Berkley Center

It might surprise you to learn that today, some of the world’s brightest liberal philosophers see religious freedom­­­­­—perhaps the liberal tradition’s most prized principle—as arbitrary and unfair. In their view, protecting people’s religious or moral beliefs at the exclusion of other important human commitments under this foundational right violates another basic liberal value—equality. Religious freedom, they contend, must either be construed so broadly as to become a highly vague and general freedom of conscience, or its scope should be reduced to that of other basic rights like freedom of speech and association.

This egalitarian approach is just one of several recent critiques of religious freedom as we’ve long understood that principle. Other scholars, for example, attack the concept of an institutional right to religious freedom, also a longstanding feature of the Western tradition (under, for instance, the principle of church autonomy). On this view, religious institutions lack a distinct status under law that could ground a special freedom and right of protection for them. Such institutions, these scholars hold, can be sufficiently protected by the rights of their individual members. There’s no good defense for legal concepts like the “ministerial exemption” (which allows religious institutions to determine their own criteria for hiring ministers, regardless of antidiscrimination laws).

Some of these new critics of religious freedom go deeper. They see the idea of religious freedom as inextricably tied to a Protestant and Enlightenment view of religion, one that finds religion’s essence in individual choices of belief, rather than in communal activity and ritual. Since there will always be minority groups with beliefs and practices that don’t fit this idea of religion, these scholars believe, the application of religious freedom will inevitably exclude them unfairly. Western efforts to promote religious freedom internationally, then, ought to be frowned upon: they not only hide other causes of the oppression of such minorities, but also entrench the lines of division that preserve their inferior status.

Together, these challenges present at least two striking puzzles that invite solving: first, why and how is liberalism, the intellectual tradition so long renowned for the birth of religious freedom, now shrinking from that principle’s defense and scope? And second, is religious freedom truly irredeemable in the way that some scholars seem to think?

These are the questions that my doctoral dissertation in political theory is exploring, and the ones I pursued this summer as a graduate fellow for the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project. In the past several months, I’ve studied the arguments of key contributors to this crisis of religious freedom, tried to diagnose its causes, and sketched the outlines of an alternative defense of the principle. The result is a first dissertation chapter that sets up the debate I’ve introduced here and starts to lay the groundwork for a better account of religious freedom.

Such a defense, I’ve discovered, will have to include historical digging for an intellectual tradition besides liberalism that has long supported religious freedom (or at least its roots). But it will also need to flesh out and defend the conception of religious freedom that the tradition offers. I share the view of some scholars affiliated with the Berkley Center that the Christian intellectual tradition is one viable source for rebuilding this important principle. Long before Locke and Rousseau and Tocqueville, philosophers like Athenagoras and Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Lactantius, Augustine and Aquinas defended the premises of religious freedom, if not the principle itself. Together, these thinkers can give us a robust defense of religious freedom that is perhaps most clearly articulated in Dignitatis Humanae, the Catholic Church’s statement on religious freedom from the Second Vatican Council. My hunch is that the natural law-based defense of religious freedom we can find in that document, and in the long tradition preceding it, is one feasible solution to the problems my first chapter lays out.

In addition to helping me start my dissertation, the RFP summer fellowship has reminded me of the value of political theory, an abstract discipline that sometimes seems to have little bearing on practical politics. The way we understand principles as foundational to our liberal democracies as religious liberty has been a long, slow process of evolution—shaped immediately by judges and lawyers, politicians and voters, but also foundationally by thinkers who articulate the meaning and value of guiding political principles. The long-term prospects for religious liberty as a fixture of the Western political and legal tradition are bleak if scholarly conversation about it continues along its current trajectory. It is the pressing need for another voice in that discussion that motivated my work this summer and will sustain it going forward.