What might religious liberty mean to a Sikh citizen of the American republic? What could a GurSikh understanding of religious liberty contribute to the American project of self-government? I raise these questions four centuries since Gurū Tegh Bahadur’s birth and 230 years after the First Amendment was ratified. To take the first question first, it seems to me that a state of perfect religious liberty for an American Sikh would obtain if and only if complete observance of a GurSikh life does not preclude full participation as an American citizen. I believe this criterion may be satisfied in principle and that it is achievable in practice. Most visibly, this would require complete accommodation of the kēs, dastār, and kirpān that initiated Sikhs are required to maintain on their person at all times. As tangible expressions of the Khālsā’s spirit, they reflect, reinforce, and redound to the realization of a GurSikh’s purpose.
The aim of religious liberty is the unencumbered practice of religion, and the aim of religion is the perfection of the human essence. Since its highest perfection—ultimately attainable only through grace—is the realization of the wondrous One, religious liberty in its most fundamental sense aims at humanity’s most exalted vocation. The Fearless One calls us beyond fear, the Hateless beyond hate, the Deathless beyond death. Gurū Nanak and his nine successors showed their Sikhs how to emancipate the mind and attain union with the originary fount of all existence. Amidst the spiritual inanition and societal tyranny of early modern India, Gurū Nanak proclaimed that humanity’s calling to know this One is fundamental, thus superseding the differences of the embattled Hindu and Muslim elites. Over the course of four major journeys studded with the great centers of worldly power, spiritual devotion, and intellectual exchange across South Asia and the Middle East, Gurū Nanak enjoined humanity in revelatory verse—accompanied by his Muslim disciple, Bhāī Mardana, and by Bhāī Mardana on the rabāb—to contemplate the Knower of Hearts with every breath, to earn one’s livelihood with integrity, and to generously serve anyone in need.
Within a diverse society, the mutual toleration of religious difference is necessary if members of all faiths are to enjoy religious liberty. Yet apparent differences among neighbors on matters of salvific import can vitiate individual belief by making conceivable the possibility that one might believe otherwise than one does. One might reasonably counter that faith, like knowledge, is kept healthy through frequent consideration of the grounds of one’s belief. Diversity indeed provides this impetus, and similar arguments from epistemic utility are to be found in the writings of thinkers as venerable and varied as Plato, Milton, and John Stuart Mill. Accepting this conclusion, I further believe GurSikh tradition offers a still more fundamental reason for embracing religious difference. Gurū Nanak rejected religious exclusivism and the imperative to convert others, recognizing both Indic and Semitic traditions—faithfully practiced—as capable of ferrying souls back to the One Maker by whose pleasure they exist.
This is not to trivialize the doctrinal differences between traditions, but to affirm the fundamentality of religion’s mystical essence. At its core, GurSikhī is not an ancestral law commanding obedience or a system of propositions tied to historical events and future prophecies. It is a perennially available path to mystical perfection. The ground of GurSikh belief—in the final analysis—is the experience that the songs of the Gurūs are true, that union is indeed wondrous! The teachings of the Gurūs, GurSikh history, and the inclusion of hymns by Hindu and Muslim mystics in Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib underscores the truth that such illumination is in principle accessible to any human soul regardless of the value the world assigns to its vessel. No language owns a monopoly on revelation. Men and women stand in spiritual equality before their Maker. Birth, affluence, and social position are of no spiritual consequence. A person’s religious profession and the subset of the myriad names by which they happen to adore the Knower of Hearts guarantees nothing absent a pure soul.
Even if the soul may attain its highest end under all external circumstances, this does not entail indifference to the external conditions of humanity. The ethos of GurSikh principles and institutions vindicates societal meliorism over quietist fatalism. For instance, the Sikh commitment to sevā is visible in the institution of langar—the community kitchen and celebration of equality founded by Gurū Nanak—that daily serves volunteer-prepared meals, completely free-of-charge, to thousands of people from all backgrounds all over the world. Beyond feeding the hungry, langar cuts against the socially invidious and spiritually pernicious distinctions of caste and social position, inviting all humans to sit as equals on the ground and to break bread together. Akbar, the most tolerant of the Mughal emperors, partook of langar before gaining an audience with the third Nanak. The revelatory utterances and leadership of the Gurūs demonstrate a sustained effort to uplift the socially disenfranchised, including women, the poor, and those deemed untouchables.
