A Modest Account of Corporate Religious Liberty

Abstract

This chapter constructs a Christian approach to corporate religious liberty. The approach holds that corporate religious liberty best applies to group actions, pursued for ends that are either distinctly religious (thus suggesting a theory of church freedoms) or religiously motivated yet secular in nature (thus suggesting a theory of religious exemptions for non-church organizations). This two-theory approach follows from the retrieval of a group ontology attributable to Saint Thomas Aquinas and developed by legal philosophers John Finnis and, separately, Richard Ekins. The ontology views groups primarily as instances of social action, and the chapter integrates it into a procedure of legal rights ascription that is informed by the political theologies of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin.