How Could Religious Liberty be a Human Right?

Abstract

A growing number of scholars think "religious liberty" is a bad idea. The unfairness objection is that singling out religion for special protection is unjust to comparable nonreligious conceptions of the good. The distraction objection asserts that religious liberty is a misleading lens: oppression sometimes occurs along religious lines, but the underlying conflicts often are not really about religious difference. Both objections are sound, but under certain conditions religious liberty should nonetheless be regarded as a right. Law is inevitably crude. The state cannot possibly recognize each individual’s unique identity-constituting attachments. It can, at best, protect broad classes of ends that many people share.

Keywords

• constitutional guarantees
• state intervention
• conflict resolution
• nonreligious conceptions
• unfairness objection