What should freedom of religion become?

Abstract

This chapter takes secularity and freedom of religion as two distinct but interrelated thought-formations and seeks to develop a historical sketch of each. Secularity and freedom of conscience emerge neither as necessary implications of each other, nor as inherently complementary concepts, but as constituent threads of a seam-line that runs along the unity presupposed by the modern state. The secular is a stance or posture towards the religious, from a vantage point of a political unity (however constructed or imagined); freedom of conscience is a carrier for historically and sociologically specific kinds of religious subjectivity. I argue that in both inheres a possibility of profound intolerance, and one way of understanding the tangled history of the interrelationship between secularity and freedom of conscience, is a continuous (and sometimes violent) struggle over the organization and management of intolerance. I propose that a casuistic rather than categorical approach to the concepts and their relationship, might enhance the prospects for a reduction in intolerance and an increase in the concrete possibilities for practical freedom for believers and non-believers.