Paul Martens is an associate professor of ethics at Baylor University. This post is based on a presentation given at the ICLRS-sponsored workshop “Religious Freedom, Flourishing Societies, and the Role of Law,” held at Christ Church, University of Oxford, 27–28 July 2026.
As a scholar of religion looking in at the respective legal and political debates around freedom of religion from the outside, I continue to be a little bemused by the way “religion” functions in this discourse. With that as a provocation, I offer the following tentative comments from the perspective of someone who has spent a few decades working in theological and religious ethics. These comments begin with what seem to be pedantic notes about the term religion. With apologies, providing this context is necessary so that I can narrate the story of the relationship between religion and the state in a different key, a key that opens additional perspectives on the conceptual application of teleology.
A Preliminary Word on Religion and Its Relation to Christianity
To state the obvious that is common knowledge: religion is a term with Latin roots that emerged in Western Christianity. That is, its definition is endemic to the story of the West. From its deep ties to monastic life in medieval Europe, its post-Reformation transformation rather arbitrarily became the generic umbrella term for the diverse belief and ritual systems encountered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of European exploration and colonization. But, as with virtually everything in this era, these various belief and ritual systems were subjected to a less-than-benign analysis and classification under the guise of comparative religion, philosophy of religion, or history of religions. Almost universally (and unsurprisingly), Christianity emerged from these analyses as the superior and final form of religion.
A quick side note for those interested in religious freedom: it is important to step back and note two realities that are frequently passed over too quickly at this point.
- On one hand, as briefly indicated above, Christianity has always held a relative advantage in this conversation since its inception.
- On the other hand, the relative value of Christianity here is not unambiguous because the argument for religious freedom emerged in the West as a coherent political argument to maintain freedom against oppressive forms of Christianity.
To my mind, Christians in the contemporary context arguing for religious freedom need to recognize these ambivalent roots—both the tremendous relative advantage but also the temptation to fall back into historic patterns of intolerance.
Finally, contrary to a narrow thread of political reasoning since the Enlightenment, religion is unapologetically public. From the perspective of many theologians and leaders of the church, Christianity was and always has been public and political, at least political in a broad sense. Think, for example, about King Herod’s reaction to news about Jesus’s birth in Matthew 2, or the Christian refusal to bow to Emperor Diocletian in the fourth century. That is to say, by their own self-understanding and practice, religions—including Christianity—almost universally assumed that worshipping together, engaging neighbors, caring for the poor, and manifesting devotion to God or the gods through other acts are exercises with public entailments that are integral to religion in virtually all forms.
Of course, this notion of religion as public persists in Christian circles today—whether in progressive circles (see the social gospeland its heirs) or in more conservative circles reflected on the pages of National Affairs with its familiar claims like the following: “It is one thing to carve out exceptions for orthodox religious beliefs; it is quite another to carve out exemptions for a growing and ever-changing group of belief systems used, at times in bad faith, to justify what are ultimately policy preferences.”
The Political Mastery of Religion in the West
While academics were seeking to capture the trajectories of the world’s religions within the boundedness of Christianity, political thinkers were trying to capture the public influence of Christianity within the confines of reason. Wrestling through the Euthyphro dilemma in a new context, Enlightenment philosophers sought to ground reason and its political judgments in something external to religion. This did not mean that reason was necessarily inimical to religion (though Voltaire, Hume, and others certainly argued this passionately); it usually meant that Christianity, even as the superior religion, needed to be superseded—in one way or another—by a form of reason.
One popular alternative: religion needs to be bounded or limited by reason. Immanuel Kant straightforwardly embraced precisely this terminology, articulating a form of practical reasoning as the logical culmination of Christianity; John Locke and others framed the conversation a little differently and less competitively by falling back to something like the medieval distinction between human law that directs humans toward temporal ends (using reason) and divine law that directs humans to eternal ends (using revelation). In the Kantian version, Christianity continued to be the most moral form of religion that laid the foundation for practical reason. In the broadly Lockean version, Christianity continued to be relevant as the means of caring for souls. For both Locke and Kant, however, religion and reason could be qualitatively differentiated, and this distinction has been essential to the judicial debates around religious freedom since the beginning. Procedural. Minimalist. And boring.
