Whether you supported the U.S. war effort to topple Saddam Hussein and his henchmen or decried that offensive as unjust, foolhardy or both, we should all agree on at least two points. First, the allied armies removed a really bad chap. Let the record show, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party gestapo gassed, shot, tortured, dismembered, maimed, raped, fleeced, and generally bullied an awful number of Iraqis for a very long period of time. An evil dictator has fallen.

Second, removing Saddam from power has created an ominous vacuum in Iraq. Terminating Saddam's regime was dangerous and costly. But this was the easy part. Managing the vacuum his removal created and seeing that vacuum filled with something better will prove the greater challenge.

This challenge is obviously much more complicated than simply replacing dictatorship with democracy in Iraq-as if one were merely removing a faulty engine from an old car and replacing it with a better one. The task at hand is more analogous to a heart transplant-a complicated, risky undertaking that will require the consent of the patient, the success of the surgeon, and this particular body's mysterious capacity to receive rather than to reject the donated organ. Anxious pacing and a case of the jitters are justified at this point.

What is the new heart that must be successfully transplanted into the chest of Iraqi culture in order for genuine freedom to fill the present vacuum? Iraq (and the rest of the Muslim world for that matter) will continue to generate repressive governments until she is retrofitted with the conviction that human beings must be granted freedom of conscience. Whether or not a democratic government is established in Iraq, Iraq must adopt freedom of religious expression, including the freedom to convert from Islam to another religion without reprisal.

Until this new heart is beating in the chest of Iraqi society, little will change. When people are granted the freedom to choose their own religion, to promote that faith publicly, and to honestly critique and dialogue with other religious systems, then, and only then, will Iraq be truly liberated.

Many pro-democracy groups were ecstatic when Saddam's regime fell. Surely now the step to establishing democracy in Iraq was only a matter of formality. But this naive optimism was soon deflated by the saber rattling of Shi'a imams in Iraq.

Shi'a Muslims were savagely repressed under Saddam's rule. But finding a voice in the present vacuum, they have clamored to fill that vacuum with their own form of religious oppression. Mouaid al-Ubaidi, for instance, recently declared in a packed Baghdad mosque that jihad against American troops is justifiable to "regain lost rights," by which he means the right to physically enforce his brand of Islam upon Iraqi citizens (Star Tribune, June 7, 2003, p. A8). Now that Saddam has been kicked off his pedestal, the Shi'as' want to mount it.

At this moment, Iraqi Shi'a clerics are not only undermining American efforts to establish a secular democracy in Iraq, they are relentlessly promoting Iranian-style committees for the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue. Such efforts are causing vice preventing, virtue promoting people of non-Islamic religions to quake in their sandals.

If the new Iraq fails to promote freedom of religion, she will be only a short step away from filling the present vacuum with repressive policies such as are found in Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and similar Islamic nations where citizens are legally bound to embrace Islam and where conversion from Islam is considered treason. Under such repressive conditions people suffer unspeakable atrocities for simply following their conscience. Iraq must strive to escape this dark dungeon.

Granted, Iraq's need to provide genuine religious freedom to its citizens is a tall order for a Muslim nation to fill. It is not, however, an unreasonable demand. In fact, every nation on earth must face this very decision sooner or later. America herself has had to undergo this same heart transplant.

By way of background, we should recognize that all pre-Christian societies were, in the words of Verduin, sacral societies (see Verduin's, Reformers and Their Stepchildren). It went without saying that the State's duty was to promote the official cult while citizens of the State were responsible to participate in that cult, or at least not to subvert it. But Jesus' teachings radically conflicted with this standard mode of operation.

Jesus' followers were not created by natural birth into a family under the jurisdiction of a sacral State. His followers were created by spiritual rebirth through personal faith in the gospel, irrespective of their national identity (John 3:1-31; 4:1-13). Such transformation could obviously not be enforced at the point of the State's sword.

So in Jesus' way of thinking, people could cooperate peacefully in the same marketplaces while worshiping at different shrines (Verduin, 21-22). Everyone needed to talk, no one needed to die. As far as Jesus and his early followers were concerned, the State was God's tool to secure peace and to punish wrongdoers. The State was never intended to serve as a sword in the Church's hand by which to secure external religious conformity from non-Christians. The only sword the Church was to wield was the sword of Scripture. The gospel was to spread only by means of the witness and moral influence of its adherents (Matthew 28:18-20; 1 Peter 2:11-12).

Jesus' perspective held sway in the Church for three centuries. There was no other option. The Roman empire into which the Church was born was a sacral society with a notoriously firm grip on the sword. Rome tempered her pagan zeal with a stout measure of toleration for other religions, even monotheistic ones. But Rome grew exasperated from time to time with Christians' lack of pious regard for the imperial cult, to say nothing of the success Christians enjoyed in converting pagans from that cult into the borderless faith of Christianity.

