Source/Freedom of Religion

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History

What is the oldest source in any country that mentions this right?

What is the oldest written source in this country that mentions this right? BUILD IN COLLAPSE EXPAND TOGGLE

Afghanistan

Albania

Algeria

Andorra

Angola

Antigua and Barbuda

Argentina

Armenia

Australia

Austria

Azerbaijan

The Bahamas

Bahrain

Bangladesh

Barbados

Belarus

Belgium

Belize

Benin

Bhutan

Bolivia

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Botswana

Brazil

Brunei

Bulgaria

Burkina Faso

Burundi

Cambodia

Cameroon

Canada

Cape Verde

Central African Republic

Chad

Chile

China

Colombia

Comoros

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Republic of the Congo

Costa Rica

Croatia

Cuba

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Denmark

Djibouti

Dominica

Dominican Republic

East Timor

Ecuador

Egypt

El Salvador

Equatorial Guinea

Eritrea

Estonia

Eswatini

Ethiopia

Fiji

Finland

France

Gabon

The Gambia

Georgia

Germany

Ghana

Greece

Grenada

Guatemala

Guinea

Guinea-Bissau

Guyana

Haiti

Honduras

Hungary

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Iran

Iraq

Republic of Ireland

Israel

Italy

Ivory Coast

Jamaica

Japan

Jordan

Kazakhstan

Kenya

Kiribati

Kuwait

Kyrgyzstan

Laos

Latvia

Lebanon

Lesotho

Liberia

Libya

Liechtenstein

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Madagascar

Malawi

Malaysia

Maldives

Mali

Malta

Marshall Islands

Mauritania

Mauritius

Mexico

Federated States of Micronesia

Moldova

Monaco

Mongolia

Montenegro

Morocco

Mozambique

Myanmar

Namibia

Nauru

Nepal

Kingdom of the Netherlands

New Zealand

Nicaragua

Niger

Nigeria

North Korea

North Macedonia

Norway

Oman

Pakistan

Palau

Panama

Papua New Guinea

Paraguay

Peru

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Qatar

Romania

Russia

Rwanda

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Lucia

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Samoa

San Marino

São Tomé and Príncipe

Saudi Arabia

Senegal

Serbia

Seychelles

Sierra Leone

Singapore

Slovakia

Slovenia

Solomon Islands

Somalia

South Africa

South Korea

South Sudan

Spain

Sri Lanka

Sudan

Suriname

Sweden

Switzerland

Syria

Tajikistan

Tanzania

Thailand

Togo

Tonga

Trinidad and Tobago

Tunisia

Turkey

Turkmenistan

Tuvalu

Uganda

Ukraine

United Arab Emirates

United Kingdom

United States

Uruguay

Uzbekistan

Vanuatu

Venezuela

Vietnam

Yemen

Zambia

Zimbabwe

Is there another noteworthy written source from the past that mentions this right?

Is the identification of this right associated with a particular era in history, political regime, or political leader?

Religious freedom, while commonplace in modern liberal democracies, was not always identified as a natural right with which people were born. Historical narratives describe the “Dark Ages” between the fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of early modernity as a period in which the world was divided between various civilizations according to the religions which they professed. Religious pluralism did not become more widespread until toleration and freedom of religion were identified as potential rights. In Western civilization, this occurred during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Reformation was one of the most influential movements in the course of western history. As leaders like Martin Luther, and John Calvin led Christian communities to break from traditional Catholicism, the rate of religious pluralism rose within Europe and led to a series of religious wars that defined the sixteenth century. In an early attempt to mediate these conflicts, German rulers negotiated the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Andrea Walsham writes that this document “established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, by which individual rulers were permitted to choose whether Catholicism or Protestantism should be professed in their states” (Walsham, “Reformation Legacies,” 231.) Thus, in addition to legalizing the practice of multiple religions within the German states, the adoption of cuius regio, eius religio also meant that religion would no longer be forced upon a principality by outside forces. The idea that Christian rulers could have the right to choose their own religion, and that this choice would be respected, represents an early step toward the principles of religious pluralism and toleration. The Peace of Augsburg did not lend religious agency to the subjects living within these principalities, but it did show European leaders that cooperation was possible between rulers who belonged to differing faiths.

