The Moral Foundations of Religious Liberty

[Music] first i would like to give a brief introduction to our sponsor to our speaker the intercollegiate studies institute has asked professor philpot to speak on the topic of religious liberty so there is a growing tendency to put this liberty at odds with the rights of others right as we see in different discussions and opinions of the supreme court these past few years the intercollegiate studies institute is a non-profit educational organization that seeks to promote free and serious intellectual discourse concerning the american tradition of liberty isaiah works towards this goal through student conferences their graduate fellowship program the intercollegiate review in modern age academic journals the isi book publication and reading lists and lecture series and if you would like to learn more about student opportunities with isi you can reach me through my email which i will later drop in the chat the intercollegiate studies institute is also pretty involved on campus uh they also they also sponsor the irish rover which is an independent publication here i know the name student publication i know perhaps one of you two are you in the ch and attending right now may have heard of it or have friends uh that have been published there now it is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker professor daniel philpott professor foba has been a student of political studies with undergraduate days receiving his ba from the university of virginia and later his master's in phd from harvard and government studies professor philpott uh taught at the university of california santa barbara before joining the department of political science here at notre dame 2001 where he holds the distinguished position of professor outside of notre dame he holds many other esteemed physicians such as vice chair of the board of directors at the institute for global engagement senior associate scholar at the religious freedom institute and editorial board member of the intern international dialogue a multi-disciplinary journal of world affairs politics and religion and religion politics and ideology journals professor philpot is a scholar of religion and global politics his many works could probably fill the room i'm sitting in right now and i could honestly go on for days listing his many distinctions he has written on reconciliation religious freedom religious communities sovereignty self-determination the role of the catholic church in global politics and christian political philosophy this webinar is being recorded to be posted on the isi website after the lecture after if professor philpott finishes the lecture you may all send in your questions through the q a chat on the right side of your screen you can access the tab on there now finally without further ado i present to you dr phillip daniel philpot thank you jorge let me just do a quick test can you hear me okay good i take it that's a yes thank you wonderful to be here and uh it's an honor to be asked to do this and to be here with you um even virtually um may the day be hastened where we can do these things in person again but uh it's wonderful to have this opportunity i um so my um even asked me to speak about the moral foundations of religious liberty i'm happy to do that it's a very appropriate topic for isi i'm a great admirer of isi i've known and worked with people um and close friends who are uh have been part of isi and have had admired have admired your work for many years so um anyway it's a great honor to be able to speak to you so i think i'll present about 30 minutes of remarks and then we can um hopefully that will give you something to chew on and then we can talk about religious freedom religious freedom is one of the most widely violated human rights in the world since 2009 the pew research center has reported consistently that about three-quarters of the world's population lives under a regime that heavily violates religious freedom in recent years the chinese government has cracked down on the practice of religion with an intensity not seen since the cultural revolution of 1966 to 1979 interning a million or more uyghur muslims destroying and disbanding christian churches and even removing children from worshiping worship services hundreds of thousands of rohingya muslims in burma have suffered violence and heavy discrimination at the hands of a buddhist nationalist state and buddhist armed militant groups governments in several muslim majority countries have restricted heavily and even outlawed sex that they considered heretical including ahmadis in pakistan and indonesia and baha'is in iran the scope of religious freedom is increasingly restricted in western europe and north america too though the curtailment is is not nearly as harsh the sources of the restriction are ideologically diverse and the issue is openly contested and the contestation is ongoing and its outcomes certain anti-semitism is on the rise muslims have come to face increasing restrictions on dress immigration in the construction of mosques and christians have faced challenges to their liberty to conduct commerce education and civil society services like hospitals and orphanages compatibly with traditional norms of marriage and sexuality against this vector of restriction stands the wide consensus of countries and institutions that espouse religious freedom as a fundamental civil and human right among the world's liberal democracies religious freedom has been for decades an element of the standard package of rights and privileges that are said to characterize just institutions no country considers religious freedom more foundational and integral to its liberal democratic vision than the united states supreme court justice robert jackson opined in 1943 that quote if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official high or petty can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics nationalism religion or other matters of opinion or forced citizens to confess by word or act their faiths therein unquote an american narrative of religious freedom accords great weight to the principle's articulation in the first amendments of the constitution and proceeds with a litany of communities who were persecuted and rejected elsewhere but found a home in the united states mennonites mormons muslims baptists jews huguenots catholics jehovah's witnesses amish quakers seventh-day adventists scientologists and atheists in the 1990s the united states congress demonstrated and advanced this consensus by passing two bills with overwhelming bipartisan majorities the religious freedom restoration act of 1993 which protected the conscience rights of religious people and the international religious freedom act of 1998 which mandated the promotion of religious freedom in american foreign policy religious freedom is also ensconced in international law it is articulated in article 18 of both the universal declaration of human rights and it's also article 18 in the international covenant on political and civil rights and even more thoroughly it's articulated in the long-winded title but very important document called the declaration on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief of 1981. europe too has taken up the cause several european countries and the european union have followed the united states in incorporating religious freedom into their foreign policies in the past decade and a half yet despite this momentum recent years have also seen the consensus on religious freedom within the west weakening a bevy of voices including prominent intellectuals has been calling the principle into question so much so that justice jackson's fixed star now risks becoming a battleground in a culture war yes the principle is in the constitution some ask but why on what basis does religious freedom deserve a right of its own warranting special recognition among other human rights others ask whether religion is even a coherent enough phenomenon to be applied in law they do not believe it is a genus of which there are species or a stable definable concept still others such as the writers known as the new atheist consider religion to be pernicious in irrational attitude that inevitably begets instability and violence another set of critics cast these doubts internationally and asserts that religious freedom is a product of western modernity