The Paradox of Religious Liberty

Preserving religious freedom requires nurturing the religious roots of our republic.

The First Amendment protects religious freedom, but it is not values-agnostic. So, for example, the First Amendment does not protect murder, theft, or sexual abuse, even if those acts are committed for religious reasons.

That’s because the American tradition is one of ordered liberty—liberty grounded in a particular vision of the common good. That “particular vision” is a set of values that includes sanctity of life (contra murder), private property (contra theft), and human dignity (contra abuse).

These values are themselves grounded in a religious worldview, one shaped by the Bible, the Christian traditions of the West, and the American historical experience.

Protecting these values is not only something governments may do. It’s something they must do. It is why Americans formed a government in the first place. As Americans, we are committed to a set of truths about the human person, which entails a responsibility to secure those truths and protect the rights that flow from them. This is the chief aim of government.

Religious freedom is embedded within the broader matrix of ordered liberty—and is incoherent outside of it. The American commitment to religious freedom depends upon a vision of the human person as a free moral agent ultimately accountable to God. That vision is, again, inescapably a religious one. Not all worldviews share this view of the human person and so not all worldviews grant religious freedom.

The great challenge of American constitutionalism and civic life is to nurture the religious roots of our republic while preserving the broader religious freedom those roots support.

I wrote more about the “paradox of religious liberty” at Mere Orthodoxy last year: “Freedom to be Bound: Religious Liberty from Moses to Madison.”