Then, once the Law was adopted, the Baptist Union and the Full Gospel Association did not re-register until the very last moment, insisting upon amendments to some of its more odious provisions. While this protest did not succeed, it at least became possible in practice to re-register a number of churches unable to manage the minimum 20 founders. The recent petition marks a new stage in the battle to change the Law.
In multi-confessional Belarus - where Christmas and Easter are officially celebrated twice, according to both Eastern and Western Christian calendars - moves to restrict religious freedom and allot the Orthodox Church the de facto status of state church are inevitably causing resentment. Most people find such a policy perplexing, as they are accustomed to believing that they belong to a multi-confessional nation.
The historical experience of Belarus also shows that religious freedom elevates our nation, whereas religious un-freedom leads to the darkest and most tragic consequences.
The advent of Christianity in Belarus was not accompanied by violence. Christian churches following Eastern and Western rites co-existed peacefully on Belarusian soil from the tenth century onwards. A policy of religious freedom became the basis of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - the state in which Belarusian national identity was forged.
In the fifteenth century there was an attempt to make Catholicism the state religion by barring non-Catholics from senior state positions. In 1436 an Inquisition was introduced against the considerable number of Christians in the Grand Duchy who had accepted the Reformation ideas of Jan Hus. These actions caused conflict and the departure of some Belarusian Orthodox nobles for the state of Muscovy.
The sixteenth century has been called Belarus' Golden Age, not just thanks to progress in the cultural and economic spheres, but also due to religious freedom. Attempts to stop the Protestant faith from spreading ended in fiasco. In 1563 the nobility, headed by the Grand Duchy's leading Protestant, Mikalai Radzivil the Black, succeeded in obtaining a decree under which, "not only subjects of the Roman Church should be elected to all positions and the government, but to the same degree men of noble class, of the Christian faith, each according to his merits." Not long afterwards the overwhelming majority of seats in the Grand Duchy's Senate were occupied by Protestant Christians.