and should not be prescribed for non-westerners who think differently about religion and its place in society particularly muslims living in muslim-majority states who are most often the object of western scorn contestation begets innovation and so the times call for a new defense of inter religious freedom what is critically needed i believe is a fresh argument for religious freedom as a universal human right not only in the positive legal sense that it is stipulated by conventions constitutions and courts but also in the moral pre-political sense that is as a natural right indeed today's critics contend that it is precisely the lack of a universal grounding for religious freedom that casts doubt about the principal's place in law whether it be international conventions or the constitutions of countries many of the major defenses of religious freedom available today argue from the premises of a faith tradition which can help to establish the principle among members but will do little to forge consensus internationally or in pluralistic domestic settings much reasoning about religious freedom also takes place within constitutional traditions a large literature accompanies the us constitution but such reasoning assumes the framework of the constitution in here question contrast i seek to sketch the outlines of the defense of religious freedom as a universal principle accessed through reason grounded in human nature and human dignity an assertion of our human right of religious freedom will not resolve or come close to resolving conflicts between religious freedom and other goods and principles such conflicts are real often difficult to resolve and are the stuff of case law in the tradition of the u.s constitution the laws of many other countries the european union and international law if i do not directly engage in these other analyses though my argument has implications for them if religion is believed to be a basic human phenomenon and a subject of inter of human rights it will have far more weight in both kinds of inquiry assessments of religious of religion's relative role in a conflict will be less likely to conclude that religion is illusory epiphenomenal or peripheral even while its role in any particular conflict remains an open empirical question legal reasoning will favor religion far more in balancing it against other goods and principles if this reasoning does not presuppose that religion is indistinguishable from generalized conscience and speech rights or that the meaning of religious freedom is impossible to know so my question remains narrower are there grounds for religious freedom as a universal human right i contend that religious freedom is indeed a distinct human right just as it is articulated in international law often in juxtaposition with thought conscience and belief and in the constitutions of about 90 percent of the world's sovereign states i argue further that the basis of the human right of religious freedom is human dignity and thus follow the lead of the preamble of the universal declaration of human rights which begins with a recognition of the inherent dignity of all members of the human family dignity alone though does not ground the specific rights found in the international conventions except perhaps the right to life on what basis do all human beings have rights to work education free speech and expression ownership of property assembly health care and the like i shall argue further that human beings possess worth not only simplicitor in itself but also with respect to certain basic goods through which they flourish to violate a basic good is to violate a dimension of a person's dignity thus human beings have rights to these goods for instance to deny a person her right to speech or education would deny her the ability to grow in knowledge a fundamental way in which her worth is realized can religious freedom also be tied to human dignity and thus human rights in this way if so then we would say that the human right of religious freedom protects a human good one that instantiates human flourishing but what is that good religion i propose well if that is my answer then another problem arises many scholars are convinced that there is no coherent universal entity called religion that is practiced by human beings as such there are different versions of this skepticism some point out the definitions of religion end up excluding cases of what most people regard as a religion for instance if religion is defined in terms of worshiping god then certain versions of hinduism buddhism and shamanism for instance would be excluded others discover the opposite problem definitions of religion end up being too wide applicable to so many phenomena that the concept loses coherence and tractability if religion is defined in terms of the sacred the luminous or spiritual then it would have to include art ardent nationalism fervent environmentalism fanatical devotion to marxist revolution and attending a guns n roses concert some scholars hold that religion as a general concept arose in western modernity especially through the influence of the protestant reformation the enlightenment colonialism and christian missions on this reasoning religion far from being a universal is a product of a certain time a particular context and most of all the interest of the powerful still others are skeptical that there is a robust concept of religion just because they believe that religion is senseless earlier i mentioned the new atheists who follow in a tradition of enlightenment thought of viewing religion as the product of pre-modern superstition that will eventually melt under the light and heat of science democracy free thought economic and technological progress education and historical criticism for thinkers like karl marx friedrich nietzsche and sigmund freud religion is an alien force that distorts and confines true human interest an oppressive superstructure a slave mentality an illusion yet there are scholars who persist in viewing religion as universal one of these is the late martin rezabrat a religious studies scholar who was at the university of chicago who in his 2010 book the promise of salvation developed a helpful way of defining and understanding religion that arguably avoids the pitfalls of other conceptions and identifies the core of what religions are all about religion's approach sorry rizabrat's approach is ingeniously simple innovatively he focuses on what ordinary people do when they practice religion and on why they do it and what they expect to get out of it whereas in recent decades scholars have approached religion as a system of beliefs an expression of ultimate meaning or the realm of the sacred and have run into problems of excessive inclusion or exclusion reason brought stress on practices holds promise for zeroing in not only on what is distinct about religion but also on how its practitioners themselves understand it sociologist christian smith my colleague here at notre dame and a prolific scholar of religion was captivated by risa braat's approach and sought to develop it and refine it refine it further in combination with some of his own commitments smith and rizabrat place central emphasis on practices in which they include prayer burning incense reading secret sacred text consulting oracles repeating incantations and scores of other behaviors that are enacted repeated endowed with meaning and prescribed by a community that exists over time the distinguishing feature of these practices what smith calls the pivotal idea in the definition is their orientation towards superhuman powers religions center around entities that its members believe are neither fashioned by humans either individually or collectively nor dependent on humans yet can quote make things happen or prevent them from happening unquote in which humans have a strong interest smith is careful to say following risa brought that superhuman is not necessarily supernatural religion may but does not necessarily involve god gods spirits higher beings holy numinous ultimate concern and sacred but rather may locate its powers and nature or other energies and dynamisms smith offers the example of dharmic religions hinduism buddhism sikhism and jainism as ones that feature impersonal powers for instance hinduism's brahman which is the creator of all that exists but lacks personhood all religions though also contain