Faith as a Secular Value
Timothy Macklem”
The fundamental freedoms, including freedom of
religion, are guaranteed for reasons that have to do with
the value that the exercise of those freedoms is thought
to contribute to the lives of those who enjoy them.
What reason is there, then, for a secular society to
guarantee freedom of religion? What reason do we
have to extend special protection to forms of belief that
can be called religious, whether because they bear a re-
semblance to traditional religions, or because they have
some fundamental role to play in a believer’s life?
What is it that distinguishes religious beliefs from other
beliefs, so as to make them worthy of distinctive, per-
haps superior constitutional protection? These are not
questions that Canadian courts have sought to answer,
despite their commitment to a purposive understanding
of Charter rights and freedoms. Yet an answer to them
is clearly required in order for the Charter to be legiti-
mately applied to any alleged breach of religious free-
dom.
This article explores the possibility that the moral
foundation of freedom of religion is to be found in the
value that faith, understood as a mode of belief distinct
from reason, is capable of contributing to human well-
being. It concludes that there are secular reasons to re-
gard faith as valuable, and suggests that it is in recog-
nition of that fact that a secular society-the most
prominent and the most vulnerable site for the pursuit
of faith–has guaranteed freedom to religion.
Les libert~s fondamentales, incluant ]a libert6 de
religion, sont garanties parce que leur exercice est vu
comme contribuant aux vies de ceux qui en jouissent.
Pourquoi une soci~t6 lalque est-elle amen~e h garantir
la libert6 de religion ? Pourquoi 6tendons-nous cette
protection spciale aux croyances dites religieuses ?
Doit-on comprendre que c’est parce qu’elles compor-
tent une ressemblance aux religions traditionnelles ou
bien parce qu’elles jouent un r6le fondamental dans ]a
vie des croyants ? En quoi les croyances religieuses se
distinguent-elles d’autres croyances, de fagon t acqu&
rir une protection constitutionnelle distincte, voire su-
p6rieure ? II ne s’agit pas de questions auxquelles les
-tribunaux canadiens ont tenta de rapondre malgr6 leur
engagement t dtablir une comprehension de ]a Charte
canadienne des droits et libertds adapt6e A ses objectifs.
Cependant, une r6ponse a ces questions s’avre n ces-
saire afin que la Charte soit convenablement appliqude
dans les cas d’atteinte A ]a libert6 de religion.
Cet article explore la possibilit6 que le fondement
moral de la libert6 de religion se trouve dans la valeur
selon laquelle la foi, lorsque comprise comme une
croyance distincte de la raison, est capable de contri-
buer au bien-etre de ‘homme. L’auteur conclut qu’il
existe des raisons s6culi~res de valoriser ]a foi et sug-
g~re que c’est en reconnaissance de ce fait qu’une so-
cit6 la’que –
cet endroit le plus important et le plus
vulnerable dans la poursuite de la foi –
garantit la li-
bert6 de religion.
“Lecturer in Law, King’s College, London. I would like to thank John Gardner and Peter Oliver for
their comments on this piece.
McGill Law Journal 2000
Revue de droit de McGill 2000
To be cited as: (2000) 45 McGill LJ. 1
Mode de r6fdrence: (2000) 45 R.D. McGill 1
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
Introduction
I. The Traditional Approach to Freedom of Religion
I1. Independent Content
II1. Conventional Justifications
A. The Semantic Approach
1. Semantic and Moral Analyses of Religious Freedom
2. Arguments From Authority
3.
4. Reference to the Concept of Religion
5. Reference to Religious Doctrine
Identity of Concept and Purpose
a. Anti-Establishment Objections to Reliance on Doctrine
b. The Moral Limits of Religious Doctrine
B. The Psychological Approach
1. The Protection of Ultimate Concerns
2. Semantic Objections to the Equation of Religion and Ultimate
Concern
3. Moral Objections to the Protection of Ultimate Concerns
IV. Alternative Justifications
A. The Elements of Religion
B. The Collective Character of Religious Institutions and Practices
C. The Content of Religious Beliefs
D. Mode of Belief
V. Faith and Religion
A. The Meaning of Faith
1. Faith and Trust
2. Faith and Conscience
3. The Impact of Faith on the Character of Belief
B. The Value of Faith
1. Overcoming Ignorance and Doubt
2. Leaps Into the Dark
a. The Content of Religion and its Relation to the Act of Faith
b. The Value of Religion
i. The Price of Faith
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T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
3
VI. The Place of Religion in Public Life
A. Freedom of Religion
1. Definition
a. The Relationship Between Religion and Well-Being
b. Religiously Inspired Conduct
c.
Individual and Collective Acts of Faith
2. Application
3. Rights and Freedoms, as Categories and as Moral Ambitions
B. Non-Establishment of Religion
Conclusion
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROITDE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
Introduction
This paper explores the possibility that the moral foundation of freedom of relig-
ion is to be found in the value that the practice of faith, understood as a mode of belief
distinct from reason, contributes to human well-being. In doing so the paper, first,
analyzes and rejects the two most prominent contemporary accounts of freedom of
religion, accounts that are based upon semantic and psychological, rather than moral
approaches to the meaning of religion; second, attempts to show what a better foun-
dation might entail, both for well-recognized religions and for marginal beliefs; and
finally, ventures to distinguish the roles played in a democratic society by a guarantee
of freedom of religion and the rule against any establishment of religion.
The justification for religious freedom is not to be found in the articles of relig-
ious belief, however ecumenically described those articles may be, nor in the institu-
tions and practices that attend religious belief, but in the capacity of religious faith to
sustain its adherents in their fundamental commitment to life and to the moral values
that make life worth living, a commitment that cannot always be made on the basis of
reason alone. This is a capacity that those responsible for our political freedoms, from
the drafters of our constitutional rights to the judges who have been called upon to in-
terpret those rights, were morally bound to recognize as valuable and deserving of
protection, despite their own commitment, at least in their public role as the architects
of a non-theocratic political order, to a secular view of rights and freedoms. As we as
a society have gradually come to acknowledge with respect a number of practices
once thought to be the exclusive preserve of religion, practices such as the exercise of
moral conscience, the expression of moral and political belief, and the investigation of
our place in the world and beyond, close analysis of the meaning of faith and the rela-
tionship it bears to human well-being leads to the conclusion that there are secular
reasons to regard faith as valuable. Moreover, it is in recognition of that fact that a
secular society has guaranteed freedom to religion, the most prominent and most vul-
nerable site for the pursuit of faith.
