Freedom of religious belief and practice has come to be seen as a basic moral and political right. It features in the 1791 First Amendment of the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 18): “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The background to these declaration was the experience of religious persecution as in that of the English non-conformists who emigrated to North America, and of the Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. The prominence of the issue of religious freedom in the present period is again due to the feeling that religious belief and practice are threatened. Prominent in contemporary discussions is the treatment by the Chinese Government of the Muslim Uyghur peoples, and the claims of some Christians that anti-discrimination legislation is limiting their right to express and practice their moral beliefs about such matters as homosexuality. Religious freedom is sometimes thought to be more fundamental than some other liberties because of its centrality to believers understanding of themselves and of reality.
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— In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s being in right relation to the divine. All of us have a duty, in conscience, to seek the truth and to honor the freedom of all men and women everywhere to do the same.
— Although the Bill of Rights does not establish a hierarchy among the values it seeks to protect, Supreme Court decisions over time have classified certain rights as essential to a fundamental scheme of ordered liberty. The prominent place of the First Amendment's provisions protecting religious freedom on this "Honor Roll of Superior Rights" has seldom been openly challenged.
— The book provides a detailed introduction to a major debate in bioethics, as well as a rigorous account of the role of conscience in professional decision-making. Exploring the role of conscience in healthcare practice, this book offers fresh counterpoints to recent calls to ban or severely restrict conscience objection. It provides a detailed philosophical account of the nature and moral import of conscience, and defends a prima facie right to conscientious objection for healthcare professionals. The book also has relevance to broader debates about religious liberty and civil rights, such as debates about the rights and duties of persons and institutions who refuse services to clients on the basis of a religious objection. The book concludes with a discussion of how to regulate individual and institutional conscientious objection, and presents general principles for the accommodation of individual conscientious objectors in the healthcare system. This book will be of value to students and scholars in the fields of moral philosophy, bioethics and health law.
— "The American founders did not create their experiment in religious freedom out of nothing. The principles of religious freedom outlined in the First Amendment were a part and product of nearly two centuries of colonial experience, and nearly two millennia of European history and thought. A host of historical examples of religious freedom were readily at hand as the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights were being drafted. Foremost among the sources was the Christian Bible, which was by far the most widely used and commonly cited text in the American founding era. American politicians, preachers, and pamphleteers alike quoted the Bible's many bracing aphorisms on freedom: "For freedom, Christ has set us free." "You were called to freedom." "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." "You will be free indeed." You have been given "the glorious liberty of the children of God." Equally important were the Bible's calls to believers to "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's," and to remain "separate" from worldly temptations. Christians are, at heart, "strangers and foreigners on the earth"; their true "citizenship is in heaven." St. Paul even used the phrase "wall of separation" (paries maceriae), albeit very differently from the way it came to be used in law and politics. Such biblical passages inspired hundreds of impassioned sermons in defense of religious liberty. Indeed, political sermons, issued both in churches and in statehouses, constituted around 80 percent of all the American political literature published in the 1770s and 1780s. Beyond the Bible, the American founders also turned for inspiration to the martyred prophets of religious liberty in the West: the early English heroes of the faith-Thomas Becket, John Wycliff, and Thomas More-and the sundry English Levellers, Quaker dissenters, and Catholic missionaries who followed them. They turned for instruction to a host of European theologians and philosophers, from the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, to early modern Catholic champions of rights Francisco de Vitoria and Bartholomew las Casas, to later European voices of liberty, such as Baron Montesquieu and François Voltaire of France; David Hume and Adam Smith of Scotland; and John Locke and William Blackstone of England. They also turned to many classical legal texts on religious freedoms and rights such as the Edict of Milan (313), the Magna Carta (1215), the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and other such documents of the civil law, common law, and canon law traditions. Historical counterexamples also came quickly to mind, however, particularly to those founders who denounced traditional state establishments of religion and defended religious freedom for all peaceable believers. In defending the novelty of the American experiment, the founders often depicted the Western inheritance as a veritable "career of intolerance," in Virginia statesman James Madison's words. "In most of the Gov[ernment]s of the old world," Madison declared, "the legal establishment of a particular religion and without or with very little toleration of others makes a part of the Political and Civil organization. . . . [I]t was taken for granted, that an exclusive & intolerant establishment was essential, and notwithstanding the light thrown on the subject by that experiment, the prevailing opinion in Europe, England not excepted, has been that Religion could not be preserved without the support of Gov[ernmen]t, nor Gov[ernmen]t without the support of Religion.""--