premises about superhuman powers beliefs that range from implicit presupposed meanings to elaborate and explicit statements of doctrine as my own church the catholic church has smith's inclusion of beliefs is important in contrast to other scholars of religion smith does not make beliefs the central focus of religion yet in contrast to still others he does not contend that beliefs are unique to certain religions like protestant christianity beliefs he argues are inescapably a part of religion but also inevitably intertwined with practices through practices in which humans align themselves with superhuman powers they gain benefits blessings goods rewards and avoid evils ills curses punishments the benefits and avoidance of evil may be everyday matters like success on an academic exam a sunny day or help in living virtuously or larger life-defining matters like healing from a terminal illness avoiding financial ruin or the flourishing of one's children or important spiritual matters like redemption from one's past sins enlightenment nirvana happiness entering heaven or union with god there is nothing esoteric about these benefits the benefits that religion delivers and the evils that it avoids are the kind that concern everyone the definition of religion is the sort that a sociologist or anthropologist would propound in an effort to describe human beings and their social world soundly it does not describe in depth the beliefs and practices of any one religion nor is it the work of a theologian it says nothing about whether religion is good or valuable for human beings or whether the beliefs of all some or one religion are true or truer than the rest it says nothing about whether superhuman powers of any sort god gods spirits energy centers really exist if smith is correct though that his and rhizobrot's definition is fully adequate properly inclusive properly exclusive then it succeeds in identifying distinct human activity in a general universal way the first step in arguing for a human right of religious freedom let me offer a few glosses on this definition that clarify and deepen it first other features of religion they add other features of religion add content to what religion is and typically does one is that religion provides answers to what may be called the grand questions of life where do we come from where did the universe come from what is the basis of our moral convictions why do we suffer is there help for us in our suffering what happens to us after death smith does not include the provision of answers to these questions in his definition of religion because he says that people also practice religion to gain help in everyday matters however in my view if such answers are not all that religion provides they are still central to what people across an extraordinary diversity of times and places have sought in religion and what they have hoped that superhuman powers will provide other characteristics of religion deserves mention reason brought places a central emphasis on worship or the liturgy through which people seek direct access to superhuman powers worship does not add to smith's definition it is a practice of the kind he describes it is an especially important practice though on accounts of its direct and intentional focus on superhuman powers most religions also contain a cast of clerics a core of people whose vocation is to help others establish relationship with superhuman powers religions embody a community a cohesive group of people who practice the rituals together and orient their lives around them important also is a moral code that is associated closely with the superhuman power not every religion that fits smith's definition contains all of these characteristics but most contain most of them a second gloss one which buttresses smith's argument is that people in people and peoples across an astonishingly diverse array of cultures geographic locales and historical epochs have practiced religion that fits this definition smith argues that the practice of religion can be found in every society vividly illustrating religion's extraordinary historical reach is the recent discovery of the gobekli tepe an archaeological site in turkey dating back to 9600 bce which some experts argue is a place for worship that predates agriculture the site suggests that religion is at the origin of human experience a third related gloss also buttressing smith's case is that the concept of religion also has a long history among philosophers and theologians reason brought in smith's view that religion is human and universal may be novel in the university university today but it is hardly new or exclusively modern in the western tradition the roman philosopher cicero early christian thinkers like augustine left tantrus and and the medieval philosopher chris christian philosopher thomas aquinas wrote of religion as a general human phenomenon long before the modern world ever came to be a fourth colossal that most religions both ancient and modern have understood themselves to be one among several other religions a general category different forms of which other humans practice this is clear in the cases of judaism christianity and islam the latter two of which explicitly differentiated themselves from their predecessors rizabrat maintains that buddhism jainism sikhism taoism and shintoism also contain writings whose authors conceived of their religion as one in a world also inhabited by other religions though they did not use the word of course the ways in which religions have regarded and related to other religions have varied enormously including conquest assimilation friendship dialogue syncretism and proselytism the idea that religion is a genus of which there are species though is as old as religions themselves a fifth and final gloss religion does not seem to be disappearing or proving to be an atavism as predicted by proponents of the secularization thesis who dominated the academy in the west only a generation ago during the 20th century when the secularization prediction reached its acme the share of the world population adhering to catholic and protestant christianity islam and hinduism jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000 and actually a an increase during the very time in which the academy has thought religion was disappearing the world values survey finds that in the early 2000s 79 of people surveyed in 50 countries across the globe reported belief in god whereas 73 percent reported the same in the late 1980s and early 1990s again the number is increasing global poll numbers are admittedly rough and do not capture unusually unreligious regions like northwestern europe or the recent rise of the nuns or the religiously unaffiliated in the united states a global and historical perspective though suggests far more strongly that religion is universal than that it is a primitive phenomenon in secular decline to say that religion is a universal human experience though does not establish it as one that merits protection through a universal human right a further step is needed an argument that religion is a human good that manifests human dignity aristotle taught that there are some goods that humans seek as instrumental to other goods and other goods that they seek for their own sake money is almost always an instrumental good apart from coin collectors people seek it as a means to what it can purchase goods sought for their own sake by contrast include knowledge life health play work aesthetic appreciation friendship and others some of these goods like work or knowledge can also be instrumental to other goods but what is important is that they can be final ends i follow the lead of philosophers who call them basic human goods humans apprehend the basic goods through reflection on their practical experience one looks at one's actions and asks what am i doing why to what end the answers point to basic goods the goods are not derived from logical demonstrations or from prior premises but rather are grasped through an act of the intellect i argue that religion as defined by smith is a basic good seeking right relationship with superhuman powers which is the key end of religious practices is a basic end a final end one that humans seek for their own sake a variety of experiences can serve as prompts that lead people to religion an encounter with the beauty of religion as practiced by a person