The seventeenth century was an especially bloody one which included such conflicts as the English Civil War, the French Wars of Religion, and the vicious Thirty Years’ War. Religious plurality invariably led to violence in the seventeenth century, but these conflicts were often followed by important agreements that fostered some level of religious toleration. In 1598, following the religious battles between Catholics and Protestants in France, the French King Henry (IV) of Navarre signed the Edict of Nantes, which “gave Protestants permission to practice their faith openly, albeit within strict limits and as second-class citizens” (Walsham, “Reformation Legacies,” 231). The Thirty Years’ War famously concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, which decreed (among other things) that while each state should have the right to establish an official religion, they were also obligated to allow their subjects the opportunity to practice different Christian denominations without fear of persecution (Christenson, “Liberty of the Exercise of Religion in the Peace of Westphalia,” 740). By favoring religious toleration, Westphalia’s signatories recognized that only religious toleration would reduce the potential for future conflict between the various sects of Christianity. Documents like the Edict of Nantes and the Peace of Westphalia ultimately failed to end religious persecution and conflict within Europe, but they still reveal a heightened awareness of the need for leaders to tolerate religious plurality within their borders.

As the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wore on, European intelligentsia began exploring the concept of religious freedom more directly. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Baruch Spinoza led the intellectual charge in support of freedom of conscience and thought, while political leaders such as Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson incorporated principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state into their state building efforts in North America. While legal guarantees of the right to religious freedom would not be made until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern right to freedom of religion is rooted in Reformation-era efforts to mediate religious conflict and incorporate religious toleration into budding European nation-states.

What specific events or ideas contributed to its identification as a fundamental right?

After witnessing the horror of religious warfare during the Reformation era, European philosophy began to explore the idea of religious toleration within political society. As the Enlightenment movement gained momentum during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, western civilization turned to science, empiricism, and reason as sources of wisdom and knowledge. This movement was accompanied by a shift away from purely religious discourse as innovative thinkers began to take up more secular pursuits than they could have in centuries past. With this shift thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, Spinoza, and Williams began to question whether states had the right to dictate their subjects’ religious beliefs. These questions led these Enlightenment thinkers to begin believing that political society would better respect its citizens’ rights if it were to adopt policies of religious toleration.

Religious pluralism became a reality in Enlightenment-era Europe. The Protestant Reformation of the previous centuries had given rise to a number of Protestant-dominated secular states which had carved out a right to remain independent of the Catholic Church after decades of bloodshed and warfare. In the following centuries, thinkers like Spinoza and Voltaire reflected upon the dangers that intolerance can pose to a peaceful society. In 1670 Spinoza’s anonymously published “Treatise on Theology and Politics” radically asserted that “men are very prone to error on religious subjects, and, according to the diversity of their dispositions, are wont with considerable stir to put forward their own inventions, as experience more than sufficiently attests.” (Spinoza, “The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza,” 163). However, rather than calling for the abolition of religious toleration, Spinoza uses this idea that religious difference breeds conflict to suggest that states should abandon any effort to control their citizens’ beliefs, and should instead simply protect the people’s right to their own thoughts. In a state built on principles of toleration instead of religious unity, religious conflict would be less likely. A century later, Voltaire came to a similar conclusion in his 1775 “Treatise on Tolerance.” In this work, the Frenchman writes that “toleration, in fine, never led to civil war; intolerance has covered the earth with carnage,” and asserts that “the whole of our continent shows us that we must neither preach nor practise intolerance” (Voltaire, “Toleration and Other Essays-Online Library of Liberty”). By linking the idea of religious toleration to the need for states to maintain law and order within society, both Spinoza and Voltaire began to identify religious freedom as an essential facet of a well-ordered state.

