From Exception to Norm: Rethinking Religious Freedom Through the Law of Diversity

Eugenia Relaño Pastor is Professor of Law in the School of Law, Complutense University of Madrid. The blog post is adapted from her keynote address at the ICLRS 33rd Annual International Law and Religion Symposium held at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 4–6 October 2026.

The theme chosen for this Symposium, “Building an Infrastructure for Freedom of Religion or Belief,” is deliberately architectural. An infrastructure is not a single wall or a single right; it is a system of interdependent supports—legal, institutional, social, and cultural—without which no single structure can stand for long. My argument relative to this theme is that the classical infrastructure we have built around freedom of religion or belief, however monumental, has load-bearing weaknesses that we can no longer ignore. Those weaknesses appear at two levels: first, in the doctrinal architecture of freedom of religion itself; second, in the poorly integrated architecture built for the protection of religious minorities.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Philosophically Pragmatic Account of Church-State Constitutional Arrangements

David Kenny is Professor in Law and Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. This post is based on a presentation given at “The Role of Religion in Constitutional Identity,” a workshop cosponsored by the ICLRS, Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Law, and the Journal of Law, Religion and State at Christ Church, University of Oxford, 15–16 July 2026.

This post explores the question of whether, and in what conditions, a state might establish an official religion while still guaranteeing freedom for minority religions. I address this question by advancing a (very brief) case for an approach to church-state arrangements and religious freedom based on philosophical pragmatism that offers a clear—if not necessarily immediately helpful—answer. The please excuse the fact that the arguments presented below are necessarily succinct, due to the constraints of the blog format.

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Can and Should a Religious Symbol Be Passive? Pasquale Annicchino’s Doubts over Lautsi v. Italy

In Lautsi v. Italy (2011), the European Court of Human Rights considered whether a crucifix displayed in an Italian public-school classroom violated the right to religious freedom of non-Catholic students. While a chamber of the Court decided in favor of the students and their parent, the Grand Chamber later sided with the Italian government and found the crucifix to be a passive symbol that did not infringe their rights. In this video, Pasquale Annicchino explains that, while the Catholic Church won the legal battle in Lautsi, it lost the war by accepting that the ultimate symbol of Christianity be culturalized and trivialized in order for its display to be allowed in educational settings. Annicchino believes that religious groups should be the first to object to such reframing and restructuring of religion, even to maintain a specific presence in public spaces.

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