Ironically, Rome's sacral orientation was eventually adopted by the Church. When the Roman empire embraced a nominal form of Christianity at the start of the fourth century, star-struck Church leaders disregarded Christ's teaching and embraced the empire's entrenched pattern. It was not long before the once persecuted Church was wielding the sword of the civil powers to establish the sacral society of "Christendom." This sacral model of society dominated the Church's vision throughout the Medieval era although Christ's vision survived underground for centuries.

When the Protestant Reformation rocked Europe in the sixteenth century, the Reformers were unable to free themselves from the sacral view of society perpetuated for over twelve centuries by the Roman Church. John Calvin, for instance, meted out stiff physical punishments against citizens of Geneva for matters as trivial as card playing. Adulterers were expelled from the city. Heretics were executed. Such measures were consistent with the sacral view of society. As Rome had enforced religious conformity among its citizens for centuries, Protestants likewise established their own sacral cultures wherever they were able to wrest political control of a region from Rome.

Like Calvin, Martin Luther was also unable to divest himself of the sacral view of society. Luther was impaled on the proverbial fence as he lobbied, on the one hand, for a confessional Church in Germany (i.e., a Church comprised of regenerate members), while at the same time arguing for a regional Church encompassing all people under a specific jurisdiction. Under this latter provision, things did not often go well for non-Lutherans living in a region governed by a Lutheran magistrate.

The black sheep of the Reformation were the Anabaptists who insisted on the ancient belief that the Church comprised a sacred, regenerate body of believers living within society. Emboldened by the Protestant uprising, Anabaptists came out of hiding during the Reformation to promote anew Jesus' vision of a society free from religious oppression.

The Anabaptists argued that unregenerate man is capable of operating the State under the common grace of God (Romans 13:1-7). The Church's sword, they maintained, was not the State but the sword of moral suasion by which the regenerate people of God proclaim the gospel and spread their influence across all cultures and in varied marketplaces as citizens of any foreign land and as pilgrims and strangers everywhere on earth.

Such a relationship is ideal as long as the State does not intrude upon the Church's privilege to call sinners into the family of God and as long as believers do not use the State to impose belief. It is just as evil for Christians to compel conformity to Christian belief as it is for the State to persecute Christians.

It was the Anabaptist's willingness to break with twelve centuries of tradition at this very point that earned them the designation, "radicals." It was their refusal to support the sacral view of Christendom that led to their denunciation and persecution at the hand of the sacralists: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed alike.

In the seventeenth century, belief in sacral society-coupled with the external enforcement that position necessitates-was transported by ship to the American colonies in the skulls of devout Protestants in particular. Early American colonists typically lived in settlements which embraced their particular form of religious conviction. Religious dissidents within those communities were routinely punished or expelled by the authorities.

As case in point, a certain Roger Williams (1603-1683), a member of the Protestant Plymouth Colony, began to argue in defense of freedom of conscience. While vigorously debating groups he deemed heretical such as the Quakers, he defended the necessity of their freedom to believe as they chose. Since regenerate faith cannot be imposed, Williams maintained, even a Christian society is duty-bound to permit honest religious expression.

Williams was expelled from Plymouth Colony in the dead of winter, 1635, for refusing to renounce his "heretical" views. With much persistence he eventually secured a charter from England granting full freedom of religious expression to all citizens of the territory that would later be called, Rhode Island. (There is a reason RI is so small!).

There was little patience for Williams in his day. He died a lonely man. But a seed had been planted and his views were eventually embraced in America. Nearly a century after his death, Congress passed the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights which provides that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...."

In the world of nations, that was radical thinking for its day. It is still radical thinking in the Islamic world today. But without transplanting this very notion in the breast of Iraqi culture, the vacuum that now exists will soon be filled with something different than Saddam's regime, but with something not much better.

A successful heart transplant starts with the willingness of the patient to yield to the procedure and thus a little hand wringing would be in order with respect to the future of Iraq. Such a willingness is not unprecedented in the Islamic world, however. King Mohammed VI of Morocco, an Islamic state that has long oppressed non-Muslims, recently pledged to promote human rights in this North African nation. One can only hope he means to include the right of Muslims to convert to other religions without fear of physical reprisal. And one can only hope his resolve translates into action. If that happens perhaps it will indicate the transplant has worked there, encouraging efforts to make it work in Iraq.

Non-Muslims in Iraq are praying that just such a transformation takes place in their country. Lovers of peace and justice would do well to pray with them.

We would also do well-we who inhabit a land where religious freedom is a constitutional right-to offer prayers of thanksgiving. Many "surgeons" along the way (thank you, Anabaptists, Roger Williams, et. al.) paid a heavy price to effect this heart transplant. Today, by God's grace alone, the new heart of religious freedom beats in the chest of American culture. By God's grace it will continue to do so, and be joined by the sound of similar pulsation's emitting from distant shores.