I. The Traditional Approach to Freedom of Religion
Religious toleration has come to be so widely endorsed that it is sometimes hard
to remember that as recently as the 17th century it was a rare and contested virtue.
When the Puritans emigrated to America in 1620, it was to acquire freedom for their
own beliefs, not to recognize that freedom in others. Apart from Maryland (founded
by Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, in 1632) and Rhode Island (founded by Roger Wil-
liams, a Baptist, in 1636), the first American colonies did not recognize freedom of
religion.’ On the contrary, settlements such as Virginia, and in particular that of Mas-
‘ The Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, which famously endorsed religious freedom, was not
founded until 1681. It was thus subject to the terms of the Toleration Act, 1689 (U.K.), 1 Gul. & Mar.,
c. 18 almost from the outset.
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T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
sachusetts Bay, pursued open policies of religious persecution as brutal as any that
their citizens had endured in England. In Massachusetts Bay, John Cotton observed
that “it was Toleration that made the world anti-Christian”, while the President of
Harvard College declared: “I look upon unbounded Toleration as the first-born of all
abominations”!
Meanwhile in 17th century England, Monarchy and Parliament conducted a
struggle for political supremacy in part through the medium of a debate over religious
toleration. Contrary to what one ignorant of English history might have expected, it
was the people’s representatives in Parliament who took the repressive position in that
debate, and in the end it was Parliament that prevailed. Following the Restoration in
1660, an Act of Uniformity,3 more severe than any that had preceded it, imposed the
Book of Common Prayer and Church of England liturgy upon all ordained preachers.
In response to this, King Charles II attempted to suspend both the Act of Uniformity
and other laws penalizing the practices of non-established religions, but was rebuffed
on the basis that it was beyond the King’s authority to suspend legislation.! Parliament
then quickly enacted the Test Act,5 effectively barring Catholics and Dissenters from
public office. In further response, the Catholic King James ]I, ignoring his brother’s
earlier failure, made common cause with the Dissenters and once again attempted to
suspend both the Test Act and similar penal legislation by issuing a Declaration of In-
dulgence. Having brought the debate to a head by linking the issue of religious tolera-
tion to that of political supremacy, James was promptly deprived of his Crown, and
upon the accession of William of Orange the purported power of suspension was de-
clared to be illegal by the Bill of Rights, 1689.
That was to be the high water mark of religious establishment and intolerance in
England. In that same year, Parliament enacted a Toleration Act, admittedly less gen-
erous in its terms than King James’ Declaration of Indulgence, but which nevertheless
granted a limited measure of religious freedom to certain Protestant Dissenters. How-
ever, it would be another two centuries before Parliament agreed to remove all dis-
abilities from all religions. Meanwhile, the terms of the Toleration Act came to govern
religious toleration in the American colonies, thus reducing the freedom previously
available in the few colonies where toleration had been endorsed.
The publication in 1689 of the English translation of Locke’s “A Letter Concern-
ing Toleration” (actually drafted somewhat earlier) introduced to the public debate
arguments for a significantly wider understanding of freedom of religion than the Tol-
eration Act had secured. Locke argued, in essence, that the state should not intervene
in matters of religion for the simple reason that the state lacks the capacity to compel
4Declaration
2 Quoted in H. Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1967) at 182.
3 Act of Uniformity, 1662 (U.K.), 14 Car. IZ c. 4.
5 TestAct, 1673 (U.K.) 25 Car. , c. 2.
6 j. Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration” in The Works of John Locke, vol. 6 (Germany: Scienta
Verlag Aalen, 1963) 3.
of Indulgence, 1672 (U.K.) 23 Car. ]I, c. 2.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
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religious belief, and in particular lacks the capacity to compel the order of belief that
can lead to personal salvation. By their very nature, Church and state belong to differ-
ent realms, a fact that must be reflected in the constitutional arrangements that de-
scribe the proper limits of the state’s authority, such as a guarantee of freedom of re-
ligion. Drawing upon these arguments, two guarantees securing freedom of religion
and prohibiting the establishment of religion were, in 1791, finally entrenched as a
fundamental right, even ahead of freedom of speech, by the opening words of the
First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as part of what has come to
be known as the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment provides that:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohib-
iting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Gov-
ernment for a redress of grievances.7
In the realmof rights, as in so much else, where the United States has led, the rest of
the world has followed. Freedom of religion is no longer a rare or contested virtue; in-
stead it has become a commonplace virtue. In the two hundred and more years that
have passed since the adoption of the First Amendment, freedom of religion has been
broadly guaranteed not only in a series of national constitutions but in international
covenants for the protection of human rights, albeit usually without the accompanying
prohibition against the establishment of religion. Article 18 of the Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and later to become a
model for a number of other international agreements, provides that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this
right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either
alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his re-
ligion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observances
7U.S. Const. amend. I.
‘ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res 217010D, UN GAOR, 3d Sess., Supp. No. 13,
UN Doc. A/810 (1948) 17 at art. 18, online: Human Rights Internet
of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 19 December 1966, 999 U.N.T.S. 171,
Can. T.S. 1976 No. 47, 6 I.L.M. 368 (entered into force 23 March 1976, accession by Canada 19 May
1976), online: Human Rights Internet
September 1999) and Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms, Council of Europe, Treaties Rome 4.X.1.1950, online: European Commis-
sion of Human Rights Homepage
2000). Modem national constitutions follow a similar approach. The Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, s. 2, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.),
1982, c. 11 [hereinafter Charter], provides, inter alia, that “[e]veryone has the following fundamental
freedoms: a) freedom of conscience and religion”. It is worth noticing here that modem human rights
documents tend to grant parallel protection to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. In my
view, however, the two freedoms have separate moral foundations, for conscience is based upon rea-
son rather than faith. See the discussion of faith and conscience in Part VA.2, below.