or a community a grasp of the truth of a particular religion an attraction to religion as an answer to suffering a relatively unreflective continuation of one's upbringing or a desire to support one's religious spouse once people do take up religion though orienting themselves towards superhuman practice they will usually find intrinsic fulfillment in religion at least to some degree now it may seem that one aspect of smith's definition risks rendering religion an instrumental good namely he says that practices that illicit right relationship with superhuman powers are performed in hope of realizing human goods and avoiding things bad is this not precisely instrumental i think smith is correct in incorporating the hope of receiving goods and of avoiding ills into his definition of religion they are essential to why people engage in religious practices undoubtedly there are people who engage in religious practices in order to gain benefits in the most crassly instrumental or transactional sense think of the huckster tv preacher for instance perhaps they think they can manipulate the superhuman powers or simply the other members of the community in order to elicit material prosperity even the more typically sincere religious person though anticipates manifold benefits from her practice of religion as noted above these range widely and might include the healing of a relative success on an examination friendship and community peace with god enlightenment nirvana and union with god is religion therefore only an instrumental good such a conclusion i contend is a distortion of what religion is and does to say that a is instrumental to be is to say that a and b are separate entities and that a is a means of achieving b do the practices through which a person religious person seeks harmony with a superhuman power and the benefits that the person hopes to result from or ills to be avoided through this harmony match this description in fact authentic religion does not easily fit this picture of instrumentality the benefits and the avoidance of ills are better seen as part and parcel of the practice of religion rather than effects that are produced by a cause above i substituted the term right relationship as a shorthand for smith's three terms of communication access and alignment relationship can note something important about these terms which is the two-way traffic that they describe between humans and the superhuman in which humans partition and treat honor worship and seek to please and the superhuman supplies bestows and blesses in this sense religion is a common good shared not only between the members of the religious community but also between these members and the superhuman power the benefits and the evils asking for them receiving them being saved from them i submit are part and parcel of the relationship which people conceive as an end in itself helpful here is an analogy with another basic human good that is enacted in common friendship which is instantiated through a relationship between people mutually willing one another's good this willing involves often involves the bestowing of benefits one friend lends the other money looks after his children when he is gone offers advice buys him a beer and so on yet at least to the friendship as a strong one we would be missing the mark if we say that the friends viewed their relationship merely as a means to these goods it is more accurate to say that they will these goods as an expression of their friendship the same is true with the relationship between humans and the superhuman power that is religion the practices through which humans seek to be right with a superhuman power and the reciprocal actions of that power together constitute a good that they value for its own sake it is just because religion has this relational character that we may describe the crest instrumentalist again think of the huckster tv preacher as one who misunderstands and malpractices religion as a human good a basic aspect of human fulfillment religion is a dimension of human dignity dignity can mean either intrinsic worth or excellence due to one's station in the present argument intrinsic worth is most immediately relevant human beings should not be violated because they have intrinsic worth their religion is a dimension of this intrinsic worth to violate it is to violate their dignity in a certain sense though excellence is important too not the excellence of this or that class of human beings but of all human beings by virtue of what sort of creature they are human beings are excellent because of their free will their intelligence their capacity for interpersonal love and i would argue their results in capacity for realizing basic human goods which are intrinsically valuable excellence isn't that closely tied with worth human beings have dignity because of their excellence a final point on the basic human good of religion it is not diminished by the fact that some persons elect not to practice it whether they are atheist agnostic or passively indifferent my argument makes no judgment of the validity of reasons for non-practice these persons may be unconvinced that superhuman powers really exist they may find religion unjust or wrongly restrictive or perhaps they have experienced religion in a negative way neither the definition of religion nor the argument for religion as a basic good though makes a claim about the reality of any or all superhuman powers were it known for certain that they do not exist then one might conclude that the good of religion is illusory and void of value i know of no convincing argument however that they certainly do not exist no proof of atheism the dignity of the person with respect to the practice of religion is the core of the human right to religious freedom from the fact that religion is a basic good a fundamental intrinsic non-instrumental dimension of human flourishing arises the moral norm that no person faction militant group community or government may interfere with a person's practice of religion including his religious practice in coordination with others in a religious community there is one other critical reason why religion must be free that is implicit in both smith's definition of religion and in the account of religion as a basic good that is virtually all religions place a critical stress on interior commitment the will the heart the enlightened mind sincerity authenticity and right motive this interior commitment is not a part of the definition of religion that i am playing here rather it is a quality that properly accompanies the practices and beliefs that are a part of the definition and one that religions that most religions emphatically stress they stress it in a variety of ways many religious faiths place strong value on a basic profession of faith both on the part of children who are brought up in their religious community and a part of people who enter the community from the outside the value of such a profession is tied to its sincerity those going through the motions doing only what they are told or committing themselves mindlessly are considered less virtuous further still all religions place central stress on interior cultivation whether it be the engagement of the heart and the soul growth and virtue practicing true worship exercising sincere belief in faith achieving enlightenment surrendering to god or practicing loving-kindness of course religions also invoke criteria for outward conformity whether this pertains to moral norms the practices of virtues dietary matters ritual and numerous other activities external behavior though is to be performed with sincerity and right motive finally simply insofar as religion is a basic good in the way that i described above it engages the will and the understanding it is chosen like all basic goods that are chosen through a deliberate and knowledgeable act outward behavior and inward commitment then are inextricably linked if this interior commitment is to be genuine it cannot be coerced were it coerced or were it adopted out of fear of harm at the hands of others for social approval or to avoid shame the commitment would not be a commitment at all so too the search for and the ability to reject such commitments out of conscience is entailed in the very same freedom more formally religious freedom is the civic right of all persons in religious communities to express practice and