Another increasingly tempting alternative: religion needs to be taken up into the state. This approach, rather than positing reason over, against, or qualitatively separate from religion, elevated reason through a form of deification of the laws of the state. One of the more robust versions of this narrative can be found in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where “the spiritual realm brings the existence of its heaven down to earth in this world, to the ordinary secularity of actuality” (p. 380). But even without the complex trappings of Hegel’s philosophy, post-Enlightenment forms of civil religion that display this tendency stretch from post-Revolutionary France (with Christian antipathy) to the continued US American notion of being a “city on a hill” and, later, Manifest Destiny (with Christian sympathy), to say nothing of the current US Department of Justice Religious Liberty Commission and its large Evangelical following. Given the reality noted above that religious freedom’s first opponent was, in fact, Christianity, the present temptations should come as no surprise.
In both pro- and anti-Christian directions indicated above, the state takes on the role of the ultimate arbiter of religious life by attributing to itself the devotion usually ascribed to religion; in both directions, the state functions as the concrete manifestation of the divine through concrete political reasoning. Inspirational. Exciting. And dangerous.
The Future of Religious Freedom
To conclude, I return explicitly to language from this Workshop’s original Concept Note:
Instead of considering religious freedom as just a necessity for the individual, we could consider what it contributes to public life. In other words, we could look at religious freedom from a teleological point of view, rather than just a utilitarian or deontological perspective. What is the benefit religious freedom brings not just to the individual but also to the community at large?
I want to say a resounding “YES!” to almost all of this. But, from the perspective of a particular form of a particular religious tradition, I also want to be careful precisely at this point.
Here’s why: at the popular and sometimes political level, civil religion becomes a kind of religious nationalism that can take many forms. This has been a temptation in the past, and it is a rising temptation for many in the US American context. The issue here is not that religion is political; the issue here is that the telos of religion is sublimation or transfiguration by the state. To my mind, this is the deeply problematic teleological temptation that Kierkegaard names as such in Fear and Trembling, the temptation that elicits his appeal to the teleological suspension of the ethical.
For good reasons, many in the United States today are frustrated with many things, including the aridity of liberalism and the rapid disappearance of civil society. In this context, a divine-sanctioned state is definitely “something that can connect people with their fellow human beings and with something beyond them,” to return to the language of this Workshop’s original Concept Note. But, if Kierkegaard is right—and I think he is—this type of teleological temptation provides meaning and community by inaugurating a new civil religion that, inevitably, subsumes or replaces any other religion. In short, this is the end of real or substantive religious freedom.
True: religion is, at least as practiced by most of the world’s religious traditions, political. Religion in one form or another is the source of meaning for billions around the world, and it is almost never individual. That is why disputes about religious practices, buildings, restrictions, etc., inevitably end up in judicial systems around the world. Stated more strongly, the public/private distinction often applied to religion is a Western notion that, in almost all contexts, also assumed the continued public presence of Christianity (in practice and as the criteria by which other religions were judged).
True: religion brings tremendous benefits to communities around the world. Not unequivocally so, but care for the neighbor, the sick, and the hungry are ubiquitous affirmations by the world’s religious traditions. These goods are neither merely utilitarian nor deontological—they are acts that go by many more coherent and authentic names: piety, charity, almsgiving, the pursuit of shalom, zakat, etc.
In the past centuries, liberalism has emerged as a useful framework for developing and expanding religious freedom. But moving forward, that may not be enough. My suspicion is that many Christians have forgotten how to articulate religious freedom in Christian terms and have become dependent on liberalism to make the case for them. Therefore, I am increasingly convinced that the success of religious freedom in the future will depend on whether or not religious traditions can pursue religious freedom collaboratively and dialogically in their own languages, in ways that preserve the internal integrity of their unique teloi (both temporal and eternal teloi). That is to say that the future of religious freedom will need to be continually renewed by arguments for and practices of religious freedom that are also neither secular nor dependent on Christianity (referring to Mustafa Akyol’s No Compulsion in Religion, for example).
I’m sure a major reason I’ve reached this conclusion is because my thinking has been profoundly shaped over the last decade by attention to human dignity, by seeing the possibilities that have emerged through the multi-faith elevation of human dignity in human rights discourse. For this I am deeply indebted to the work of Brett Scharffs and others. In similar fashion, religions beyond Christianity must have a seat at the freedom of religion and belief table; other religions must be given a voice in determining its future. Christians cannot leave the table, but they need to invite other religions into the conversation much more energetically. What is needed is a robust multi-faith pursuit of religious freedom, and here there will need to be as much intra-faith engagement as inter-faith engagement. But without a multi-faith embrace of religious freedom, I sincerely doubt that the political liberalism sustaining freedom of religion today will be sufficient for the future.