Every history of Unitarianism that I’ve ever encountered has made much of the execution of Miguel Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva. He went to the flames for his ‘heresy’ in disputing the Trinity. This, we are told, is a defining moment, from which Unitarianism takes inspiration, and is key, not just to our history but to our enduring identity and values.
Servetus, a Unitarian martyr, was executed by what we would now call a fundamentalist regime, in which church and state were unhealthily entwined. He is a particularly celebrated Unitarian martyr, but he was not a one off. Long after they stopped torturing and killing our spiritual ancestors, religious and state authorities continued to discriminate against them.
So, Unitarianism is not just about opposing the Trinity, (indeed, for some people this has very little or nothing to do with Unitarianism). Unitarianism is, or rather has hitherto been, about advocating for the freedom to speak, think and express oneself about religion, and fierce opposition to the horrible idea that you can be killed for upsetting someone’s religious beliefs . This experience of persecution by fundamentalists means that ours is not just a freethinking but also a dissenting tradition.
Now, let’s imagine previous generations of Unitarians, those who venerated Servetus, and were themselves persecuted by religious fanatics, coming, via a time machine, into the present day. What might be their reaction to a celebrated author living under a permanent death sentence from a theocratic regime and its supporters?
And what would they make of the deafening silence from progressive intellectuals when he was nearly killed 33 years after the issuing of the fatwa?
And how, once returned to their own time, would they explain to their contemporaries that the Unitarians of the future, whether in the UK or the US, would have so little to say about religious fascists trying to kill a novelist for blasphemy?
Mind you, had they visited the 21st century prior to Friday’s attempt on Rushdie’s life, they might still have been troubled by how the freedom to express yourself, and to differ from orthodoxy, is so little valued by so-called progressives in Western countries.
If they saw this, then stayed around long enough to see the reaction, or rather lack of it, to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, they might well think that the two things were not unconnected. And surely, they’d be shocked to see who it is that is standing up for free speech against religious fanaticism, and depressed as hell to see who isn’t.
Unitarianism has such a diversity of religious belief within it, that it can be hard to say what Unitarianism is. But surely, are we not all of us, outraged by a fundamentalist religious regime sentencing to death an Indian author for writing a novel? Unitarians are not generally shy about their opinions and feelings. So why the terrible silence now?
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