A right to religious and moral freedom?

Abstract

This essay develops a normative argument against Michael Perry's approach to religious freedom. According to Perry, the to religious freedom should be expanded into a claim upon liberal democracies to religious and moral freedom. In other words, one should be free to practice one's morality, whether or not it is grounded in the transcendent. This paper argues instead that religious freedom cannot be protected by the same legal paradigm as moral freedom because religion and morality affect legal systems in different ways. Religious freedom and moral freedom are different ontological realities and therefore require different treatments under law. Religion is detachable from political communities; morality is not: political communities are by definition moral communities. Perry's expansion promotes moral permissiveness and slows and hinders the development of religious and moral values in political societies. His approach ultimately identifies moral freedom with free morality and coercively imposes a particular model of morality: namely, a liberal one. In place of Perry's expansion, this paper proposes a new expansion of religious liberty along different lines: a more specific legal distinction between the right to religion, on the one hand, and moral freedom of conscience, on the other.