G.S. “Mack” McCarter III is founder and coordinator of Community Renewal International and an ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ denomination. The following post is based on his address at the ICLRS Religious Freedom Annual Review, 17 June 2025, at Brigham Young University.
Religious Freedom: An On-Ramp onto the Highway of God
I’ve been asked to speak about “Why Religious Freedom Matters to Me.” But in light of the conference, and with the organizers’ connivance, I simply have to change the title. And that is to move from me to we, and from I to us, because that really reflects the power of this conference.
So, why does religious freedom matter to us? And of course, we answer that religious freedom really is the regnant power that can change the direction of humanity and move us to a place talked about in Isaiah chapter 11—where peace, joy, and love can fill this entire globe and all of humanity; where the wolf lives with the lamb; where the bear eats hay with the cow; and where the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, even as the waters cover the sea.[1]
And so religious freedom is a threshold into the world of the love of God. It is a large on-ramp to the highway of God that can lead to the kind of world that is in the heart of God, and that He has placed within every one of us. That longing, as it says in Ecclesiastes,[2] for eternity that He has placed into the hearts of all people: It is our hope. It is our wish. It is our quest. And it is that for which “we live, and move, and have our being.”[3] Consequently, we also need to understand that this love, which is present all around us, must become more than a presence. It has to become a force that can literally shift the direction of our humanity and our world away from what looks like the days of Noah[4] into the renewed days of Isaiah.[5] So the question is, with us facing the world as it is, how does this on-ramp literally become more than a presence and more than a conference? How does it become a force that lives within us and walks out with us, to be able to leaven the world into the kind of world God wants?
Hardwired for Connection
One ally in this quest is a scientific verdict about human beings: we are hardwired to connect with and care for each other.[6] This ally lies within the hearts and minds of every single person. Our extending caring and kindness has been scientifically proven to benefit not only others but us as well.[7]
I was reminded about the omnipresence of our connectedness on a flight from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Washington, D.C. Three rows in front of me was a little toddler boy, about two-and-a-half years old, who began to laugh a little bit and then a little bit harder. And then he started what we in Louisiana call “belly laughing—when you laugh so hard that your legs become like wet noodles, you can’t even stand up, you fall down on the ground, and you roll around on your belly. Listening to him, I kind of started smiling. And then I began to laugh a little bit. And then I found myself laughing even more. But it wasn’t just me. Three rows behind him, three rows in front of him: the little boy would laugh hard, and everyone sitting around him would give an antiphonal response. We all started laughing, demonstrating that the mirror neurons in all of us have power and that we are hardwired to connect to one another.
Another truth is that there is another presence within us: the presence of the power of self, which, at times, is not an ally. It can be not just not a friend; it can become an enemy. When I counseled with young premarital couples, they would come to see me and be so in love. There is a peculiar kind of psychosis associated with that kind of love; they are just crazy about each other. The two lovebirds would be holding hands, and I would tell them, “I’ve got good news and bad news for you, and the good news is this: You’re about to enter a life that, if you will obey the rules of God, the two of you will become one.” And they would grab hold of hands and look pie eyed at each other. And I would continue, “Now the bad news is this. You’re about to embark on a lifelong struggle to see which one of you the two of you will become.” I always had to ruthlessly check the impulse to dive over my desk and grab that poor young man and say, “Give up right now. Save yourself years of struggle. Just give it up, and then go on and be happy.” A friend of mine and his wife loved each other like crazy, but he said, “We’re fighting so much. One night I was going to be late for supper, and I just called her up and said, ‘Honey, look: I’m going to be about 30 minutes late. Go ahead and start the fight without me.’” As the indigenous myth recounts, we have two wolves inside of us, and they’re both ravenous; one is ravenous for self and for whatever self can get, but the other is ravenous for connectedness, love, and caring.
