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

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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.

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

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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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Constitutional Rights Symmetry: Thomas Berg’s Evolution of Opinion on Obergefell v. Hodges

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In the video, Thomas Berg, the author of Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age and professor of law at University of St. Thomas School of Law, explains his evolution of opinion on same-sex marriage. While initially he supported same-sex marriage as a matter of policy important for both conservatives and liberals, he eventually began viewing it as a constitutional right—the recognition of which is important not only for same-sex couples but also for symmetrical religious freedom protection.

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