Freedom is far from a simple thing

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Jan. 17, 2007. Jack made many trips to former Soviet republics to lead seminars on journalism and the free press. This column illustrates well the challenges that were, and are, faced in countries where freedoms like those enshrined in our First Amendment are not tolerated.

Tamuna still probably wouldn’t understand.

I’ve thought about our conversation for more than six years now, and I still don’t think I could have won the argument.

It was the fall of 2000, and I was working on a project in the republic of Georgia for the International Center for Journalists. Tamuna had been interpreting for me, and as the project wound down I invited her to dinner.

We ended up at a little place in old Tbilisi near the puppet theater.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to some of the newspapers I’d been working with.

One of my favorites was a paper with a name that translates as Resonance. Malkhaz Ramishvili, the editor and publisher, had become a good friend.

One of the reasons I admired the paper was its tough stand when it came to reporting unpleasant news. It had, for example, reported extensively on the activities of a rogue priest who had been defrocked by the Georgian Orthodox Church. The priest had made it his life’s mission to harass, threaten, intimidate, and persecute the handful of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Georgia.

Ramishvili’s paper had also editorialized against the rogue priest and called for greater religious tolerance in the country.

For that, the newspaper had made itself a target. Supporters of the intolerant former priest had staged demonstrations in front of the paper’s offices, chaining the doors closed, and spraying the building with anti-Resonance graffiti.

I was impressed by the newspaper’s stand and mentioned as much to Tamuna.

She surprised me with a shrug, then surprised me further when she said she thought the rogue priest had a point.

Now this is a young woman with an excellent education. She’d studied for a year in the U.S. and had a good appreciation of Western values.

But she wasn’t about to be tolerant of other religions in her native country.

“We have a church,” she told me. Georgia had been a Christian nation for hundreds of years. It was only during the Soviet era that people couldn’t practice their religion. “We have a church,” she repeated. “We don’t need any others.”

My pleas for tolerance, free will, and pluralism bounced off completely.

When I got back to Indiana, I ran into Keith Pepple, an old friend and a local Jehovah’s Witness. He had been following news of harassment of Witnesses in the former Soviet Union and was curious what I had run into.

I’m not sure whether I mentioned my conversation with Tamuna to Keith at the time, but it came up this month when a Witness missionary was passing through Jay County.

Keith brought Tom McFarland by my office for a visit because our paths had sometimes intertwined. While I’ve been something of a free press missionary, McFarland has been carrying his religious message abroad.

Most of us, if we think of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at all, think of them as an occasional nuisance, the folks who knock at the door when you’re watching the football game on TV.

But historically, the Witnesses have been among the most persecuted and harassed religious followers in history. When millions of Jews were sent to the gas chambers of the Holocaust, Jehovah’s Witnesses were at their side.

Today, the religion is illegal in some countries and barely tolerated in others. In some, like Georgia and Armenia, its followers are routinely subjected to everything from petty harassment to physical violence.

So I told Tom McFarland about my conversation with Tamuna.

“What should I have told her?” I asked.

His answer echoed my own arguments that night more than six years ago.

The problem, he said, begins when you start making religious decisions for everyone. Each individual must have the right to follow his or her path to truth. Religious liberty can be a messy thing, but it always beats the alternative.

I found myself nodding in agreement as he spoke. I had made the same arguments.

“I wish you’d been there,” I said. “You might have had more luck convincing her. But I’m not sure you would have changed her mind.”

Freedom, it seems, is a pretty complicated thing.