spread their religion in all of its public and private dimensions and to be free from heavy discrimination on accounts of their religion in essence religious freedom means that no person alone or in community should have to pay a material penalty for the practice of her religion religious freedom is not an absolute right that is to say this right does not give religious people license to do anything they like in the practice of their religion all of the major human rights conventions as well as important statements of the right such as the catholic church's landmark declaration of 1965 dignitades humane make this point religious people may not curtail the religious freedom of others in the name of their own religion religious people may not violate other human rights either to take some obvious those sadly genuine examples religions may not practice child sacrifice or lead their members in committing suicide as at jonestown of course there are controversies polygeny and female genital mutilation are examples of religiously authorized practices that many believe to violate other human rights but are globally disputed then there are the numerous numerous controversies that make up the subject matter of constitutional law and developed democracies where judges decide how religion is to be balanced against other goods again resolving these many controversies is not my task here rather it is to outline an argument for why religion deserves to be enumerated as a distinct right the boundaries of whose practice then need to be delineated the grounding for the right of religious freedom that i have offered however does imply that religion ought to be afforded wide deference in a presumption against restriction the concept of basic goods indeed helps us decide where the boundaries of this deference in presumption lie again one ought not to violate or destroy one base of good in the pursuit of another if religion damages life bodily integrity the pursuit of knowledge through education or other basic goods then it may justly be restricted or regulated short of this its practice ought to be respected what i have been arguing for is a moral right of religious freedom a natural right a human right such a right is pre-political meaning that it does not require enactment in positive law for its validity but the value of this right urges just such an enactment so it may be considered a great historical achievement that this right has been incorporated into the major human rights conventions the constitutions of developed democracies and many other countries and the european union the purpose of the human right of religious freedom is to protect the wide diversity of ways in which humans relate to powers that are beyond human and live out answers to ultimate questions here i have sought to articulate a manner in which this human right might be grounded and defended to the degree that religion enjoys such a grounding in defense it merits a right of its own and ought not simply to be folded into rights like speech belief conscience or expressed or assimilated into broad principles like equality and democracy like so many scholars are proposing today while this argument alone cannot show how religion is to be balanced against other goods and principles it purports to answer contemporary critics who claim either that religion does not merit a right of its own in law and policy or more strongly that religion is pernicious and not not to be protected at all religion i maintain is a dimension of human dignity whose free pursuit according to conscience ought to be protected [Music] so that brings me to the end of my remarks and i would love to engage in comments and questions uh the discussion you had on smith's definition of religion uh yeah we don't typically hear uh someone define religions in in any sort of concise way it's more of a connotative term we know it when we see it in a sort of way uh so before i open it up to questions from the other attendees i would like to serve my own question actually that being what does religious liberty look like in policy in a practical sense because we there's it's very much disputed right in the sense that perhaps religious liberty could be achieved if we don't engage in the religious questions at all if we just simply evacuate religion from the public square i'm wondering if you can speak to that yeah well now of course again there are many many you know constitutional lawyers just uh there are thousands of pages written on you know religion and how it is balanced against other things what its scope is you know the question of whether there are exemptions to generally applicable laws uh for for religious uh conscience and so forth and so on um i think at a minimum um religious freedom i want to argue is a coherent definable right and ought to be incorporated into law and what it means in in at the core is that nobody whether that's another person another organization another or a government can there's kind of a presumption against interference in the basic practice of that religion in other words if it's going to be interfered with or or coerced by somebody in other words blocked by anybody or even put a place a penalty on it like you think of the hhs mandate under the obama administration where they said we're not going to go out and block you from and coerce you into but you're going to pay a heavy fine if you don't incorporate contraception into board of patients into your you know organization's health care so notre dame or whoever you're going to pay a huge fine so there's a penalty that's a form of coercion as i see it in other words religious freedom means that you should be able to live and practice your religious faith without any kind of penalty or price imposed by another or discrimination so if i belong to a certain religion i shouldn't have any less access to public offices and we have a no religion test in our constitution no religious tests in other words in in a lot of countries if you don't belong to the in religion then you're probably you're not likely to hold government office or you're not likely to um have the best jobs or the best positions or you know you're going to be excluded because you're not a muslim or hindu or what have you right so that shouldn't matter so again that's a form of penalty that person is discriminated against penalized faces a disadvantage because of his or her religion and that shouldn't be true either so there should be a very wide scope of strong presumption against any kind of coercion the only case the only coercion would be if religious people are doing something that violates the basic human rights of others so if i'm practicing my religion in a way that makes it somebody else can't practice their religion or if i'm practicing some kind of cruelty or something like that then that's where we draw the line or you know imposing some damage to the public good or the common good of an egregious sort um so uh yeah that that that's the way now that of course there again there are there are controversial cases in the united states in the 19th century the supreme court said to mormons you can't have polygamy now were they practicing one of those cruel practices or was that something that should be within their scope of their religious practice i would argue i would tend to argue the supreme court was right i think that i come down on the side of saying that polygamy is a kind of a cruel and abusive practice they might disagree maybe they would say a man can have three or four wives and treat them all with equal dignity and everybody gets along just fine i'm skeptical but uh but you know that's the kind of case we have to adjudicate which side of the line does it fall upon so great great no that was a great answer thank you so much for that uh so i have a question here and max asks is there an argument to be made that secularism is itself religion i know you in smith's definition he sort of has the element of the supernatural involved in it so it kind of comes at odds with thinking of secularism or thinking about under these other secular forms as sometimes we like to call them religious in a sense right so yeah wondering if you could speak to that [Music] yeah so the question is at the core about the supernatural right it's yeah it's it's about the claim that secularism itself is a religion oh i see yeah right um well there is insight there um