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T2 MACKLEM- FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
Accompanying this rise in religious freedom, however, has come a decline in religious
practice. By and large, the citizens of those same Western societies that have so as-
siduously guaranteed freedom of religion have lost much of their interest in the en-
joyment of that freedom. The exercise of moral conscience, the expression of moral
and political belief, and the creation and maintenance of institutions that can serve as
a home for those activities have increasingly come to be seen in secular terms. It is
now widely assumed in the West that religion has no monopoly on the moral and
spiritual concerns that have traditionally constituted its distinctive territory. Perhaps as
a result, most and possibly all of the leading features of religious freedom have now
found secular expression and a corresponding political guarantee under the rubric of
non-religious principles, such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and
the right to be free from discrimination (including certain multicultural guarantees).
In the wake of these developments a number of questions arise concerning the
continued relevance of freedom of religion. The first question is whether there is still
independent content to the guarantee of freedom of religion, or whether that guarantee
has been rendered empty by the recognition of other rights and freedoms, other than
rhetorically, as a way of advertising certain implications of the other rights. The sec-
ond question is, if the guarantee retains independent content, what is the proper justi-
fication for the freedom which that independent content confers? Is a guarantee of
freedom of religion still justifiable in light of the activities that the term religion is
now understood to cover distinctively, and if so on what basis? And finally, does that
justification, if available, warrant the extension of the distinctive protection of free-
dom of religion to institutions and practices that are not animated by ideas of the di-
vine, given that the moral outlook that must justify that freedom is necessarily secular,
that is to say, is not drawn from the tenets of any particular religion or religions, and
thus is detached from religious doctrine? Or are there secular reasons to restrict the
guarantee of freedom of religion to activities that are shaped and informed by contact
with the divine? In the balance of this article I will address each of these questions in
turn and examine their consequences for freedom of religion.
It might be helpful as an indication of the shape of the discussion that is to follow
if I were to suggest at the outset what I take the crux of the issue to be. At the mo-
ment, in Anglo-American law at least, the guarantee of freedom of religion tends to
be extended simply by reference to the doctrinal features of well-recognized relig-
ions In other words, freedom of religion is taken to protect those institutions and
practices that have features in common with well-recognized religions. There is an
obvious objection to this approach, namely that it appears to violate the essence of the
guarantee by establishing the features of well-recognized religions as conditions for
the enjoyment of the guarantee, contrary to the requirement contained in the guaran-
9 See e.g. the English cases of Bowman v. Secular Society, [1917] A.C. 406 (H.L.); R. v. Registrar-
General, exparte Segerdal, [1970] 2 Q.B. 697 (C.A.); Barralet v. Attorney-General, [1980] 3 All E.R.
918 (Ch.); the United States case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972) [hereinafter Yoder]; and
the Canadian case of R. v. Big M Drug Mart, [1985] 1 S.C.R. 295 at 336, 18 D.L.R. (4th) 321 at 353
[hereinafter Big M cited to S.C.R.].
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[Vol. 45
tee that no religion (or the definitive features thereof) be established. Nevertheless,
this ready objection meets the ready response that once one goes beyond reference to
the features of well-recognized religions it becomes impossible to give any shape to
the guarantee in order to distinguish various collective expressions of belief, be they
mass political movements or questionably religious cults. And even if that problem
could be resolved, would the resulting guarantee still warrant the description of free-
dom of religion, given that it would be detached from any commitment to the features
of well-recognized religions? What needs to be determined, then, is whether the ob-
jection to doctrinally-based understandings of religion is well founded, and, if so,
what better moral foundation there might be for freedom of religion.
II. Independent Content
To what extent, then, does freedom of religion retain independent content? The
readiest way to answer that question, in my view, is to examine the protection that is
offered to religious beliefs and practices by the other fundamental rights and freedoms
currently available in most Western societies. Fortunately, this can be done quite
briefly, without entering into the niceties of those rights and freedoms, since the de-
scription of the human activities to which freedom of religion can plausibly be said to
offer distinctive protection is, as it turns out, neither subtle nor abstruse, as can be
shown by a simple process of elimination.
Freedom of speech and expression safeguards the expression of religious beliefs,
and so covers not only religious speech but religions conduct that has a symbolic
character, such as rituals, ceremonies, and the act of worship itself. Freedom of con-
science and belief now protects those who subscribe to religious doctrine from being
penalized for their beliefs. Freedom of association and assembly protects religious
gatherings, and when coupled with freedom of speech and expression protects the
collective act of worship. Freedom from discrimination, where available, guarantees
to members of religions minorities equality in the provision of employment, services
and accommodation; however, at a constitutional level, in the United States at least,
this guarantee of equality offers protection against direct discrimination only, leaving
unprotected those forms of conduct that do not address religion but nevertheless have
an adverse impact upon the practice of religion.” Finally, multicultural rights, where
available, now protect certain activities that express membership in particular minority
cultures, such as the use of a minority language, a language that may help to define
and to sustain a community of believers. Multicultural rights may also protect certain
institutions that maintain membership in those minority cultures, such as sectarian
schools. Otherwise they merely serve as aids to the interpretation of other rights and
freedoms.” In particular, multicultural rights offer no general right to abstain from the
0 Compare Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) [hereinafter Griggs] and Washington v.
Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976) [hereinafter Davis].
” See Charter, supra note 8, s. 27.
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T MACKLEM – FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
requirements of the common good simply because those requirements have an ad-
verse impact upon the minority culture, as perhaps they should.'”
Therefore, of the range of possible human beliefs and actions that might be
brought within the ordinary description of religion (a description that is accurate
enough for present purposes), all that freedom of religion can claim to cover distinc-
tively today is religiously inspired conduct, or more precisely, religiously inspired
conduct that lacks a symbolic character and so would not be protected by freedom of
expression.’3 In itself, however, this is far from a trivial benefit to believers, for unlike
multicultural rights and rights to equality, freedom of religion requires the majority to
accommodate the practices of religious minorities even when those practices are oth-
erwise generally unlawful, which is a benefit that Locke himself would have denied to
believers” and one that cannot be derived from the terms of any other right or free-
dom, at least as presently understood. For example, parents are entitled by right of
freedom of religion to educate (or not to educate) their children entirely according to
their own religious beliefs, and this despite the fact that no other right or freedom
would entitle non-religious parents to educate their children according to their non-
religious beliefs.
