By Bill Leonard
On Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, the terrorists who call themselves an Islamic State released a lurid video showing the decapitation of 21 Egyptian laborers working in Libya. Taken hostage in January, largely because they were Coptic Christians, their execution was couched in the language of medieval apocalypticism.
Labeling their horrendous act “a message signed in blood to the people of the cross,” the fanatics promised further vengeance on the “hostile Egyptian Church,” along with a final confrontation with “Rome.” Denouncing the Copts as “crusaders,” they claimed the deaths were a response to supposed mistreatment of an alleged convert to Islam who was the spouse of a Coptic priest.
The Coptic Orthodox Church, the largest Christian community in the Middle East, traces its origins to the Gospel writer Mark, the founder of Egyptian Christianity. Copts cite the early leaders of the church in Alexandria — Clement, Origen, Athanasius — as their theological forebears. Their distinct identity dates from the Council of Chalcedon (451) and disputes over the nature of Christ. Although accused of believing that Christ had only one nature — divine — Copts insist that Jesus was both God and man, a union “without mingling, without confusion, and without alteration.” A powerful minority in Egyptian society, the Copts have experienced alternating periods of cultural privilege and persecution, often due to shifts in Egyptian politics. Church leaders charged that if the Coptic laborers had been Muslim, the Egyptian government would have worked more intently toward their release.
These days, the struggle for and absence of religious freedom seems unrelenting across the globe, no less so now than in history. Amid massacres of Copts, Muslims, Yazidis and other religionists and a rising anti-Semitism worldwide, insights from certain 17th-century Baptists seem surprisingly relevant. Although a minority voice, they audaciously demanded an end to violence laced with religious rhetoric, affirming the power of religious liberty in a society where there was none.
These Baptists anchored their pleas for religious freedom in the significance of uncoerced faith. In his 1614 treatise titled Religion’s Peace: Or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, English Baptist Leonard Busher wrote: “Therefore may it please your majesty and parliament to understand that, by fire and sword, to constrain princes and peoples to receive that one true religion of the gospel, is wholly against the mind and merciful law of Christ.” Busher concluded that “no king nor bishop can, or is able to command faith; That is the gift of God, who worketh in us both the will and the deed of his own pleasure.” Thus persecuting individuals “to death, because they will not hear and believe, is no gaining of souls unto God, but unto the devil.” Faith, no matter how intense or culture-privileged, cannot be coerced.
Busher insisted that if the religious persecutors were not “ashamed of their faith,” they would reject any attempt to compel others to believe, “but would use only the assistance of God’s word and Spirit, and therewith suffer their faith and doctrine to be examined, proved, and disputed, both by word and writing.” Religious pluralism would strengthen, not weaken, genuine faith. The mystery of how Busher and other Baptists could see that when most in their “Christian” society did not, lingers.
Busher noted: “I read that a bishop of Rome would have constrained a Turkish emperor to the Christian faith, unto whom the emperor answered, ‘I believe that Christ was an excellent prophet, but he did never, so far as I understand, command that men should, with the power of weapons, be constrained to believe his law; and verily I also do force no man to believe Mahomet’s law.’ Also I read that Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople, and yet are peaceable, though so contrary the one to the other.” Busher asked: “And how much more ought Christians to tolerate Christians, when as the Turks do tolerate them?” It was “monstrous,” he said, “for one Christian to vex and destroy another for difference and questions of religion;” a seeming anachronism in light of 21st-century events.
Busher’s warnings were directed less at Islam or unbelievers than at the Christians of his day, in a society where religious harassment was normative. Church leaders, he said, should understand, “that it is preaching, and not persecuting, that getteth people to the church of Christ.” Religious oppression in any era, Busher believed, is actually “to force and constrain men and women’s consciences to a religion against their wills, [and] to tyrannize over the soul, as well as over the body.” He insisted Christian persecutors were “crueler and greater tyrants than the Turks, who, though they force the bodies of strangers to slavery and bondage, yet they let the consciences go free, yea, to Christians that are so contrary to them in religion.”
Busher concluded that “it is not the gallows, nor the prisons, nor burning, nor banishing that can defend the … faith,” but only “the word and Spirit of God.” Would that contemporary Muslims might ponder Leonard Busher’s wise and liberating words. Would that contemporary Christians might never forget the trauma in which those words were born.