Another important Enlightenment idea that contributed to the identification of the right to religious freedom was the argument that God may will that religious toleration be extended throughout the Christian world. After centuries of warfare, much of it based on the principle that members of the one true religion must fight infidels in the name of God, this was a relatively novel idea. In his 1644 work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Roger Williams rejects this idea and states that “it is the will and command of God, that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most pagan, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries...” (Williams, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution”). The Tenant even goes as far as to claim that “God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state…”(Williams, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution”). Williams’ work was not well-received by his audience in England, especially considering that the country was still in the midst of a religiously-motivated civil war. However, the idea that the civil state should not enforce any religion was hugely influential in the colony of Rhode Island, of which Williams is considered the sole founder. Decades later, in 1689 following the French King Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Locke wrote something very similar in his “Letter Concerning Toleration.” In this letter, he asserts that “the toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ...that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light” (Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration”). The desire to follow God’s will had long guided European thoughts about the connection between church and state, but thinkers like Williams and Locke presented important challenges to this notion. This allowed for discussion over the right to religious freedom to flourish as the Enlightenment wore on.

Though discourse on religious toleration was still considered fairly radical during the seventeenth century, Enlightenment philosophers also questioned whether it was indeed even possible for a state to dictate its citizens’ religious beliefs. Spinoza’s “Treatise” is heavily concerned with the idea that a person’s right to think freely is a natural right which cannot be deprived by any political society. He writes that “however unlimited, therefore, the power of a sovereign may be, however implicitly it is trusted as the exponent of law and religion, it can never prevent men from forming judgments according to their intellect, or being influenced by any given emotion” (Spinoza, “The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza,” 194). This, Spinoza believes, necessarily implies that a state could never enforce a person’s belief or religious faith because it is not possible for a state to take a person’s mastery of their own thoughts. Voltaire expresses a similar sentiment in his essays when he states that “it does not depend on man to believe or not to believe: but it depends on him to respect the usages of his country” (Voltaire, “Toleration and Other Essays-Online Library of Liberty”). Writing about a century after Spinoza, Voltaire also explored the idea that the state is unable to change how a citizen believes, as long as the belief is not inherently detrimental to the state itself. With this in mind, Voltaire advances the idea that because states cannot change its citizens’ beliefs, it should embrace a diversity of beliefs by incorporating the principle of religious freedom into its governance.

Among the most radical Enlightenment-era ideas concerning religious toleration was the thought that civil states did not have the inherent right to dictate citizens’ religion at all. Locke’s “Letter” asserts that “nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion” (Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration”). Spinoza similarly states that “government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects” (Spinoza, “The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza,” 194). This idea that citizens of a political society could have the innate right to decide their own thoughts and religion built upon the initial identification of religion as a multifaceted issue, which originated centuries earlier during the Reformation. As early as 1644, former Massachusetts Puritain Roger Williams rather controversially wrote that “all civil states and their officers of justice in their respective constitutions and administrations are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the Spiritual or Christian state and worship” (Williams, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution”). The principle that civil states could not serve as spiritual authorities directly influenced the development of political states such as the Rhode Island Colony and the United States of America, in which freedom of religion was identified as an essential right with which the government could not interfere.

Though the idea of a right to religious freedom was first conceived during the religious wars of the Reformation era, Enlightenment thinkers deserve credit for identifying religious freedom as an essential right. Questions of whether God’s will dictated religious uniformity, the dangers of combating religious pluralism, as well as issues of citizen and states’ rights all contributed, decades and centuries after they were originally pondered, to the inclusion of religious freedom in mainstream political discourse. Williams and Locke both made important contributions to the growing American discussion of essential rights and liberties, while writings from thinkers like Spinoza and Voltaire gradually invited Europeans to consider the benefits of granting religious freedom to their subjects.

When was it generally accepted as a fundamental, legally-protectable right?

What historical forces or events, if any, contributed to a widespread belief in its importance?

Legal Codification

Is this right protected in the Constitutions of most countries today?

Is it contained in the US Constitution?

Has it been interpreted as being implicit in the US Constitution?

Are there any exceptions in American law to this right?

Is this right enshrined in international and regional human rights treaties?

Philosophical Origins

What have religious and philosophical traditions contributed to our understanding of this right?

Buddhism

Platonism

Aristotelian thought

Ancient Chinese Philosophy

Stoicism

Early Indian Philosophy

Miscellaneous Hellenistic Schools (epicureans, academics, skeptics, etc.)

