Posts - Talk About: Law and Religion

The Case for Tolerance as a European Value

Post published: October 18, 2026

Renáta Uitz is professor of law and government at the Royal Holloway Law School, University of London, and senior research fellow at the Democracy Institute of Central European University (CEU), Budapest. This post formed part of a keynote address a conference on “FORB and the European Union” sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Freedom of Religion or Belief (ISFORB) at the Evangelical Theological Faculty (ETF Leuven), 7–8 May 2026. It is also based on a presentation at the “Religious Freedom, Flourishing Societies, and the Role of Law” workshop sponsored by the ICLRS at Christ Church, University of Oxford, 27–28 July 2026. Research for this post was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation though the CEU project Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East-Central Europe.

The minimum conditions of belonging to the European Union (EU) were recently spelled out by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the values judgment (Case C-769/22, European Commission v. Hungary (21 April 2026)). Responding to the rule of law crisis, CJEU case law to date has focused on values set out expressly in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) such as the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights. Other contenders for EU values emerging on the heels of the migration crisis include solidarity in the face of religious diversity (based on TEU Article 2) and animal welfare as a rationale for limitations on ritual slaughter (based on Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) and Article 37 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCFR)). Christianity (as the defining feature of European culture) is also a prominent contender, with discussions focusing on the EU’s role in protecting Christianity, Christian values, and Christian civilization.

(more…)

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

Post published: October 7, 2026

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.

(more…)

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

Post published: September 28, 2026

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.

(more…)