In addition to securing religiously inspired conduct, however, freedom of religion
may offer distinctive reasons, and thus possibly distinctive protection, for securing
freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association with regard
to acts of religious expression, religious assembly, and religious association. If one
adopts the conventional view that the interpretation of any right or freedom must be
purposive, the view that a freedom must be interpreted in terms of the purpose for the
sake of which it is guaranteed, then freedom of religion offers a different purpose, and
“2 See J. Raz, “Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective” in Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in
the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 155 [hereinafter Ethics in the Pub-
lic Domain].
‘” See Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 at 406 (1963) [hereinafter Sherbert], holding that un-
employment benefits must be extended to a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to work on a Satur-
day because of her religious beliefs: “[To condition the availability of benefits upon [her] willingness
to violate a cardinal principle of her religious faith effectively penalizes the free exercise of her con-
stitutional liberties.” See also Yoder, supra note 9.
4 Locke’s conception of toleration extended only to the protection of what he took to be inherently
religious activities. “[T]hose things that are prejudicial to the commonwealth of a people in their ordi-
nary use, and are therefore forbidden by laws, those things ought not to be permitted to churches in
their sacred rites.”: in Locke, supra note 6 at 34.
‘5 See Yoder, supra note 9, where Amish children are exempted from a requirement of school atten-
dance beyond the eighth grade. Parents can normally send their children to private, fee-paying
schools, both religious and non-religious. Even private schools, however, are subject to certain state
educational requirements relating to curriculum or inspection and the parents of school-age children
remain subject to other requirements, such as the requirement that their children attend some school,
private or public, until the age of 16. It is exemption from these requirements that freedom of religion,
and no other freedom, may confer. For limits to this see R. v. Jones, [1986] 2 S.C.R. 284, 31 D.L.R
(4th) 569.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
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thus different reasons, for securing freedom of speech, assembly, and association. In
certain cases at least, that difference in purpose may well lead to different conse-
quences. It follows that religious speech may be protected by freedom of religion in
circumstances where it would not be protected by freedom of expression. For exam-
ple, the distribution of scurrilous tracts that promote one religion by maligning an-
other (as Jehovah’s Witnesses were once accused of having done in Qutbec) might
not be protected by freedom of expression (if the purposes of that freedom were re-
stricted to the promotion of democracy, truth, and individual self-fulfilment), yet
might be protected by freedom of religion.”‘
Finally, it may matter to a claimant that protection be granted to his or her expres-
sion on the basis of religion rather than on the basis of speech since a claimant’s sense
of the value of his or her speech may well be diminished if the public protection of
that speech depends on its being characterized in secular terms. If that is true, then
protecting religious speech on the basis of its status as speech may well undermine the
contribution to human well-being that religious speech is capable of making. It is that
kind of contribution that may justify freedom of religion as an independent guarantee,
a question that I will turn to next.
Ill. Conventional Justifications
A. The Semantic Approach
1. Semantic and Moral Analyses of Religious Freedom
Conventional accounts of freedom of religion, particularly those developed in the
context of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, have tended to ad-
dress themselves to the question of the proper meaning of the term religion. When
claims to religious freedom are advanced by bodies not traditionally recognized as re-
ligious, such as Scientologists,” or in support of the exercise of personal convictions
not necessarily regarded as religious, such as a conscientious objection to armed con-
flict,'” or in support of activities that have not conventionally formed part of religious
‘6 But see to the contrary Ross v. New Brunswick School District No. 15, [1996] 1 S.C.R. 825 at
876-79, 133 D.L.R. (4th) 1 at 35-37, where the purpose supporting the guarantee of religious freedom
is said to be a commitment to freedom of belief, a purpose that is said to preclude the denigration of
other beliefs. That conclusion must have surprised not only those religious proselytizers accustomed
to denigrating other religions, but also those non-religious activists who had assumed their freedom to
engage in brutal criticism of the beliefs of others. Compare Saumur v. Quebec (City of), [1953] 2
S.C.R. 299, [1953] 4 D.L.R. 641, where the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to distribute tracts allegedly
denigrating the Catholic faith was upheld on the basis of freedom of speech and religion.
R7 Founding Church of Scientology v. United States, 409 E2d 1146 (D.C. Cir. 1969).
‘s See United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 at 163, 166 (1965) [hereinafter Seeger]: interpretation
of a statute requiring belief in relation to a Supreme Being was held to include a belief that occupies
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
ceremony, such as the use of moose meat for a funeral potlatch,” those claims have
been assessed by drawing analogies between the social practices underlying the
claims and the practices of well-recognized religions, so as to determine whether the
beliefs and rituals for which freedom is claimed have parallels in religions to which
freedom is clearly due.” For example, Kent Greenawalt begins his analysis of religion
as a concept in constitutional law by observing, with approval: “[N]o-one doubts that
Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Methodism, and Orthodox Ju-
daism are religions. Our society identifies what is indubitably religious largely by ref-
erence to their beliefs, practices, and organizations”- There is an obvious paradox
here, in that access to freedom of religion is taken to depend upon conformity to the
fundamental features of recognized religions. At first blush, this would seem to be in-
consistent not only with freedom of religion but with its companion requirement, just
as securely entrenched in the United States Constitution, that there be no establish-
ment of religion. If the fundamental features of leading religions are in effect consti-
tutionally entrenched as models for all other religions, does that entrenchment not
amount to state establishment? Whether or not that is indeed the case is a question
that I will return to below. Rightly or wrongly, however, accounts such as these have
been widely condemned on this basis as imposing undue constraints upon the concept
of religion.’
Given these criticisms of straightforward comparisons between the indisputably
religious and the allegedly religious, more sophisticated accounts, including that of-
fered by Greenawalt himself, have sought to develop more subtle forms of analogy.
