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.

(more…)