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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More Layers to Consider: Andrea Pin on Bayatyan v. Armenia

In Bayatyan v. Armenia (2011), the European Court of Human Rights recognized for the first time that the right to conscientious objection to military service must be protected by the state. In this video, Andrea Pin of the University of Padua shares his views on Bayatyan, the right to object, and the Court itself. While Pin supports the protection of objector rights, over time he began to discern additional layers inherent in the ECtHR judgment. Pin raises rule of law concerns over Bayatyan and wonders if such strong and unconditional protection is realistic and practically survivable in a world where countries are increasingly open to waging war against each other.

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The Future of Religious Freedom Must Be Multi-Faith: A Preliminary Reflection

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.

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