Religious Freedom (original) (raw)

Christianity and Constitutionalism

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between religious liberty and freedom of conscience, seeking to re-evaluate the Christian contribution in the light of current controversial conscience claims. It identifies two significant trends. The first and dominant one is for Christian writers to treat conscience as a matter of moral belief. This approach conceives freedom of religion in “Protestant” terms (i.e., as belief centered and genuinely personally held in order to be of any value) so that the right of freedom of conscience has a high degree of convergence with it. Although this approach has its origins in early Christian thought, the discussion focuses on the impact of seventeenth-century Christian writers on the foundations of liberal constitutionalism. The second approach, particularly associated with Thomism and natural law thinking, and reflected in modern Catholic law thought, stresses that conscience is a form of objective moral knowledge. Both strands contrast with modern...

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