The belief that the soul can attain its highest end regardless of external circumstance—not excluding religion—admits the possibility that different spiritual paths may be more or less direct routes to a common destination. Indeed, the belief that one’s own religion is the surest path to the Self-Existent One would be an appropriate justification for one’s particular religious belief, thereby averting a doxastically untenable relativism where no religious beliefs matter since all are equally good, though some contradict others. A GurSikh worthy of the name is prepared to die to uphold his or her religious conviction, including belief in the freedom of conscience for all. Further, a GurSikh would never dream of presenting this ultimatum to another human being.
The witness the GurSikh of martyrs—who embraced death rather than forsake their Lord—figures prominently in the young but storied chronicle of the Sikhs. Gurū Arjan was murdered at the hands of Jahangir, the Mughal emperor, upon refusing to convert to Islam. Throughout the unspeakable torture the great Gurū endured with perfect equanimity, GurSikh tradition remembers that he sang, ‘Your doings feel sweet. Nanak pleads for the riches of the Verdant One’s Name.’ At Chandni Chowk, Gurū Tegh Bahadur offered his head to safeguard the religious liberty of the Kashmiri Pandits, who Aurangzeb was forcibly converting to Islam. For the magnanimity of his singular sacrifice, the ninth Nanak is remembered as the shield of Hindustān, as ‘Hind kī Chādar.’ Thirty years later, his grandsons, Sahibzādē Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh—aged nine and six—embraced death rather than profess Islam. As Gurū Arjan demonstrated, a being perfectly in love with the will of God is beyond despair regardless of the body’s plight.
The daily liturgical reminders of such courageous devotion in ardās inscribes on every GurSikh soul the truth that one who does not fear death cannot be enslaved. While every human is born with the potential for such self-mastery, the possibility of supreme blessedness must never preclude compassion for and struggle to alleviate the suffering of the oppressed. On the contrary, selfless service emanates from this state of love. Martyrdoms make manifest the metaphysical realities that we are more than our bodies and that the best humans never sell their souls to save their flesh. Strictly speaking, it is thus evident that the religious liberty that aims at the highest human end is beyond the whim of any government. It is safe so long as the soul is true. Nonetheless, it is also true that our bodies are divine gifts worthy of protection, and though an individual’s spiritual flourishing is possible under any sort of regime, this does not render justice in this world inconsequential or victory more or less likely. While the best kind of human is always prepared for martyrdom, only the worst kind of regime makes martyrs of the best humans.
Before venturing a response to my second question, I will offer a sketch of how religious liberty fits within the American system of government. The first two clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution declare that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With these words, the Framers entrusted the soul’s care not to the representatives of the people, but to the people directly. This decision to bar national legislation establishing a state religion or interfering in religion’s free exercise originated neither from indifference, nor less still from the belief that religion is irrelevant to the project of self-government. Like their classical and Renaissance forebears, the architects of the American republic considered religion indispensable for cultivating the virtue necessary to sustain free institutions.
Instead, the reason for the new federal government’s hands-off approach to religion may be found in the experience of religious persecution in 17th-century England that prompted many colonists including Puritan John Winthrop, Catholic George Calvert, and Quaker William Penn to transplant their families and fortunes to North America. The American policy of “salutary neglect” in religion—to adopt Burke’s formulation—has arguably helped nourish more vibrant and varied religious communities than have establishmentarianism, laïcité, theocracy, or state atheism. It is, after all, the France of ‘liberté, égalité, et fraternité’ that cracked down on publicly wearing Islamic hijābs, Jewish kippāhs, Christian crosses, and the Sikh dastār.