While continuing to take the traditional features of religious practice as his starting
point, Greenawalt argues that those features should not be regarded as necessary or
sufficient conditions for the presence of a religion. Rather we should recognize that
the term religion describes a family of practices that has no common element just as,
according to Wtitgenstein, we should recognize that the term game describes a family
of games.’ In assessing whether a particular set of beliefs amounts to a religion, there-
fore, we should begin by cataloguing the characteristics of traditional religions, so as
to arrive at what Greenawalt calls a paradigm instance, and then simply assess how
“a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God of one who
clearly qualifies for the exemption”.
9 See Frank v. Alaska, 604 P.2d 1068 (Alaska 1979).
20 For a prominent and relatively liberal version of this approach see J.H. Choper, ‘Defining ‘Relig-
ion’ in the First Amendment” [1982] 3 U. III. L. Rev. 579.
2 K. Greenawalt, “Religion as a Concept in Constitutional Law” (1984) 72 Cal. L. Rev. 753 at 767.
‘aThe Misguided Search for the Constitu-
For an argument along similar lines see G.C. Freeman/]l,
tional Definition of ‘Religion’
[19831 71 Geo. L.L 1519.
‘ See e.g. L.H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, vol. 1, 2d ed. (New York: The Foundation
Press, 1988) at 1181. See also West
irginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 at
642 (1943), Jackson J.: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no offi-
cial, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other
matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein ”
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d. ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1968) I at paras.
66-76.
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closely the characteristics of the alleged religion match that paradigm, without de-
manding that the alleged religion display any particular feature of the paradigm. 4
Clearly, however, this cannot quite be the answer to the problem of interpreting
freedom of religion. There is something basic missing from what I have called con-
ventional accounts, in both their sophisticated and their unsophisticated versions, and
that is that they make no attempt whatsoever to address the question of justification, a
question that must be addressed in order to say anything at all about the scope of the
freedom. Wittgenstein’s analysis of language, relied upon by Greenawalt, is a de-
scriptive and not a normative analysis. It is no part of Wittgenstein’s purpose to tell us
what language should look like or how it should function. Rather, he seeks to tell us
what language does look like and how it does function. If we were concerned to know
how the term religion is in fact used in the world, as part of an attempt to understand
the nature of language, perhaps we might well turn to Wittgenstein for assistance. But
if we are concerned to know how the term religion should be used, in the interpreta-
tion, the application, or the justification of a fundamental freedom, then a semantic in-
quiry into the use of that term is simply misplaced, unless, of course, there are moral
reasons to resolve the problem of justification in semantic terms. In other words, it
only makes sense to approach freedom of religion by asking what the term religion
means if the reasons for guaranteeing the freedom are also reasons to determine its
scope on linguistic principles. It is those reasons that are missing from the accounts
that I have just described, or at least that are missing from their face, and that must be
taken to be implicitly present in them if the accounts are to be justified as legitimate
descriptions of freedom of religion.
In the absence of such reasons the accounts are radically incomplete. To claim
this is not to demand that we carry on a moral debate rather than a semantic debate.
Instead, it is to insist that semantic answers not be given to what are inherently moral
questions. As I have said, a semantic account of religion may tell us how people in
general use the word religion, how the legal profession uses it, or how people should
use the word if they wish to be understood by their peers. But a semantic account
cannot, in itself and without assistance, tell us what forms of human activity ought to
be secured under the rubric of freedom of religion.
Semantic accounts of freedom of religion are incomplete because they do not tell
us, other than in semantic terms, why one understanding of religion should be pre-
ferred to another in the application of a fundamental freedom. And yet our reason for
wanting to know which understanding should be preferred is not semantic but moral,
not descriptive but normative. Our concern is not with linguistics but with justice. In
the setting of a fundamental freedom what matters is not how the word religion is cor-
24 Greenawalt, supra note 21 at 768. I might note that this still has the effect of constitutionally en-
trenching the fundamental features of those religions whose characteristics are catalogued in order to
arrive at the paradigm instance of religion; it merely ensures that the paradigm thus established is ap-
plied flexibly rather than rigidly. In my view, however, this is not a telling objection to Greenawalt’s
account, for the reasons given in Part IIA5.a, below.
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rectly used, whether generally or as a term of art, but how it should be used in order to
arrive at a just outcome in balancing the requirements of personal autonomy against
those of the public good.’ It follows that a semantic approach to freedom of religion is
necessarily dependent upon some prior moral justification which, if not explicitly stated
on the face of a given account of freedom of religion must be treated as implicit in it.
2. Arguments From Authority
I will assume in their favour, therefore, that conventional accounts of freedom of
religion, those that determine the scope of the freedom by reference to the meaning of
the term religion, a meaning that is to be inferred from the central features of social
practices indisputably acknowledged to be religious, implicitly take the proper justifi-
cation for the freedom to be the fact that its entrenchment is the product of a demo-
cratic decision, whether of a constitutional convention or some other body’ In other
words, according to these accounts, freedom of religion is implicitly taken to be justi-
fied by the just character of its source. Whatever reasons may support the exercise of
democratic authority necessarily support actions taken by that authority. Having set-
tled the problem of justification in this way, conventional accounts of freedom of reli-
gion can then plausibly address the proper application of the freedom by interpreting
the concept of religion in exclusively linguistic terms. That is to say, they are able to
take the view that in order to understand the concept of freedom of religion and its
proper application we should simply ask ourselves what the word religion means, for
that is the word that the democratic authority used when entrenching the freedom.
Once we discover the proper answer to that question we will be able to apply the con-
cept in a manner that is justified.
There is again a ready objection to this line of reasoning. A bare reference to the
presence of a democratic decision simply begs the question of whether and on what
basis that democratic decision is justifiable. This question must be answered not
merely in order to justify the freedom but in order to apply it. In other words, the ref-
erence to a democratic decision postpones but does not resolve the problem of justifi-
cation for the simple reason that there is a difference between justifying a certain form
‘5 I am not suggesting here that there is any inherent conflict between personal autonomy and the
public good: see J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) at 213ff. I am as-
suming, however, that incidental conflicts between the claims of autonomy and the public good
clearly do arise, and that the proper interpretation and application of a fundamental freedom involves
the resolution of such conflicts.