Roman Legal and Political Thought

Early Christianity

Thomism and medieval Christianity

Medieval Islamic Thought

Medieval Judaism

Early Modern Rationalism

Absolute Idealism

Reformation Christianity

Hobbesian Thought

Lockean Thought/English Empiricism

Physiocrats

Scottish Enlightenment

Modern Capitalism

Rousseau's Thought

Kantianism

German Idealism

Benthamite Utilitarianism

Millian Utilitarianism

Current Utilitarianism

Transcendentalism

Marxism

Early Sociology

Pragmatism

Weberian Thought

Process Philosophy

Social Darwinism

British Idealism (19th cen.)

Continental Philosophy/Frankfurt School

Behaviorism

Feminist Thought

Postmodernism

Are there any philosophical or moral traditions that dispute the classification of this right as a fundamental right?

What do the major legal theories (positive law, natural law, critical legal studies, etc.) say about this right?

Culture and Politics

Is this right interpreted and exercised in different ways in different countries? Focus on particular countries in which the right is interpreted distinctively

Is this right exercised in different ways depending on the political governance regime in place (democracy, autocracy, hybrid regime)?

Is there general and widespread belief that this right is a fundamental right that should generally be protected (and that exceptions should be rare)?

Does public polling reveal insights about the right as experienced in different countries?

Conflicts with other Rights

Are there other specific fundamental rights that tend to conflict with this right? Can you identify specific examples of this?

Are there other specific rights that are critical to the exercise of this right? Can you identify specific examples of this?

Is there a perception that this right is above or higher than other fundamental rights, or in general, that it has a particular place in a hierarchy of rights?

What specific examples of hierarchies, manifestos, constitutions, or prioritized descriptions of rights cite this right’s high status? Low status? No status at all?

How does federalism change, if at all, the exercise or application of this right? What examples of this can one point to?

Limitations / Restrictions

What are the typical exceptions or limitations placed on this right?

Under American jurisprudence, what permissible exceptions exist?

Under international human rights laws, what permissible exceptions (often called derogations) exist?

Have political theorists or philosophers discussed the permissibility of exceptions to this right?

Should this right be limited when limiting it would jeopardize democratic norms?

Is this right often perceived as threatening to government authorities?

Is this right often curtailed by government authorities for reasons other than those which are generally viewed as permissible?

Is this right at times curtailed by private actors?

Is this right subject to specific limitations in event of emergency (war, brief natural disaster [weather, earthquake], long-run natural disaster [volcano, fire, disease])? Can such limitations be defined in advance with reference to the disaster in question?

Utilitarian / Fairness Assessments

Is there a cost attached to protecting and enforcing this right? What kinds of costs are implicated?

Short-term economic cost in general

Long-term economic cost in general

Cost to those least able to economically absorb the cost

Cost to perceived democratic legitimacy

Cost to consistency or coherence of the law as a whole

Cost to the legitimacy or effectiveness of other rights

Cost to considerations of social equality

Cost to other non-material goods not so far specified

What are the financial consequences, if any, of making this right a legally protectable right?

Are there any groups that are uniquely disadvantaged by the exercise of this right?

Are there any groups that uniquely benefit from the exercise of this right?

Are there instances when this fundamental right can lead to unfairness or inequities?

Are there objective ways to measure the utilitarian nature of this right?

If so, where can one draw the line: when does this right stop being useful or economically viable?

Looking Ahead

How can we expect this right to change and evolve in the years ahead?

How is the future likely to shape the exercise of this right?

Will the exercise or protection of this right be affected by technological changes?

Under what conditions would this right become irrelevant?

Are questions of fairness and utility pertaining to this right likely to change in the years ahead?

Policy Recommendations

Can the practice or exercise of this right be shaped through executive action?

In the US context, are there particular parties with a stake or interest in amending or reconceptualizing this right?

In the US context, can this right be altered legislatively, or would it require a constitutional amendment?

Is this right best addressed at the national level? The sub-national level? The international level?

To what extent is this right shaped primarily by judicial decisions?

If this right is best addressed through the amendment process, how should it proceed?

If this right were unlimited, what might be the consequences (positive and negative)?

If this right were eliminated, what might be the consequences (positive and negative)?