Alexis de Tocqueville—far wiser a Frenchman than the revolutionaries of 1789, and among the finest theorists of American democracy—discusses religion at length in his celebrated Democracy in America. He cites it among “The Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States,” later explaining that religion is a vital counterweight to the materialism to which democracy—with its unlocking of commercial energies—is particularly susceptible (II 2.15). Pride and an appetite for material pleasures prove ruinous if unchecked by a “taste for the infinite.” Religion elevates the horizon of human affairs by conveying “the immortality of the soul.” In short, de Tocqueville observes that Americans make “democracy more moral by means of religion.”
Such propositions will doubtless raise eyebrows in some quarters, especially in the aftermath of the disgraceful January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, where Trumpian appropriations of Christian “imagery and rhetoric” featured prominently. More generally, many Americans subscribe to the Enlightenment orthodoxy that views religion as a regressive force—too frequently opposing science with superstition—not to forget its deplorable role in stoking discrimination against marginalized identities. Even among America’s earliest and most prestigious universities, which were mainly established to train aspiring ministers, theology proper is hardly at the heart of contemporary intellectual activity. Is not religion a vestigial appendage, an opiate for the simple, a quixotic playground for modernity’s holdouts?
How odd to such ears—how perverse—must sound my earnest contention that religion is not something to deconstruct, but something that might instruct us still. For are not humans the playthings still of lust, wrath, greed, infatuation, and pride? See how we fragment ourselves, foil ourselves, soil ourselves! And in the city, Adeimantus, are not the souls’ disorders visible as a macrocosm? Truly, there can be no self-government without government of the self. How clearly Burke saw that appetites forge fetters for intemperate minds; the less order exists within, the heavier are the chains without! Accepting the changeless diagnosis of the wise, I will not neglect to try the remedy, to taste the truth of the Gurūs’ songs.
What then might a GurSikh understanding of religious liberty contribute to the American project of self-government? Engagement with the virtues of self-sovereignty and respect for difference that illuminate the pages of GurSikh history can help rekindle a bitterly divided nation’s understanding of how best we might exercise our rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” together. In his slōkas, Gurū Tegh Bahadur commends a course alike beyond fear and frightening others. Herein is the kirpān’s ethic: never to aggress, never to hesitate in defending the helpless. Gurū Tegh Bahadur cautions us that our moments here are fleeting, that our chance to meet the Lord is now. What fortitude, sweetness, and urgency mark Rāga Jaijawantī, his melodic gift to mankind! Remembering that each breath could be our last, we must renounce the illusions of worldly seductions, recognizing that the wealth of loving God is alone everlasting.
Worldly power grows arrogant save in fear of God’s justice. Following its own caprice, how often it defeats itself. Jealous of any rival allegiance, statism is the most iconoclastic of idolatries. The more enlightened a majority believes itself, the more it would profit from dissent, and the less likely it will heed it. Religious allegiance stands athwart modish passions. Her moral horizons span farther into the past, to the ages to come—and deeper still into the nature of being—so her charity, sub specie aeternitatis, is patient.
The more perfectly free elections and free markets are realized, the more reliably they give us what we choose. The better we learn to choose, the better the outcomes. Good government both protects and depends upon religious liberty. If religious communities are to safeguard the civic spirit, government must not undercut precisely those pillars of civil society that are to support it. A society in which citizens of ability and goodwill must expend energy simply not to be persecuted by their own government ruinously plunders itself of its citizens’ goodwill and ability. Imagine what could be if India would only afford the fearless sons and daughters of Hind-kī-Chādar justice. As a Sikh citizen of the American republic, there exists no government under which I would rather live.
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Nihal Singh
This essay is a substantial reworking of “End & Bulwark of Good Government: A Sikh Perspective on Religious Liberty in America” in honor of Gurū Tegh Bahadur’s 400th birth anniversary. In its prior incarnation, it was published in Religious Liberty: Striving for Inclusion (Sutherland Institute, May 2019) and supplemented by the author’s remarks at the Utah State Capitol.