The meaning of freedom

By B.C.

CAN religious believers and secularists find a consensus on what sort of human entitlements are fundamentally important and in need of protection? Given that in virtually all countries that aspire to be liberal, rights-based democracies, there are people of many religious beliefs and none, that is a pretty important question. And despite the best efforts of Voltaire and other enlightened libertarians, it is still unresolved.

Theos, a religion-minded British think-tank that says it tries to foster intelligent debate about faith and public life, has just waded into these deep waters with an extended essay by its research director, Nick Spencer, on "How to Think about Religious Freedom". Although the study is written from an emphatically Christian perspective, its tone varies; it is emollient (in the sense of seeking common ground with secularism) in some places and uncompromising in others.

Mr Spencer argues that in Western thought, the very ideal of human rights is rooted in the Christian idea of a man as a creature made in the image of God, whose highest calling is to be reconciled with God. Secularists would probably retort (and Mr Spencer more or less acknowledges the force of this point) that human rights began as a protest against cruel theocracies which enforced a particular way of religious thinking and punished dissenters, either physically or by excluding them from power.

Anyway all that is behind us, the essay insists. It goes on to reject blasphemy laws as a way of sheltering faiths and their adherents from being offended; but it insists that the mildish forms of state privilege enjoyed by national churches in some Western countries, such as England and Denmark, need not compromise democracy or civil liberty. So where does the hard argument begin? Some would assert the need for both individual rights and "group rights"—the ability of freely constituted institutions, including churches and other faith communities, to live by their own rules and encourage others to do so. And religious people would put much more emphasis on group rights than some secularists would.

Religions are an example of groups which are "not coercive in the sense of exercising power over a person against their will, nor are they compulsory, in the sense of denying people the right of exit," Mr Spencer affirms. "Rather they are binding but on a voluntary basis." That said, the group rights asserted by a religion were bound to be more controversial than, say, the rules of a sports club, because "religions encompass so much more, in one sense all of life, they can seem less like a group within society than an alternative to society."

The argument gets crunchier when Mr Spencer cites some concrete examples. As a positive example of weighing religious rights against other rights, he cites a long and ultimately successful campaign by a British Hindu for the right to be cremated in the open air. In this case, the Hindu's faith-inspired wish had to be examined and balanced against the disturbance such cremations might cause to other citizens. As a less happy example, from his viewpoint, he cites the case of Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar in London who lost her job after refusing, on Christian grounds, to officiate at unions between people of the same sex. Mr Spencer argues that not enough effort was made to ascertain the source of her beliefs or the precise consequences of her stance. She had done her best to juggle shifts so that no same-sex pairs were denied the chance to tie the knot; there were no complaints from "service users".

A commonly cited ruling by an English judge lays down that in order to claim protection, beliefs must be coherent, consistent and "worthy of respect in a democratic society". But it is almost impossible to prescribe with any greater precision what is worthy of such respect: that is a matter of perpetual debate and negotiation, not just about what is ultimately right but what can tenably be argued without being manifestly offensive. Things that seemed normal a generation ago, like the frequent use of corporal punishment in schools, seem horrifying today. Secularists and believers cannot possibly fine-tune, in advance, the way they will handle situations where religious rights and other rights seem to be in conflict. Perhaps the best they can do is map out the contours of a reasoned debate.