in that um you know secularism often wants to say that it represents a kind of neutral baseline of human experience that neutral non-judgmental um something everybody can agree upon and then religion is said to be the sort of the irrational um departure from that so again that was the thinking of the secularization paradigm which dominated the academy probably still does in in the west although it's been challenged too um that says that secularization the idea that came out of the western enlightenment says that it's normal for people to be secular right that's normal that's rational that's normal and that's the basis on which we can all get along when people are religious they're they're superstitious they're doing something that is kind of just based on feeling and desire and irrationality and and if they start making big claims then because it's irrational it's going to start leading to conflict and violence and things like that so that's the secular now the kind of one of the forms of pushback against that on the part of religious people is to say to the secular well you know you in fact you know your secularism is not as universal and rational and normal and neutral as you say it is in fact your secularism is really just another form of religion um your secularism is something that is unusual in world history it's confined to a particular time and place it's um you know people hold it with a kind of fundamentalist fervor and so your secularism is just another religion too and so i think that there's a valid response in that in wanting to kind of dethrone the secularism right however i would not quite go as far as say saying that secularism is a religion um i would say that secularism is maybe a form of political theology it's a doctrine with claims about religious truth we ought to take it as such but um you know i don't want to i want to you know i worry about you know defining religion too broadly such that it's anything and everything because if it becomes everything then it doesn't become anything and then we lose the basis for saying that it's a phenomenon that deserves protection then we fall right into the hands of the people who say that um there's no real coherent entity here that forms the basis of any human right so i think that one of the things that makes religion religion and that characterizes the core thing that characterizes how how people have practiced it is a kind of right relationship that one seeks with the more than human a more than human um entity that is very very important very great that is ultimate that has answers to the ultimate questions and um you know is uh of the most important things and um so it's it's a relationship with a beyond human entity that has that kind of ultimate ground kind of quality and status and i think that's a that's not just a belief and it's through practices that we access that we through actions that we live that you know harmony seek that harmony a right relationship with the the more than human so it's not just a matter of uh abstract beliefs or it's not just an ism right it's not just a doctrine that's one of the things that i think how religion is being portrayed in the modern world is it's just another set of beliefs well just another set of beliefs then why should it and this is what the skeptics are saying why should it have special protection why not you know why not other beliefs why not the ethical society why not um environmentalism marxism whatever why doesn't that deserve equal status so then we start saying well you know it's hard to answer that if it's just a set of beliefs then why why have a you know place in it for our first amendment why not just make it a matter of conscience and speech and all that so i i guess i think there's there's a phenomenon there that's a lot more than just um beliefs it's a it's a right relationship with an entity that is more than human great that was yeah that basically got right into the heart of the question i think i think that was really direct great the next question i have here is from your understanding of catholic intellectual and political tradition uh and your engagement with that what do you find to be the most challenging argument against religious freedom the most challenge from from a catholic perspective right well um i mean i think there are the two big arguments now that are kind of um have kind of arisen in recent years that are seeking to bring religion down so to speak are one is what i would call the enlightenment argument which says that um religion is not really distinctive it's just one of many choices that people can make beliefs that people can have and so forth and so that's one but i think i've kind of answered that i think it's not just a belief it's not just a choice it's a relationship with a more than human entity [Music] but then the other is what i might call the post-modern critique which says that religion is just a concept that was invented by the modern west and is sort of imposed on the rest of the world it's sort of a western colonialist western imperialist kind of thing and um you know uh religion the idea that there's religion that there's a kind of category of which there are many kinds the art the criticism is that that's something that just arose in the modern world it's really christians and western colonialists that took this took that and started imposing it upon people who never thought of themselves as a religion so take something like hinduism well people over there who are hindus they don't think of themselves as members of a religion called hinduism they never did it's just a bunch of people who had a set of practices and beliefs in a particular part of the world it's called hindu because it came out of the indus river region and to call it hinduism is to make it into something kind of in our own image western christians do that because we think of our faith as a religion and then we impose it on them we make everybody else out to be a religion but we're making them out to be something that is like us or that's not how they think of themselves right and so it ends up becoming kind of a tool of domination so colonialists make hinduism out to be a religion and then they then they say well it's inferior it's an inferior form it's not as true as christianity and therefore we can dominate them and impose ours on theirs but uh yeah i mean this has to i think there is some truth to that i think religion has been used in that way but um again i don't accept the critique in the end i think it's um uh i think religion is a more distinctive human phenomenon that it's not just a product of modernity you can find it in the thought of thomas aquinas he thought that religion was a natural human virtue very similar to how i think of it you know by which people worship god he thought god could be known by reason so even before we have the revealed truths of christianity that he thought were critically important he thought that religion was a natural human good in doing so he derived that idea he cites cicero it was a pagan philosopher i mean plato we find the idea of the gods so way before modernity we get something like religion then you know risa brought argues that eastern religions also think of themselves as something like religious traditions they're where they're where they are one in a world where there are others and uh so lots lots more can be said but i again i don't quite buy that post-modern critique either now on the catholicism dimension for me the great great statement of religious freedom is not just for me it is the great statement of religious freedom is dignitat as humane so 1965 the catholic vatican council declares religious freedom [Music] as a universal human right so i mean i'm deeply inspired by dignitado's humanity in fact a lot of my way of thinking about it is really um thanks to dignitatis humanity is really due to the framework of how it laid it out but um so it said that you know dignitaries humanity made very clear that the catholic church was not backing off its claim about truth about truth as revealed by god through jesus christ and ultimately i thought that the purpose of religious freedom was to give people the space you know to search for the truth the search for that truth which is the truth that in you know adheres in the catholic church but there had to be religious freedom for every human being based upon their human