RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

María Palco, Lorena García, Paula Ballester and Ester Luque

The religion in the USA and in the United Kingdom is characterized by a great diversity of beliefs and religious practices. The majority of American and English people in these countries say that religion plays an important role in their lives. Almost all the worldwide religions are living together in these nations.

The official religion in Britain is Christianity and it is practised by the Anglican Church. Followers of this branch are known as Protestants and make up the majority of the population.

However, in the USA doesn’t exist an official religion because of the diversity. Moreover, in the Constitution we can clearly see the separation between Church and State, the respect for every religion living there and the guarantee of liberty related to the worship and beliefs.

Even though the Constitution has those ideas, we can see that the conflicts between religious beliefs still remain. But this is a problem that we could also find throughout history.

We can notice that the issue of religion is so closely related to politics. Politicians of these countries frequently speak about their religion beliefs when they are electioneering. They always say what people want to hear, nevertheless they never solve the problems.

In the past, in both countries, there did not exist any type of religious freedom.

In the 16th century there were a big number of attacks against the religious freedom in England. It's curious to know that this nation, which is now considered like a model of tolerance, and that has a glorious history in its fight as the defense of freedom, was the scene of terrible pursuit of the mere fact of having a different faith.

In 1534 the Act of Supremacy was promulgated for which the British crown was declared "the only supreme head of the Church in England" instead of the Pope.  Any act of alliance with the Pope was considered to be treason. A few objected to this law, but people who were against of this Act were executed in 1535.

In 1553, Queen Mary I of England reigned in this country. During her reign, Mary was named "Bloody Mary" because she had burned more than 300 persons at the stake for heresy. Among them was the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Nowadays, in the United Kingdom, the British monarch is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and 26 bishops sit in the upper house of government, the House of Lords. This fact doesn't seem correct to us because a bishop or one representative of a religion cannot occupy a place  in the government.

In America, President Obama declared: “This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.”

With this speech, he wanted to pay homage to the vision that politicians and preachers have extolled about the religious tolerance for more than two centuries.

However, it is not completely true because even if America has always been a country which receives lots of immigrants, there were conflicts that demonstrate that it is not a country with religious freedom, such as the revolution in which people established different religions in the thirteen colonies. They wanted to defend this variety. Other examples of conflicts were the Early Religious Persecution and the Mormon war, where people have suffered from persecutions and other physical damages just because they didn’t accept other religious that theirs.

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