Religious Freedom: A Means to Systemize God’s Love
My organization, Community Renewal International, is working in the Woodland Terrace neighborhood in Washington, D.C., which is the deadliest neighborhood in our nation’s capital. The six streets in this neighborhood have become impassable borders between apartment complexes. In 2023–24, the neighborhood lost
Ty’ah Settles: 3 years old; shot, killed on Hartford Street
Kevin Mason and Demarcus “Pinky” Pinckney: cousins, 17 and 15 years old; both shot, killed on Langston Place
Dee Monte Pernell Chase: 27 years old; shot, killed on Langston Place
Darren Johnson: 16 years old; shot, killed on Langston place
Joevontae Ramsey: 24 years old; shot, killed on Alabama Avenue
In just over one year.
It’s a war zone. And so, what is the answer for us? The answer for us has to be the love of God. It’s the only answer possible, but it must be put into a system where this miracle of love that only God can bring us can be systematized and made a power. Religious freedom allows us to do this.
About 20 years ago, I turned on the television set to watch a program about dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel. Instead, the whole screen was filled with ants, and they were crawling all over each other like crazy. I was about to hit the channel changer, the way men can do. (I can watch 17 channels at once.) But my thumb froze in midair, just as the narrator said something that caught my attention. I watched the next four minutes and then dialed the 1-800 number and did something I had never done before: I ordered a VHS tape of the program, after having seen only four minutes of the show. What did I see, and what had the narrator said, to prompt me to give up my sacred Visa number?
The narrator said, “Ants have been living in successful societies for millions of years.” Well, that beats us. And then the program featured an experiment with two adjacent tables. On one table, the ants in the colony were rolling all over each other amongst specks of sand, in turmoil because they couldn’t protect their eggs on the flat surface. Then the experimenters did something astonishing: they placed a straw, the width of one ant, to connect that table with the neighboring table that was fitted with a structure, making it not entirely flat. One ant made its way across that straw, feeling with its antennae every single millimeter of space along that straw, to reach table two. And then the ant did something astonishing: It went back across the straw, to table one, and picked up another ant. And the second ant let it. It didn’t say, “Well, wait a minute. Are you Christian or Muslim? Are you Jewish? Are you Buddhist?” It just got on the back of the first ant, which carried it to table two. And then, navigating with their feelers, they both went back to table one and picked up an ant each: four, then eight, then 16, and then 64 ants eventually made their way to the second table. And then some unseen signal went through the entire colony on table one, and they all picked up their little ant eggs and their grains of sand, marched across the straw, and put the eggs in a safe place, which they filled in with sand. With this accomplished, a palpable relaxation settled on the entire colony, and they went back to crawling all over each other again. In four minutes those ants, through a single act that initiated a sophisticated system, solved a complex problem.
Woodland Terrace is the symptom of the entire globe, which we should call “Neighborhood Earth.” It is a speck in the entire universe of two trillion galaxies. Its residents were born into a neighborhood that they cannot live in or leave. And so, how do we solve this? We exercise our religious freedom by taking the power of love and placing it into everyone to make the decision to lead us to a new destination and then, as a human family, to a new destiny. And we march out of this room with a system to say, “I will exercise my religious freedom by loving all people everywhere. I’m committed, and I will do it with all people who have made that commitment, and we will share it, and we will cover the globe.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”[8] God bless you, and God bless this conference, as we use our religious freedom to go forth to cover the world with God’s love.
References:
[1] Isaiah 11:6–9 (KJV).
[2] See Ecclesiastes 3:11.
[3] Acts 17:28.
[4] See Genesis 6:5.
[5] See Isaiah 40.
[6] See, e.g., MATTHEW D. LIEBERMAN, SOCIAL: WHY OUR BRAINS ARE WIRED TO CONNECT (2013).
[7] See, e.g., The Mental Health Benefits of Simple Acts of Kindness, AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION (17 Feb. 2023); Melissa Broderick, The Heart and Science of Kindness, HARVARD HEALTH PUBLISHING (18 Apr. 2019).
[8] See Teilhard’s Story, THE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN PROJECT (last visited 11 Nov. 2025). EDITORS’ NOTE: While this quote is often attributed to Teihard’s book The Human Phenomenon, the quote reflects ideas articulated in that book but is not contained, word for word, in the book.