TURKEY - Religious freedom: keeper of the peace

Massive violence in the streets of Cairo on Oct. 9 resulted in sectarian clashes in which some 26 Coptic Christians died. Egyptian authorities have claimed that some Christians fired upon and killed police. Sorting out who did what may prove a never-ending endeavor, but one lesson in particular now looms: Unless religious communities believe that their rights are secure, then change in Egypt and elsewhere seems destined to encourage sectarian strife.

It is therefore important that, in her commentary on Turkey in the Oct. 9 edition of The Times-Dispatch, Neslihan Cevik notes that believers in that country "use both Islamic law and the U.N. Human Rights Convention to promote civil rights." Turkey's moderate Islamic leadership recently settled some longstanding disputes with Christian and other religious minorities who had been denied access to communal property and the kind of legal recognition they need.

Many eyes are trained on Turkey these days, in large measure because of its evolving foreign policy and efforts to widen Turkish influence in the Middle East. Its downgrading of relations with Israel has also caught the world's attention.

What is important in Cevik's piece, however, is her focus on rights — civil and human. That Turks make appeal to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is both salutary and reassuring. For the First Freedom Center, which advances the fundamental human rights of freedom of religion and conscience in the tradition of Jefferson's 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Turkish support for and interest in the Declaration is welcome. We also highly appreciate the Turkish government's actions on behalf of Turkey's ancient religious minorities. The First Freedom Center monitors closely the circumstances of minority communities around the world.

Too often, Americans forget how interwoven religious freedom has been with our own origins and our own culture of rights. In the years before the American Revolution, Virginians and other colonists came to fear that the catalog of rights that they construed as being inherent in their status as British subjects was under conspiratorial attack in Parliament and in the king's administration. If property and ports were at risk, they reasoned, so must be freedoms of the press and of religion. When, in 1774, the First Continental Congress approved an "association" on behalf of boycotting British goods, colonists from north to south created countless committees to administer and police that boycott. Historians have pointed both to the patriotism and ingenuity of these first revolutionary governing bodies and, at the same time, to their severe and, on occasion, violent stamping out of political dissent, which, for ill or good, began driving crown sympathizers, including not a few Anglicans, either into silence or into exile. That only slightly more than a decade thereafter Virginians should be drafting laws on the rights of believers and non-believers is therefore reassuring.

That result was, however, far from automatic. Homegrown hero Patrick Henry, for example, opposed Jefferson's view that there should be no established religion in Virginia. Henry derided Jefferson's religious freedom bill as "unnecessary" and "dangerous," likely to allow "the legislature of Virginia to be held and administered by men professionally atheists, Mohametans, or any other creed, however unfriendly to liberty or to the morals of a free country."

We are fortunate that, down through our history, the culture of rights, including those protecting the individual human conscience, has deepened and strengthened. The 1948 Universal Declaration and the several other United Nations instruments anchoring religious rights, among others, as universal norms both derive from our own and other cultures' historic experiences and strengthen further our rights here at home. We should, as Virginians, take pride in the contributions we have made to this global heritage, but we should remain vigilant both at home and abroad. The use of local ordinances and state statutes to limit the rights of Islamic-American communities to build houses of worship can weaken the rights of all. In the wider world, oppression of religious minorities, of individual believers and of individual non-believers is all too rife. Much of the world follows with shocked opprobrium the threat of Iranian authorities to kill Youcef Nadarkhani for the capital offense of "apostasy," or conversion (during his childhood) from Islam to Christianity. It follows both the advance of human freedom in the Arab Spring and, with it, the growing prospect for violence among religious communities and for rank anti-Semitism.

In a changing world, and amid the many changes in our own culture, we should all be very glad for our own and for others' continuing focus on rights. For the First Freedom Center, which joins many partner organizations in encouraging respect among diversity, there can be no meaningful respect without the according of rights. Mr. Jefferson understood that only too well when he and his supporters secured passage of the Virginia Statute in a humble, provisional building at the corner of 14th and Cary.