OPINION:
Cars, computers, technology, aircraft and oil — as a nation, we export so many things that are critical to life. Our most important exports, however, are our values.
But intolerance, amplified by our caustic digital culture, has made protecting religious liberty at home more challenging.
The incoming Trump administration can help quell domestic forces seeking to attack our first freedom.
President-elect Donald Trump’s commitment to dismantling government censorship and cancel culture provides this country with the moral footing to reinforce religious freedom again at home and around the world.
Our founders understood the importance of religious liberty to the fabric of the republic. Religious liberty is the bedrock upon which free speech and the Bill of Rights are built. Without the ability to worship God as you see fit, without fear of oppression from the state, true free speech simply cannot exist.
In recent times, a culture of fear has been driven by powerful voices in media, Hollywood and the left-wing political ecosystem, as well as the shadowy work of the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy. In the last five years, Americans have been horrified by the demonizing and ridiculing of people of faith. It goes far beyond the FBI’s covert efforts to infiltrate and monitor Catholic parishes.
The Biden administration and left-wing governors openly and notoriously attempted to eviscerate the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Americans to force them, under penalty of losing their livelihoods, to take the COVID-19 jabs that the government knew did not prevent transmission or infection.
Pro-life demonstrators have received harsher punishments, including years in jail, for blocking abortion centers, while Black Lives Matters rioters have walked free.
Antisemitic demonstrations have been tolerated on hundreds of college campuses. Hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed.
The Associated Press recently ran a story based on comments from one source suggesting that Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, should be considered “alt-right” or an “insider threat” because of his tattoos of the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult” (Latin for “God wills it”).
The AP, perhaps not surprisingly, didn’t include any sources to rebut claims that those symbols connote White supremacy.
For nearly a thousand years, the Jerusalem Cross has symbolized the five wounds of Christ or, alternatively, the four evangelists and Christ himself. It is also a symbol of the Holy Land and worn by the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a lay order of knighthood under the protection of the pope. “Deus Vult” or “Deus lo Vult” is also an ancient motto of the order and associated with protection of the people and places of the greater Holy Land.
It’s just another example of the pervasiveness and normalization of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic bigotry.
The domestic situation may be perilous, but the global state of religious liberty, in the absence of U.S. leadership, is even more troubling. According to the Religious Freedom Institute, in three of the last four years, during the Biden administration, the number of nations where there is negative trajectory in terms of religious liberty has increased year over year, while those improving have consistently decreased.
Antisemitic protests, riots and attacks have dramatically increased globally since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. According to Open Doors, more than 365 million Christians in the world, or 1 in 7, face high levels of religious persecution. The human cost of attacks by Muslims against other factions within their own religion is incalculable.
In China, it is illegal for children under 18 to attend church; government registration for worship is required, and digital persecution is widespread as a component of the country’s social credit system. Churches are monitored and can be shut down without warning.
Religious intolerance globally matters because it has historically been a companion to democide and other aspects of the societal collapse that help breed authoritarianism. Integrating religious liberty benchmarks into our diplomacy is critical to global stability.
The incoming Trump administration’s recommitment to religious liberty at home and abroad will provide assurance not only to Americans but also to billions around the world that this cornerstone of free and advanced societies is not fading but rather affirmed.
Advancing religious freedom isn’t about military or diplomatic adventurism. It recognizes the indisputable truth that more tolerant societies are freer, more peaceful and more resistant to communism and authoritarianism, a growing global calamity.
Leftists in America have a perverted view of freedom and religion, consistently espousing that we should be free from religion. If we do that, we shall neither enjoy freedom nor religion. Getting the border under control, cutting taxes and reducing the deficit are all critically important goals for President-elect Trump.
We should pray, however, that our first freedom again be revered, celebrated and exported as well.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV and a columnist for the Washington Times. He holds the rank of knight commander with star in the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
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