Religious Freedom as the Cornerstone of the Western World

This lecture event is part of the 11th Annual Kościuszko Chair Spring Symposium in honor of Lady Blanka Rosenstiel sponsored by the Kościuszko Chair in Polish Studies and the Center for Intermarium studies. Lady Blanka Rosenstiel and the American Institute of Polish Culture (AIPC) established the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies at IWP in 2008. The Kościuszko Chair serves as a center for Polish Studies in the broadest sense, including learning, teaching, researching, and writing about Poland's culture, history, heritage, religion, government, economy, and successes in the arts, sciences, and letters, with special emphasis on the achievements of Polish civilization and its relation to other nations, particularly the United States. We remain grateful for Lady Blanka’s leadership in founding this Chair at IWP. About the lecture: Today's crisis in Europe and the Western world is, above all, a religious crisis. We live nowadays in times of unusually fierce religious intensification. It holds not only to Islam; instead to various contemporary ideologies and social movements, which religious or quasi-religious characters can be seen easily in their missionary zeal. In Europe and also America, a religious war takes place - a war of life and death. It is not a conflict between religious and non-religious people, but a clash of Christianity – or rather, what remains of it – and Neopaganism. Rivalry with Islam is here of secondary significance. A question arises concerning the proper shape of the political order: is it at all possible for individuals and communities, differing in religion – and if so, then how – to live together in peace and harmony within the framework of one political organism? The proper answer was brought to the world by Christianity: the common life of different communities will be possible if we reject the program of forceful conversion, guaranteeing everybody the right to religious freedom instead. Here religious freedom is understood as freedom to practice one's religion, openly express one'