Why You Cannot Coerce Religion

“Postliberal” Christians are fantasizing about making Christianity the law of the land: Catholic integralists want to bring back an Emperor under the authority of the Pope. Calvinist reconstructionists would like to see a church with temporal authority. Pentecostal Seven Mountain activists want Christians to rule in the “mountains” of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government so as to bring about Christ’s second coming.

So it’s a good time to think through whether Christianity can take on political power so as to impose its religious and moral teachings on non-believers. That is, whether religion can be coerced.

According to Luther, Christianity cannot be coerced. Not just should not be coerced, but cannot be coerced–it’s impossible.

The issue of religious coercion is currently being debated by Muslims. In Islam, this is not merely theoretical, as it mostly is for American Christians who have no path forward in gaining control of an increasingly secular nation. Islam does exercise power to one degree or another over 46 countries with 1.5 billion people, and Islam is openly coercive–requiring adherence and punishing deviations.

Some Muslims, though, are questioning this application of their religion. It turns out, there is a verse in the Qur’an that says, “Let there be no compulsion in religion, for the truth stands out clearly from falsehood” (Surah 2:256). Now there are other verses that indicate the opposite, and current coercive practices derive from a long and authoritative tradition based on commentaries to the Qur’an. A new book, though, No Compulsion in Religion ― No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom, edited by the Turkish libertarian Mustafa Akyol, is a collection of essays by Muslims challenging that tradition.

I take no position on the correct Islamic teaching on this matter. Not my religion. But a review of that book by Oxford scholar Jacob Williams in Law & Liberty brings out some interesting insights with broader implications. He writes:

On the teleological side, the contributors show us that religious coercion corrupts the religion and the moral character of both the coercer and his victim. The authorities empowered to coerce tend to embark on an “‘ego trip’ of the self-righteous,” tempted to vice by a dangerous power to regulate the details of other people’s private lives. And the people subject to coercion are unlikely to become pious paragons of virtue, but rather to either resist enforcements that they resent or to performatively go through the external motions of worship while inwardly remaining recalcitrant. Either way, coercion does not produce genuine religiosity or inner striving for the Divine.

Among the contributions, Mohamad Machine-Chian’s remarkable essay on Iran backs up this philosophical speculation with concrete empirical data. The legacy of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution” appears to have been to turn his country into a riddastan, or “land of apostasy”: an astonishing 47 percent of Iranians claim to have no religion in anonymous surveys, while only around a third identify with the regime’s official Shia Islam. Not only has the regime’s coercion failed to produce piety, but it has also actively undermined it by associating religion with the corruption and predations of unchecked power.

So coercion in religion does not make people believe in religion more, though they may pretend to. Rather, coercion makes people believe in religion less. Furthermore, coercion in religion corrupts the religious people doing the coercion.

This is in line with what Luther taught on the subject, though he took it further. For example, here is what he says in his 1523 treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (emphasis mine):

How he believes or disbelieves is a matter for the conscience of each individual, and since this takes nothing away from the temporal authority the latter should be content to attend to its own affairs and let men believe this or that as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force. For faith is a free act, to which no one can be forced. Indeed, it is a work of God in the spirit, not something which outward authority should compel or create. Hence arises the common saying, found also in Augustine, “No one can or ought to be forced to believe.”

Moreover, the blind, wretched fellows fail to see how utterly hopeless and impossible a thing they are attempting. For no matter how harshly they lay down the law, or how violently they rage, they can do no more than force an outward compliance of the mouth and the hand; the heart they cannot compel, though they work themselves to a frazzle. . . .Why do they persist in trying to force people to believe from the heart when they see that it is impossible? In so doing they only compel weak consciences to lie, to disavow, and to utter what is not in their hearts. They thereby load themselves down with dreadful alien sins, for all the lies and false confessions which such weak consciences utter fall back upon him who compels them. Even if their subjects were in error, it would be much easier simply to let them err than to compel them to lie and to utter what is not in their hearts. . . .

Moreover, faith and heresy are never so strong as when men oppose them by sheer force, without God’s word. For men count it certain that such force is for a wrong cause and is directed against the right, since it proceeds without God’s word and knows not how to further its cause except by naked force, as brute beasts do.

Thus, for Luther, coercion in matters of inner convictions is wrong, impossible, and counter-productive. Since faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit, no one can be forced to believe. It follows that heresies, doctrinal errors, and mistaken faiths must be dealt with by the Word, not the Sword.

The most coercion can do is create hypocrites. People who pretend to believe on the outside, but actually on the inside reject and rage against the faith that is being forced upon them. Meanwhile, those doing the coercing and the religious body they represent are not only corrupted by “the ‘ego trip’ of the self-righteous,” turning them into hypocrites too, in the case of Christianity, they do something even worse. They turn Christianity into a religion of law, rather than the gospel. They become fixated on demanding that people be good–which is impossible, given the reality of sin–instead of proclaiming to these sinners the forgiveness won by Jesus Christ.

See also my post The Futility of Coercing or Punishing Belief in which I apply this principle to secular examples, such as government censorship and cancel culture.

Thus far we have been discussing the problem of governments trying to coerce belief, but does this principle apply to the family? Shouldn’t parents coerce their children in the direction of Christianity? Isn’t this how Christian parents fulfill their vocational obligation to form Christian children?

Well, no. It is still impossible to coerce your children into faith. What you can do, though, is have them baptized, teach them God’s Word, show them how to pray, and take them to church. You can even make them go to church. In doing so, you are exposing them to God’s Word, by means of which the Holy Spirit creates faith.

But trying to compel your children to believe–and punishing them if they don’t–simply creates atheists, as so many of their biographies demonstrate. If they don’t believe despite everything you have done for them, you can still pray for them, express your love for them, and bring God’s Word to them as you can. The Holy Spirit creates lots of converts who come to faith later in life.

So if we can’t coerce religion, can we coerce morality? That’s a little more complicated. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. The answer may surprise you.

Illustration: The Spanish Inquisition in The Illustrated Christian Martyrology (1854) by C. Sperry via Picryl, Public Domain