Post-Liberal Religious Liberty

‘Religious liberty protects the quest for true religion’ (1). With this audacious claim Joel Harrison opens his book. Audacious, because it confronts head-on the dominant liberal egalitarian view that religious liberty can only be justified in terms of a generic state duty to protect freedom of conscience (or some equivalent) and is to be secured equally for all citizens irrespective of the content of what conscience is driven by or latches onto. The state cannot have an interest in protecting ‘religious truth’, only personal autonomy, and religion can claim no special legal status. How could a neutral liberal state presume to know what religious truth is anyway? Redoubling the challenge, Harrison goes on: religious liberty ‘facilitates the free creation of communities of solidarity, fraternity, and charity, or what we may call “right relationship”, seeking the truth about God and instantiating this in manifold contexts’ (1). It is thus not narrowly or even primarily about protecting the freedom-rights of individuals but about serving the search for a common good that must direct a whole society (3).

Autonomy · Conscience · Duty · Fraternity · Law and economics · Liberalism · Negative liberty · Political science · Politics · Religious freedom · Sociology · Solidarity · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development