Religious Freedom In The Ecumenical Movement

A core conception of modern church-state relationship, religious freedom originated from the Reformation period. It thus developed through the French Revolution, and was established in the Constitution of US. Under the influence of colonialism and imperialism, it became the model of nation-states after the Second World War. And the United Nations as a new international mechanism together with various NGOs make religious freedom a universal right in a global era. However, the“International Religious Freedom Act” signed by President Clinton in 1998, also put religious freedom in the field of foreign affairs, especially with the following emergence of new rightists. While religious freedom as a popular term in the current world, its Christian background is neglected to great extent.If the Reformation started the discussion of religious freedom, the Ecumenical Movement pushed its realization in the modern world. The World Council of Churches(WCC) and the Second Vatican Council(VaticanⅡ) are two distinguished examples of the 20 th century. They promoted religious freedom respectively among the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, with common and differing ideas. Due to its British-American context, WCC does not recognize religious freedom as an internal matter related to God, rather as an external one connected with social rights.So it promotes religious freedom in terms of its social meaning, including “freedom of conscience” and mixed religious freedom. The Roman Catholic Church is a later comer regarding this issue, with its particular historical and contextual background.It is more conservative, focusing on freedom of conscience itself, which is from God and exempt from human intervention.These two cases are both important for the development of religious freedom in the modern world. Through historical survey and case analysis, we can see, religious freedom is at first an issue among the churches, and then extended to the wider society. Religious freedom as a basic human right, it should be understood from the context of church politics, though it also has a broader social meaning.