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.