261 make this assumption because it is the only basis that I can think of upon which one might jus-
tify approaching freedom of religion by simply seeking the meaning of the term religion. If, contrary
to my assumption, one thought that the question of justification was not answered by the role of a
democratic authority in guaranteeing this fieedom, or if one thought that the question of justification
was primafacie answered in that way, but that what the democratic authority had guaranteed was a
moral rather than a linguistic concept, then the absence of any consideration of justification on the
face of a semantic account would clearly be fatal, for it would make the account not merely superfi-
cially but radically incomplete.
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of authority and justifying what that authority does. It is right, and so justifiable, that
most political decisions, including a decision to secure freedom of religion, be taken
by a democratic body, but it does not follow from this that any of the decisions taken
by that body are themselves justifiable, other than in procedural terms. Just proce-
dures do not necessarily produce just outcomes.
More particularly, the fact that a decision is democratically authorized does not in
any way enlighten us as to the specific basis on which that decision may be justifiable.
Democracies often err; when they do good it is for varying moral reasons. We cannot
conclude from the fact that the guarantee of freedom of religion was democratically
arrived at, therefore, that the guarantee is justified at all, and that being the case we
certainly cannot ascertain from the bare fact of its democratic origins the particular
basis on which that guarantee may be justified, a basis that it is necessary to identify
in order to be able to apply the guarantee.
3.
Identity of Concept and Purpose
In response to this objection it might be argued, indeed can only be argued, that
the concept of religion so far reflects the moral purpose for which it was constitution-
ally entrenched that the protection of activities that fall within that concept is neces-
sarily morally justified. If this is true, then it would seem to follow that a semantic in-
quiry into the meaning of the concept of religion would indeed be sufficient to answer
the problem of justification. As long as we understand the concept of religion prop-
erly, and as long as we apply that concept faithfully, we will act in fulfilment of the
moral purpose for which that freedom was guaranteed.
In a sense, of course, this response is once again question-begging, for the alleged
answer it provides to the question of justification does not in fact tell us what justifies
the protection of freedom of religion, but rather tells us that this is something that we
do not need to know. According to this response, the search for justification is unnec-
essary. All we need to do is to interpret and apply the concept in the assurance that the
outcome of that semantic inquiry is bound to describe and, thus, lead to a degree of
protection that is morally justified.
Leaving the issue of question-begging aside for a moment, is it in fact true that
the concept of religion so far reflects the purpose for which it has been guaranteed
that protection of the activities that fall within the concept is necessarily morally justi-
fied? And if we want to seek the answer to that question, how should we go about
discovering it? Clearly, the claim will be true only if there is a high degree of correla-
tion between the concept of religion and the moral purpose or purposes that are capa-
ble of justifying a guarantee of religious freedom, which is open to doubt. How then
are we to determine the degree, indeed the existence of correlation between the con-
cept and the purpose that justifies its guarantee? Plainly, by comparing the concept of
religion and the purpose or purposes for which the activities covered by that concept are
guaranteed by religious freedom. It follows that the degree of correlation between the
concept of religion and the purpose or purposes that justify its fundamental protection
can only be determined by identifying what those purposes might be. It is not possible to
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decide what the term religion means in a guarantee of religious freedom without know-
ing why freedom should be extended to the practices covered by that term.
In other words, the accusation of question-begging matters here, for identifying
the meaning that is to be given to the concept of religion in this setting depends upon
identifying the moral purpose that justifies granting freedom to some or all of the mani-
fold activities that are capable of being brought within that concept. We can only deter-
mine the meaning and significance that the concept of religion ought to bear in the con-
text of an analysis of religious freedom by referring to the purpose or purposes that jus-
tify the entrenchment of that concept in a fundamental guarantee. It follows that freedom
of religion cannot be justified, explained, or applied in the absence of a moral debate
over the purposes for which that freedom has been and continues to be guaranteed.
If this is true it does not simply raise questions about the completeness of what I
have called conventional accounts of freedom of religion but, more important, sug-
gests significant constraints upon the direction that any search for a better account
must take. For that reason it is worth examining this conclusion and its implications in
somewhat greater detail, since they may tell us a good deal more about religion as a
fundamental freedom and the purpose or purposes for which that freedom is guaran-
teed than is immediately apparent.
4. Reference to the Concept of Religion
In general, any concept only has significance for us as a society to the extent that
it serves as the vehicle for some social purpose. The concept of religion is no excep-
tion. Religion has different meanings for different purposes, not because religion
means whatever it suits our purposes to have it mean, but simply because the concept
of religion genuinely has a large number of possible meanings, so that it takes a social
purpose to make any one meaning matter rather than some other. The debate over the
scope of religious freedom simply confirms this. If religion did not have multiple
meanings, there could be no debate over the meaning that it should bear in the setting
of a constitution or other form of fundamental guarantee. If, for example, in order to
answer the question of whether Scientology is a religion, a court does not simply as-
sess evidence as to the practice of Scientology but entertains argument about the
proper scope of the concept of religion, it can only be because the court recognizes
that religion is capable of meaning different things, some of which may embrace Sci-
entology and some of which may not.
In order to apply a guarantee of religious freedom, then, it is necessary to assign a
meaning to the term religion as it is used in that guarantee. Plainly, that involves se-
lecting one meaning rather than another. To select one meaning rather than another,
however, requires a purpose that makes the selected meaning relevant. That purpose
can only be the moral justification supporting the freedom, for the moral justification
supporting the freedom is the only consideration that can legitimately establish the
relevance or irrelevance of a particular meaning of religion in that setting; otherwise
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the selection would be arbitrary and thus unjustifiable.’ It follows that it is necessary
to refer to the justifications in support of freedom of religion in order to establish the
proper meaning of religion in the setting of a fundamental political guarantee. This is
true even if it is the case that all possible meanings of religion fall within the justifica-
tion of freedom of religion, so that there is a perfect correlation between the concept
and its justification, for we can only know that such a correlation exists by looking to
the justification. Otherwise the correlation would simply have to be taken on faith. As
I suggested above, then, any recourse to a semantic inquiry necessarily depends upon
a prior moral inquiry.