dignity and their search for and embrace of that truth had to be free because it was something that we embraced through judgment through choice through free will and to short-circuit that is to fail to respect that human dignity you can kind of see the lines of my own argument a critic might say that basically i'm just kind of you know importing human dignity humane but if you look at also there was another document of the second vatican council called nostra etate which was a document on other religions and it sort of placed the catholic church's relationship with other religions on a new footing much more one of dialogue and encounter and friendship but in so doing they recognize that their value there is value to other religions that they have value and have truth and um and so i think that kind of goes with the idea of religion being a basic good that it's something that uh there are other religions other ways in which people instantiate that relationship through the more than human now the catholic church would say still is adhering to its claim that the catholic church has the fullness of truth but um but it recognizes the dignity of the search for truth recognizes their other religions which have partial truth that demand respect and um so in a way you know my own thinking is kind of trying to flush out the um you know what stands at the intersection of those documents great i think also another element to the question that was that was asked that you're answering was i think it's kind of pointing to a tendency that we're seeing with uh sort of this radical traditionalism within the catholic church the form of integralism right that oh yeah people like to point to aquinas's stance on her politics uh i like to point to these days and say well the state has a role in promoting promoting the right religion and therefore the space for religious liberty is very very limited if there's any so yeah what you would have to say about that through a catholic perspective is uh you just spoke about dignitas humane second vatican council little gentleman right yeah yeah so there yeah there is this big kind of movement of foot called integralism and um it seems to be kind of uh rooted in a sort of wordy that the catholic church is getting marginalized and you know i think there are real threats along those lines i tend to agree with the integralists in terms of what they see as the problem a kind of secular liberalism that is sort of you know shoving you know i think as the question earlier said shoving religion out of the public square um but you have to ask more more deeply well what does it mean one thing integralism could mean it just should be that religion should have much more of a role in public life and shouldn't be marginalized in which case i agree but i think that sometimes they mean more sometimes what they mean is um that there ought to be an established church now interestingly you might ask is an established church compatible with dignitatis humanity you might think at first what no it wouldn't be religious freedom means no established church but however it doesn't necessarily mean that and dignitaries humanity does allow that you can have an established church so the united states we have a you know the first amendment forbids the national established church congress shall make no law you know but many european countries western countries there are established churches england has one until recently most scandinavian countries had one i mean germany sort of establishes two or at least posits too and then raises tax money for those two churches so dignitado's humanity says you can have a kind of direct government support for for religion and it can be an established church but it says you also have to have religious freedom so if you don't belong to the established church then you should be able to still have religious freedom and again england is a great example they've got an established church but you know maybe part of the issues no one believes in it anymore but uh but but also regardless of whether anyone believes in the alien church there are uh you can belong to another religion and be free methodist a muslim baptist whatever and uh so there is religious freedom there and um so establish church okay that's where the interval is flunt now the united states we have a problem with our constitution not going to allow that but the integralists tend to think well unless you have the established church again um the catholic church is going to be marginalized however some integralists go to a third level which is to seem to want to peel back dignitados humane or argue that dignitaries humane doesn't in fact forbid coercion of non-catholic religious faith and there i would have to take issue with it pretty directly i think that uh dignity humanity does in fact forbid coercion and um uh yeah i don't i wouldn't interpret it in a way that means something otherwise and uh so that's where some point some intervals argue that that's where i would take issue for all the reasons that i outlined in my lecture and you know and i think that that's the proper interpretation of dignitas humane great great so we're getting close to the end of the hour we have time for one more question and we have one right here it's a great question uh and it has to do with the reconciliation of religious liberty with other rights i'm just going to read this question directly if religious practice is leading to an ultimate good how can we place another good and for example right to education above it the religious person is not going to see the value of that other good and the outsider is not not going to see the value of the religious practice what is the concept of good that we can use to evaluate other final goods and goods yeah so in my view um basic goods are natural they're knowable they're constitutive of human flourishing they're goods which everybody um every human being ought to practice ought to be have the freedom to practice and realize um and pursue um so um you know uh if somebody doesn't perceive religion to be a basic good i would just argue well you know i think you're wrong about that religion is a basic human good for all persons and let's talk about why you don't perceive it as such and you know have a discussion about that but there are other basic human goods and um i take other basic human goods to be a kind of beginning of a set of guidelines for you know where those limits to religious freedom might be so if religious people are then practicing their religion in a way that violates other human goods of other people then that would be a problem um i i'm just trying to think of examples um i mean maybe um yes i mean you could you mentioned the work case right you know yeah argument within it is well all right you allow the religious liberty or the these nuns to follow their convictions you are limiting the good of you know access to reproductive health for example right okay yeah all right so good so yeah this is this is the issue is um and uh i think that if um you know biden is elected as it looks like probably will happen that's kind of in flux right now we'll start to see those kinds of issues again where religious freedom proposes to be curtailed on the basis of other things that are claimed to be a good like same-sex marriage or reproductive health a right to an abortion or what have you and um one of the things yeah that makes that challenging is that other people are the people are saying well that's a right to conscience that you know to be for people to be married to a member of the same sex is um well i have i believe that's my religious beliefs that that's okay right so my religious freedom should be able to allow me to do that um well this is a so i'm skeptical of this but this is where i would invoke i think i could invoke natural law that um so again i don't i'm not going to make the argument in the rounds of the constitution or law but let's take it just on grounds of justice um and reasoning according to natural law well i would say that um you know the same-sex marriage thing is not uh doesn't trump religion because it's not really marriage i don't think it's really a good so i would take the view that the claim that that's marriage is not really right that it's not really marriage and nor is um our sexual acts or relationships be based on sexual acts between members of the same sex that