Liberal Democracy and the Right to Religious Freedom

Abstract

AbstractThe Roman Catholic Church was famously late to embrace the right to religious freedom. Some have plausibly maintained that when, in 1965, the cardinals and bishops at the Second Vatican Council overwhelmingly adopted the Declaration on Religious Freedom—known by the first two words of its official Latin version: Dignitatis Humanae—the church betrayed one of its most traditional and established theological teachings. The right to religious freedom, according to international law, rests in part on respect for human dignity. Thus there is a prima facie link between the liberal democratic justification and the church's 1965 justification. But, as I will argue, the appeal to human dignity is not a preserve of modern liberal democracy. Indeed, we can imagine a government that limits religious freedom because it wishes to save souls, and this precisely out of a respect for human dignity. A similar view was held by the pre-Vatican II church. Thus the appeal to human dignity is not evidence of a fundamental shift by the church. What then does account for the church's undeniable change of direction? Human dignity by itself cannot provide the fundamental justification for the right to religious freedom. Another ingredient is needed: distrust, born of long historical experience, of government authority to adjudicate questions of religious truth. The church in Dignitatis Humanae accepted this lesson of history, a lesson available to believers of a variety of stripes as well as nonbelievers.