However, something more follows here, something that is a further product of the
relationship between meaning and purpose. So far I have considered the positive im-
plications of the relationship between meaning and purpose, namely, the extent to
which the choice of meaning requires a moral purpose to support it. Still, there are
also negative implications to the relationship between meaning and purpose, namely,
the extent to which the choice of a meaning may be precluded by the absence of any
moral purpose that could support it. In the context of freedom of religion the possible
meaning of the term religion is constrained not only by the purposes that support the
existence of that freedom, but by the purposes that could not do so. The concept of
religion must be assigned a meaning that can be sustained by some plausible account
of the moral reasons in support of freedom of religion. If a particular meaning, gener-
ally recognized as falling within the concept of religion, cannot be justified in that
way, because the reasons that might support that particular meaning are not acceptable
justifications for a guarantee of freedom of religion, then that meaning simply cannot
be a candidate for a correct interpretation of religious freedom.
If that is so, then a search for the moral purposes that might justify a guarantee of
freedom of religion will be correspondingly constrained. Just as the possible moral
purposes for guaranteeing the freedom constrain the possible meanings of the word
religion, so too impossible moral purposes make some possible meanings of the word
religion insupportable in this setting. The only candidates for a correct justification of
freedom of religion are those moral purposes that support meanings of religion other
than those meanings that have already been determined, for whatever reason, to be in-
supportable. Following this line of reasoning, I suggest that doctrinal accounts of the
” I take it as given that a morally arbitrary decision could not be justified in this setting. TWo further
points should be noted here. First, in the case of those guarantees of freedom of religion that form part
of a written constitution, it is theoretically possible that a recognized rule of interpretation might grant
to one particular understanding of the word religion (be it a dictionary definition or the reading said to
be intended by the framers of the constitution) the authority of law. In fact, no such rule exists, and
even if it did, it would only establish the scope of the freedom as a legal right, as an aspect of positive
law, and would not tell us what judges should do in order to secure the freedom as a moral right. Sec-
ond, the moral justification supporting the freedom may not exhaust the question of meaning, for that
justification may make a number of meanings relevant, some of which may need to be discarded, ei-
ther for other reasons, such as their vagueness perhaps, or because they are simply incompatible with
one another, so that a choice must be made between them on non-rational grounds.
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meaning of religion, accounts that define religion by reference to the content of reli-
gious belief, cannot be sustained by any plausible understanding of the reasons in
support of freedom of religion. The moral basis for religious freedom cannot be found
in religious doctrine. If that is so, then the meaning of religion, at least as far as free-
dom of religion is concerned, and the purposes that would justify giving the freedom
that meaning rather than some other, must be sought in non-doctrinal accounts of re-
ligion, or at least must be sought in accounts that are not focused exclusively upon
matters of doctrine.
5. Reference to Religious Doctrine
A crucial feature of what I have called conventional or semantic accounts of free-
dom of religion is that their description of the paradigmatic elements of religion draws
exclusively upon religious beliefs and the practices that express those beliefs. In other
words, religion is defined solely in doctrinal terms. Let me return to Greenawalt’s ac-
count and its clearly intentionally generous description of the meaning of religion:
[N]o-one doubts that Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Lutheranism,
Methodism, and Orthodox Judaism are religions. Our society identifies what is
indubitably religious largely by reference to their beliefs, practices, and organi-
zations. These include: a belief in God; a comprehensive view of the world and
human purposes; a belief in some form of afterlife; communication with God
through ritual acts of worship and through corporate and individual prayer, a
particular perspective on moral obligations derived from a moral code or from
a conception of God’s nature; practices involving repentance and forgiveness of
sins; “religious” feelings of awe, guilt and, adoration; the use of sacred texts;
and organization to facilitate the corporate aspects of religious practice and to
promote and perpetuate beliefs and practices.’
Greenawalt recognizes the restricted nature of his description but defends it on practi-
cal grounds:
In this brief discussion of the ordinary concept of religion, I have not explored
the plausible claim that some deep characteristic such as ‘Taith” or the “tran-
scending of ordinary experience?’ does unite all instances of religion. My rea-
son is that a common characteristic as vague and general as these would be lit-
tle help for someone trying to classify beliefs and practices as religious or not.
For legal purposes, one needs to concentrate on features of religion that are spe-
cific enough to be employed by judges and other actors in the legal system.29
I do not want to imply that there is anything wrong with taking practical considera-
tions into account here. Moral requirements can only be implemented in law to the
extent that they are susceptible to adjudication and enforcement through law. Whether
Greenawalt is right, and the concept of faith is indeed too vague to be adjudicated, is a
point that I will return to below.? What I want to explore at the moment are the conse-
28 Greenawalt, supra note 21 at 767-68.
29bi at 768-69.
“See Part VIA3, below.
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quences of pursuing a doctrinal approach to the analysis of religious freedom, and the
readiest way to do this is, first, to begin with the conventional objections to what I
have called conventional accounts; next, to examine the merits of those objections;
and finally, to refine them where necessary, and to see where they lead.
I have said that conventional accounts of freedom of religion have tended to ad-
dress themselves to the question of the proper meaning of the term religion, and have
sought to determine that meaning by reference to the central features of those social
practices that are indisputably acknowledged to be religions. When a claim is made to
freedom of religion, an analogy is drawn between the social practices underlying that
claim and a paradigm established by traditional religions. The paradigm may be de-
scribed strictly, so as to impose specific requirements upon any alleged religion as
necessary and sufficient conditions of its freedom, or it may be described loosely, so
as to require only a reasonably close resemblance between the alleged religion and the
paradigm. In either case, the analogy is regarded as having been established where the
alleged religion and the paradigm are found to have features in common.
