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A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: (1) it confines the relevance of 'religion' to limited social contexts; (2) it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; (3) it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say (or refrain from saying) if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; (4) it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the kind of religious establishment that currently obtains in England is sufficiently liberal in the sense that it accommodates rights to religious freedom and is compatible with political equality. What is more, insofar as it expresses a Christian anthropology, established Anglicanism can generate the 'thick' set of virtues necessary to make citizens capable of respecting liberal rights. In the course of defending its thesis, the argument disputes John Rawls's description of the 'overlapping consensus' as one that stands free of its supporting comprehensive doctrines; and it reads Martha Nussbaum as, ironically, confirming that an established orthodoxy of some sort is inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peculiar and particular manner in which freedom of religion is promoted and protected in the United Kingdom owes much to the nation's history. This article offers a highly selective consideration of some of the incidents of history which have shaped or foreshadowed the lived reality of freedom of religion in Britain today. It traces key episodes over past centuries, crudely categorised as the Seven Ages of Religious Liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically assesses an account of religious liberty often associated with several legal and political philosophers: Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager. Calling it the Religion as Comprehensive Doctrine approach (RCD), the author contrasts it with an account often attributed to John Locke and the American Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Two Sovereigns approach (TS). He argues that the latter provides an important corrective to RCD's chief weakness: RCD eliminates (or greatly diminishes) from our vision those aspects of religious belief and practice that most conventional religious believers would consider essential to their faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches' failure to respond to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction surveys the contributions to this issue, which were originally delivered at Oxford University in 2018. By exploring the interconnections and shared motifs, this article suggests that the answer to this symposium is a tentative 'yes', but that the sources of those threats arise from the background culture within which these papers are situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom: freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and no state establishment of religion. Since the 1940s, the United States Supreme Court has upheld these religious freedom principles in more than 170 cases, albeit unevenly of late. Moreover, in recent years religious freedom has come under sharp popular and academic attack, particularly as religious pathologies have come to light and religious freedom claims have clashed with sexual liberty claims. This article calls for a return to the first principles of religious freedom for all, at home and abroad, and for a new balance between religious freedom and other fundamental rights claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]