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In Murphy v. Ireland (2003), the European Court of Human Rights decided in favor of the state’s power to prevent a radio station from broadcasting a religious advertisement, based on public order concerns. David Kenny of Trinity College Dublin was initially disappointed that the Strasbourg Court did not find against Ireland. But over time he came to see the decision differently. While he still does not approve of the Irish domestic court decisions that were challenged to the ECtHR, he has reconsidered his opinion on how the ECtHR, as an international court, should deal with cases when religious sensitivities are involved. Kenny explains why he is still skeptical about the “view from Dublin” on Murphy but appreciates “the view from Strasbourg.”
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.
The Politics of Metanoia: Conscience, Community, and the Conditions of Human Flourishing
By Alexis de La Ferrière
Human flourishing depends on the interplay of individuation and communion—on the capacity of persons to develop as individual moral agents while doing so through relationships and shared forms of life. A well-ordered society must therefore protect both the freedom of the person and the associational ecology in which persons are formed, collaborate with others, and pursue shared goods. Religious freedom is particularly important in this respect. It protects not only individual conscience but also the institutions, communities, and collective practices through which persons may encounter and inhabit accounts of the good that are inherited or discovered, independent of the state.
When Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) adopted its Law on Freedom of Religion in 2004, it established the principles of separation between the state and religious communities, state neutrality toward all religious communities, equal treatment of religious communities before the law, and cooperation through agreements between the state (including its subnational units) and religious communities. The latter agreements are intended to regulate “issues of common interest.” This framework has led scholars to describe the relationship between the state and religious communities as one of “separation with cooperation.”
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