1415. The questions his story raises have never stopped being urgent: Who decides what a person may believe? What happens to those who refuse to comply? And how did humanity move from burning reformers at the stake to enshrining religious liberty in international law? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Cyrus the Great established the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BC and documented a general policy of permitting religious freedom throughout his territory on the Cyrus Cylinder. He was not alone. In the 3rd century BC, King Piyadasi, known to history as Ashoka the Great, inscribed his commitment to religious tolerance across ancient India in what became the Edicts of Ashoka. One inscription reads: "One must not exalt one's creed discrediting all others, nor must one degrade these others without legitimate reasons. One must, on the contrary, render to other creeds the honour befitting them." Genghis Khan, in the 13th century, enacted a law explicitly guaranteeing religious freedom to everyone and every religion, making him one of the earliest rulers to do so by formal decree. In the classical Mediterranean world, the Romans tolerated most religions, including Judaism, and generally encouraged local subjects to continue worshipping their own gods. The Christian apologist Tertullian was the first known writer to use the phrase "freedom of religion" in Latin, arguing in his Apologeticum that "it is a human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions." The Edict of Milan later guaranteed that freedom across the Roman Empire, until the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 reversed course and outlawed all religions except Christianity.

• 3. Reformation and Its Costs

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  Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church in Wittenberg on the 31st of October 1517, setting off a chain of events that would reshape the religious map of Europe for centuries. His three core propositions were radical for the time: the Bible alone is infallible, every Christian can interpret it, and salvation comes through God's grace alone, not human deeds. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused to recant before Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and was declared a heretic. He was sequestered on the Wartburg, in the possessions of Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, where he translated the New Testament into German. The Reformation spread quickly but not peacefully. Huldrych Zwingli preached reform in Zurich from 1520 to 1523, opposing indulgences, celibacy, pilgrimages, and even church organs, before dying in battle against Catholic cantons in 1531. In France, the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1570 attempted to reconcile the two faiths, but persecution continued. On the 24th of August 1572, thousands of Protestants across France were killed in the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day. It took the conversion and eventual royal ascension of Henry IV to finally impose tolerance through the Edict of Nantes in 1598. That edict remained in force for over 80 years until Louis XIV revoked it in 1685. Permanent legal protection did not come to France until Louis XVI signed the Edict of Versailles in 1787.

• 4. Transylvania's Experiment

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  In 1558, the Hungarian Diet's Edict of Torda declared free practice of both Catholicism and Lutheranism, making it the first legal guarantee of religious freedom in Christian Europe. Calvinism was initially excluded but added as an accepted religion in 1564. Then, in 1568, the same Diet extended freedom to all religions under the chairmanship of King John Sigismund Zápolya, following the teaching of Ferenc Dávid, founder of the Unitarian Church of Transylvania. The Diet's declaration was unambiguous: "It is not allowed to anybody to intimidate anybody with captivity or expelling for his religion." Four religions were formally named as accepted, with legal representation in the Diet: Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism. Other groups, including Orthodox Christians, Sabbatarians, and Anabaptists, were classified as tolerated churches. They held no legislative power but faced no persecution. For several decades, Transylvania stood as the only place in Europe where that many faiths coexisted without institutional violence. The experiment had a deadline. This relative freedom ended for some communities in 1638, when Sabbatarians began to be persecuted. After the Habsburg conquest in 1691, the Hutterite Anabaptists, who had found a safe haven in Transylvania in 1621, were ultimately forced to convert or leave, migrating through Wallachia, then Russia, and finally to the United States.

• 5. The American Struggle

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  In 1660, an English Quaker named Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts for repeatedly defying a Puritan law that banned Quakers from the colony. She was one of four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs. The Puritans of Massachusetts enforced religious conformity through branding, whipping, and the hangman's noose, tools that were, by some accounts, more rigorous than anything imposed on Puritans back in England. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting Jesuit Roman Catholic priests from entering Puritan territory; a second offense carried the death penalty. Christmas observance was outlawed in Boston in 1659. The ban was revoked by an English-appointed governor in 1681, but celebrating Christmas did not become common in the Boston region until the mid-19th century. Against this backdrop, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island in 1636 as a refuge from persecution. William Penn's Pennsylvania, founded in 1682, became the only colony that retained unlimited religious freedom all the way to the foundation of the United States in 1776. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, proclaiming that no man shall be compelled to attend or financially support any religious worship, nor suffer for his religious opinions. Those sentiments found their permanent legal form in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which bars Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, signed by President Bill Clinton on the 27th of October, established a commission to investigate the religious freedom records of over 200 nations.

• 6. Where the Law Meets Belief

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  In 1993, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, upholding the right of Santeria adherents to practice ritual animal sacrifice. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection. The same year, the UN's human rights committee clarified that Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects not only religious belief but also non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, and explicitly bars signatories from using physical force or penal sanctions to compel anyone to recant or convert. Yet the distance between legal principle and lived reality has always been wide. The Pew Research Center tracked global data between 2009 and 2022 and found that in 2009, nearly 70 percent of the world's population lived in countries classified as having heavy restrictions on freedom of religion. In 178 countries, religious groups must register with the government. In 75 countries, governments limit efforts to proselytize. Topping Pew's 2022 government restrictions index were Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, China, Egypt, Burma, Maldives, and Malaysia. In Egypt, a judgment of the Supreme Constitutional Court on the 16th of December 2006 created a strict legal demarcation that left members of the Bahai faith unable to obtain identity cards, birth certificates, marriage certificates, or passports, effectively stripping them of the rights of citizenship.

• 7. The Right Not to Believe

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  In 2012, five organizations including the American Humanist Association, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and Humanists International joined to produce a joint report on discrimination against atheists, humanists, and the non-religious. By December of that year, Humanists International had expanded it into a global report now called the Freedom of Thought Report, which examines every country in the world for its record on upholding equality for non-religious people. Freedom from religion, the right not to practice or profess any religion, is considered a core element of religious liberty. Germany addresses this from a specific angle through the concept of "religious maturity," which grants children aged 14 and older the unrestricted right to enter or leave any religious community, with similar laws in Austria and Switzerland. The United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief on the 25th of November 1981, explicitly recognizing freedom of religion as a fundamental human right. Yet the French philosopher Voltaire had already made the practical case for pluralism in 1733, in his book on English society. Writing about the Royal Exchange in London, he observed that there the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian transact together as though they profess the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. Where many faiths coexist, he argued, they all live happy and in peace.