Freedom of religion is something that is normally taken for granted. But in the English speaking world there have recently been many spotfires over issues like wearing and hanging crosses in public, and proposed legislation to compel the disclosure of what is heard in confession, to compel Christian adoption agencies to accept applications from gay couples and to force clergy to marry gay couples in churches.
These, and other controversies over the insurance of contraceptive practices in the United States, have led some Catholics to identify a concerted secularist threat to religious freedom. I believe that the freedom to express publicly one's religious beliefs is central within any healthy society, but that the current tensions are part of the normal negotiation of its relationship to other values in society.
Religious freedom includes the right to hold religious beliefs, to associate with others with like beliefs, to engage in practices connected with those beliefs, and to commend one's religious allegiances, beliefs and way of life to others. Religious freedom implies the right of individuals to make and withdraw from religious allegiances, and also the right of religious groups to live by and promote their beliefs and practices.
It also means that people should not be impeded from holding religious beliefs, expressing them and embodying them in their association with others.
Religious freedom should be protected for the same reasons as political freedom. Both assert the value of human beings reflecting on what matters in life and of living publicly by the answers they give to these large questions. Religious freedom asserts the importance of human freedom and the personal centre that ground the respect given to individual choice.
This human freedom and interiority must be supported by the right to express itself in public and bodily ways. When religious or political freedom is suppressed, human beings are reduced to political and economic counters.
But religious freedom is not absolute. Nor is everything claimed in its name sacrosanct. Its claims need to be set against the claims made by other human values. And they may sometimes be denied. Extreme examples are easy to imagine. In some religions human sacrifice was central to belief systems and practice. Freedom to practice