Nobody Believes in Religious Freedom
The question is not whether religious freedom is limited, but which religion will establish the moral standard that defines the limits of all others.
Nobody believes in religious freedom. At least, not in an absolute sense.
Let me explain: If a religious text allows the abuse of children, commands human sacrifice, permits the assault of women, or requires other atrocities, no high society would accept the defence that such acts ought to be protected under “religious freedom.”
The state would intervene by prohibiting such conduct and punishing those responsible for committing it. Who, at this point, would protest about the violation of the perpetrators’ “human rights”? That reality alone demonstrates that freedom of religion is not, and has never been, an unlimited principle.
Historically, the modern doctrine of religious liberty emerged within Christian civilisation, particularly in the aftermath of the Reformation. It developed in societies that assumed a broadly Christian moral framework and sought to protect freedom of conscience against state coercion, especially in matters of worship and religious profession.
The principle was not originally understood to mean that every religious claim, practice, or command lay beyond the reach of civil authority. Rather, it held that the state should not compel individuals to profess beliefs or engage in acts that they sincerely believed were contrary to God’s law. At the same time, civil authorities retained the power to prohibit conduct they regarded as contrary to public order or the moral law.
Every society, without exception, imposes limits on religious practices. If a person’s conscience, informed by his religion, compels him to commit murder, abuse, or other serious crimes, the state not only has the right but the duty to impede on that person’s “religious conviction.”
The state may restrain, punish, and if necessary, use deadly force to stop criminal conduct, whether it is religiously motivated or not. No functioning society can permit unlimited religious freedom. All religions will be regulated.
For that reason, “freedom of religion” cannot mean the unrestricted right to practice whatever one’s religion commands. That would be pure anarchy.
As such, religious freedom can only meaningfully operate within the limits of each society’s primary religious foundation. Every society has one, even secular societies. That is, the chief religious assumption behind every moral claim that is legislated or culturally imposed. In Western nations, that religious assumption has always been Christianity.
So, the question is not whether religious freedom is limited, but which religion will establish the moral standard that defines the limits of all others. And it will be religiously restricted. That much is unavoidable. This is because morality is a religious category. It doesn’t deal with how things are, but how things ought to be, according to some transendent standard.
Even secular societies are fundamentally religious in nature. Every system rotates around the god of that system, and the god of the system can be located at the source of that system’s laws.
The traditional Christian understanding was that religious freedom existed within a civilisation shaped by Christian moral assumptions. Citizens were free to worship, believe, and order their lives according to conscience, provided those actions remained consistent with the fundamental Christian moral order upon which society rested.
In practice, freedom of religion was never an absolute freedom. It was a qualified freedom operating within a recognised Christian framework. However, the more society drifts from that framework, the more difficult it is for society to identify religious and cultural limitations. For this reason, the Western world today finds itself increasingly tolerating what previous generations would have considered intolerable.
If Christianity does not define what is good, beautiful, and true, then there must be another standard that is being applied. And if that standard is not Christianity, the only question is what religious standard is now governing the limits of all others.