What's Not Wrong With the Williamsburg Charter

Extract

“[T]he chief menace to religious liberty today is the expanding power of government control over personal behavior and the institutions of society, when the government acts not so much in deliberate hostility to, but in reckless disregard of, communal belief and personal conscience.”

— The Williamsburg Charter

The odd title I chose for this article may betray a feeling of defensiveness about the Charter. “What's right with the Charter” might imply that much about it isn't right. “What's wrong with the Charter” would surely imply that it's totally bad. My title is meant to point to criticisms which have been leveled against the Charter and to say that, whatever its faults may be, those are not the things which are wrong with it. My title leaves the implication that the Charter isn't perfect. It is not. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to take up the ill-founded attacks on the Charter which caused some very good people to decline to sign it.

In order both to appreciate the great quality of the Charter and to see its limitations, it is important to understand that because of the religious and philosophic diversity of its drafters, it could only go so far in achieving agreement on issues of religious liberty. It did not even attempt to explore certain finite controversies such as the Adolescent Pregnancy Act, protection of religious freedom in the public schools, government aid to parents of religious school children, the “equal access” issue, religious tax exemption, or refusal of the Amish to use state-prescribed slow-moving vehicle signs. Second, it contains, in places, language that some would prefer to see altered or omitted, or there are omissions where some would like to supply text.