— Religious freedom is a foundational human right without which subsequent human rights cannot be upheld. This widely recognized fact is maintained, not only in the luminous tradition of the Catholic Church, but in the contemporary human rights discourse, including secular documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution. Saint John Paul II called it the “first freedom.” Others describe religious freedom as an “architectural” right, on which others are built. Thus, the work of promoting and protecting religious freedom, as well as refining our understanding of it, is a critical task for our generation. Ambassador Sam Brownback has dedicated his life to promoting religious liberty. As former U.S. Ambassador for international religious freedom, Brownback developed networks to combat human rights abuses on a global scale. In the Fourth Annual Human Rights Lecture, Ambassador Brownback will discuss the challenges and opportunities for religious freedom with the IHE’s William Saunders, Director of the Program on Human Rights. Sam Brownback served as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom from February 2018 to January 2021. He served as Governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. Prior to that he represented his home state in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. While a member of the Senate, he worked actively on the issue of religious freedom in multiple countries and was a key sponsor of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Ambassador Brownback currently serves as co-chair for the International Religious Freedom Summit. He and his wife Mary have five children and six grandchildren.
— Amazon.com: Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction (Law and Christianity): 9781108835381: Hammond, Jeffrey B., Alvare, Helen M.: Books
— How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process. In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their churchÕs own traditionsÑrather than Enlightenment liberalismÑto secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life. Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the popeÕs authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The critical role of Catholics in establishing American churchÐstate separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. ChurchÐstate separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
— Should the freedom of churches and other religious institutions come down to little more than a grudging recognition that “what happens in the church, stays in the church”? In this article, I provide a more robust definition of what I call institutional religious freedom than a crabbed and merely negative understanding. In addition, I also go beyond a libertarian-style defense of institutional religious freedom as the ecclesiastical equivalent of the “right to be left alone” by suggesting a multitude of reasons why institutional religious freedom in a robust form deserves robust protection. Especially amidst exigent challenges such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, an anemic appeal to an ecclesiastical version of negative liberty on merely jurisdictional grounds will not be enough to defend religious organizations from an increasingly strong temptation and tendency on the part of political authorities—often acting on the basis of understandable intentions—to subject such organizations to sweeping interference even in the most internal matters. In contrast, the article offers an articulation of why both the internal and external freedoms of religious institutions require maximum deference if they are to offer their indispensable contributions—indeed, their “essential services”—to the shared public good in the United States and other countries throughout the world. Underscoring the external and public dimensions of institutional religious freedom, the article follows the work of law and religion scholar W. Cole Durham in that it analytically disaggregates the freedom of religious institutions into three indispensable components: “substantive”, or the right of self-definition; “vertical”, or the right of self-governance; and “horizontal”, or the right of self-directed outward expression and action.
— Bernadette Tobin, Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics in Sydney, Australia, discusses the question, “Is religious freedom a threat to equality, or an aspect of it?” Daniel Sulmasy, Director of Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics, provides the response.
Freedom of religious belief and practice has come to be seen as a basic moral and political right. It features in the 1791 First Amendment of the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 18): “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The background to these declaration was the experience of religious persecution as in that of the English non-conformists who emigrated to North America, and of the Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. The prominence of the issue of religious freedom in the present period is again due to the feeling that religious belief and practice are threatened. Prominent in contemporary discussions is the treatment by the Chinese Government of the Muslim Uyghur peoples, and the claims of some Christians that anti-discrimination legislation is limiting their right to express and practice their moral beliefs about such matters as homosexuality. Religious freedom is sometimes thought to be more fundamental than some other liberties because of its centrality to believers understanding of themselves and of reality.