does not have the status of a good that's a false good and a parent good or it's not really a human good whereas marriage defined as between men and women really is a human good and abortion is not a human good it's not a true right because it's one person violating the basic good of another uh their life and so there's no there's no right to an abortion in fact there's a right to not be aborted um in the right to life and so i would argue that that the the reasoning on which that purports to restrict religion it just doesn't pass muster according to natural law those are not real goods that are being asserted against religion now this is a problem as we saw in the under the obama administration i think we're going to see a return to these kinds of issues under biden harris if that's how things go with our election uh but it's also on the international level so the um no less than the u.n special rapporteur on human rights who was supposed to be like the main guy in the u.n sorry rapporteur on religious freedom this is remarkable the main guy in the world who is supposed to be the un's guy on religious freedom he himself wrote a paper last year saying that religious freedom you know should be restricted or does not mean interfering in any way with um same-sex marriage or abortion rights and in fact it ought to be restricted and curtailed and has limits when it rubs up against those other rights he thinks those things ought to trump religious freedom in international law well for me this is enormously problematic that the special rapporteur would argue this and so i wrote a paper for the heritage foundation in which i argued this and that's where i made the argument that these kinds of claims are not based on natural law therefore should not restrict religious freedom but um that's where i think if if we depart from natural law and start putting human rights based upon just whatever anyone claims or desires then you know there's no end to it and i think religious freedom is in big trouble becomes very precarious i think a natural law foundation both shows why religious freedom is valuable but also helps to show why other things can't trump it great great and that was a very astute question as well it's actually spoke directly to what i was thinking as well and what i mentioned yeah in the introduction which is that there seems to be a tendency to sort of pit religiously with against other rights right that it seems to be sort of a zero-sum game where if you allow if yeah you allow religious liberty to win in the in the supreme court then it comes at the expense of other rights and uh it's very personal as well we see it uh we just saw uh fulton versus uh the city of philadelphia that was just argued a few days ago i think it was on election day i was arguing that they had oral arguments and that's another you know that's another chaos yeah right you know yeah that's coming up yeah right the right of right self-determination by family is right to adopt whomever yeah uh versus the rights of the catholic church to recognize what is religious freedom properly and uh defend them against the city of philadelphia defend these agencies yeah i might also point out oh go ahead no yeah no go ahead please oh say under the obama administration the head of the civil rights committee commission no less said that religious freedom was just um nothing more than a kind of cloak for bigotry so that's a pretty remarkable thing for the head of the civil rights commission to say um so this is the this is a sort of worry not just that they think religious freedom can be trumped by other things but i think it's just not i mean it's you know it's our first amendment of the constitution and he's saying it's a club for bigotry um well if that's the thinking then well we've got problems right i'm wondering if you can actually take one more quick question we just and this is another great question actually has to do with uh kennedy's opinion both in planned parenthood versus casey and also in alberta uh where he states very famously right that human beings have the right to uh define their own reality so why should we why should we take the natural law stance rather than justice yeah well that's a great expression of the view that um contrasts with my view which is a natural law view and so kennedy's view that statement by kennedy is probably the kind of signature expression of what might be called self-expressive individualism which says that um no natural guns or natural law is incorporated into public morality um rather we just try to build a political sphere in which everybody has rights they don't interfere with anybody else's rights but within their sphere then we give them that sphere to kind of define their own existence to sort of positive their own morality define their own morality pursue it as they wish based on their desires and um you know nothing nothing can interfere with that and it's the thinking of people who hold that view that are that the people who hold that view are the ones who are calling religious freedom into question because religion then is just another one of the whole you know wide menu of choices that a person could choose to find the mystery of one's own existence well they might define that as religion they might define that as playing golf on sunday morning they might define that as tree hugging they might define that as um you know whatever whatever they want or none of that or anything not nothing at all and so um they would say well privileging religion there's just no basis for that privilege privileging religion is just um you know picking out one of many possible choices and giving that status in the law there's no basis for that but by contrast in contrast to a self-expressive individualist view of public life and law i would defend a natural law perspective which would hold that rights have their foundation in human dignity and human dignity is connected with basic human goods and is defined as closely linked with moral norms that are based upon that dignity and those goods fixed moral norms and that um those moral norms are the natural law law which anybody can apprehend by virtue of their reason but has a fixity with respect to the goods and norms that it involves and um so we we give people a wide freedom in modern societies but we give them that freedom in order to pursue those uh those goods in a life a vocation defined in terms of those goods that's very different from defining one's own existence right so freedom has a purpose is ordered towards the good and um so in that firmament then i would call religionism is a basic good religion is one of the religion is a good that people should should be protected for people to pursue and not be interfered with great great so yes unfortunately we've reached the end of the hour i first i would love to thank you professor philpot for taking the time to give us this great lecture in the fall and thank you to the attendees for not only attending but also the great questions that you presented a professor and of course i'd like to thank the intercollegiate studies institute for hosting this event and again uh you can contact me i put my email in the chat if you're interested in getting involved with interested in other opportunities especially with student conferences that the intercollegiate studies institute organizes so in the future hopefully in person soon we can have these sort of conferences where we can engage in this these different topics with professors like professor philpott um and you can engage them with people outside of notre dame uh and your fellow peers so yeah right in these sort of prospects please contact me through my email so chad great with two two last comments one is if you um are interested in reading the paper that is my lecture is drawn from i'm happy to share it um it's forthcoming as in an edited volume and then secondly i just want to thank you and give my full encouragement to the isi group forming here on campus i think that's fantastic and into isi and to express my gratitude and encouragement for all that you do you

Channel: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Views: 121

Keywords: religious freedom, religious liberty, Adam Smith, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI, Daniel Philpott

Id: nnzgij8nGbA

Length: 80min 10sec (4810 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020