As I have also indicated, objections have been taken to this approach on the basis
that the apparently privileged position that it grants to well-recognized religions vio-
lates both freedom of religion and the accompanying rule against any establishment of
religion.” In my view, these objections, while not sound in themselves, nonetheless
reveal reasons to object to any doctrinal account of freedom of religion and so are
worth reviewing and responding to in some detail.
a. Anti-Establishment Objections to Reliance on Doctrine
The first objection is what I might call the anti-establishment argument: the tenets
of dominant religions cannot be used as a template to describe the proper outlines of
the guarantee of freedom of religion, since to rely on those tenets would be to es-
tablish certain doctrinal aspects of dominant religions as necessary conditions of ac-
cess to the freedom. For my own part, I cannot deny that there is a certain attraction to
this objection, particularly when one remembers that the genesis of the guarantee of
religious freedom as we now know it was in the desire of members of minority relig-
ions to be free from the oppressive weight of religious orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it
seems to me that there are ready and effective responses to the objection. First, the
objection assumes that a rule against the establishment of religion is a necessary as-
pect of any guarantee of freedom of religion, so that an approach to freedom of reli-
gion that establishes certain features of religion is a contradiction in terms. But is this
so? Surely it may well be the case that freedom of religion is capable of co-existing
with an established church, as it has arguably done in England for the past century
” See e.g. ‘Toward a Constitutional Definition of Religion” Note (1978) 91 Harv. L. Rev. 1056 at
1074-75 [hereinafter “Constitutional Definition”]: “At the very point when those approaches say, in
effect, that a person must hold certain tenets or focus on certain issues to come within constitutional
protection, they demonstrate their incapacity to effectuate that protection. They enshrine an orthodoxy
within a Constitution designed in part to protect unorthodoxy”
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and a half. Even if that were not true, so that we would be driven to conclude that
England today does not in fact enjoy religious freedom, it seems clear that one cannot
demand that freedom of religion be predicated upon a rule against establishment
without assuming one’s conclusions, for if a rule against the establishment of religion
is required at all it must surely be as a consequence and not as a presupposition of the
moral justification of the guarantee of religious freedom. If there is an objection to de-
fining religious freedom in terms of religious doctrine, then it must lie elsewhere than
in the rule against the establishment of religion.
Second, and more important, however, anti-establishment objections to reliance
upon the tenets of dominant religions as the basis for a proper understanding of the
scope of religious freedom overlook the fact that any guarantee of religious freedom
necessarily enshrines protection for what it takes religion to mean, and in that sense
and to that extent necessarily establishes the values to which it lends its protection. 2
Another way to put this is to say that the guarantee cannot be impartial between what
it guarantees and what it does not. It follows that the privileged position of certain
elements of religious doctrine and of the conduct that attends belief in those elements
of doctrine is no more than what is required by the guarantee, and is indeed funda-
mental to the very existence of the guarantee.
Put another way, reference to religious doctrine as the template for religious free-
dom does not amount to an establishment of religion on a proper understanding of
what establishment means, even where the doctrine that is referred to is drawn from a
limited number of well-recognized religions. An establishment of religion involves
the endorsement of particular religious doctrines, institutions, and practices by the
state, not the entrenchment of broadly recognized religious values in a guarantee of
religious freedom. In other words, an insufficiently inclusive understanding of the
scope of religious freedom, one that is based upon an insufficiently generous refer-
ence to the wide variety of religious doctrine present in the world, is simply not the
same thing as a state religion.
b. The Moral Limits of Religious Doctrine
But do these responses exhaust the force of the objection? If a reference to relig-
ious doctrine as the source of religious freedom is not objectionable on the basis of a
rule against the establishment of religion, may it yet be objectionable on the basis of
an incompatibility between the basic requirements of any justification for a funda-
mental political guarantee and the character of religious doctrine? One way to test this
is to ask what a guarantee of freedom of religion would look like if it were, in fact,
drawn from the doctrines of well-recognized religions, so that we had to look to those
doctrines as the source for our understanding of religious toleration. It is possible that
in such a case the freedom might not exist at all. One does not have to be much of a
32 An argument to this effect has been advanced by Choper, supra note 20 at 579, in response to
“Constitutional Definition”, ibid at 1074-75.
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skeptic to believe that the doctrines of well-recognized religions are unlikely to yield
any sort of commitment to religious toleration. If this skeptical view were right, then
religious doctrine clearly could not be the basis of freedom of religion, and accounts
of freedom of religion that define religion by reference to the elements of religious
doctrine would be simply misguided. But even if this skeptical view were wrong, can
religious doctrine be made to yield a commitment to religious toleration that is at once
recognizable and acceptable as a fundamental political guarantee? In my view, it can-
not.
Were religious toleration indeed the product of religious doctrine the result would
be not a state guarantee of freedom of religion, but state endorsement of a tolerant
faith. The distinction between these two outcomes is critical, for a religious morality,
however tolerant, displays certain features that are simply incompatible with what is
required of a morality that is to justify the guarantee of a fundamental freedom.
First, as I will explain below, religious beliefs are not held exclusively for reasons,
but rather are endorsed, in part at least, as a matter of faith. By contrast, the design of
state institutions, and the scope of the protection that they offer or deny to individuals,
must be based on reasons. It follows that the task of justifying freedom of religion as a
political guarantee must be a rational, not a theological exercise. 3
Second, the account of morality that is embodied in religious doctrine is neces-
sarily partial and incomplete, rather than plural and comprehensive, for even the most
tolerant of religions does not and cannot take other accounts of morality to be as true
as its own.’ In itself, of course, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, much indi-
vidual and group morality displays this form of partiality and is not necessarily wrong
to do so, for the account of morality that each of us gives, whether as an individual or
as a group, need only be as comprehensive as is required to accommodate the well-
being of those to whom we are responsible.’ But it follows that a partial and incom-
plete account of morality is inappropriate for adoption by the state, whose policies
and institutions must reflect a comprehensive, value-pluralist account of morality if
they are not to exclude the recognition of values upon which the well-being of certain
human beings depends, human beings who necessarily fall within the ambit of the
“I am not suggesting that theology and reason are mutually exclusive, but I am suggesting that the-
ology necessarily draws upon non-rational considerations. See the discussion of faith in Part VA.
” Would this claim still hold if the doctrine thus referred to was an ecumenical amalgam of several
doctrines? Would such an amalgam not be capable of serving the well-being of all believers? The an-
swer, in my view, is that as far as a guarantee of freedom of religion is concerned no amalgam of
doctrines can be genuinely ecumenical without deciding what religion means in the first place, the
very question that the amalgam is constructed to answer. In other words, partiality is built into an ap-
proach that decides the scope of religion, and so limits the guarantee of religious freedom, by refer-
ence, however sophisticated, to the doctrines of any set of religions other than the set whose scope it is
supposed to determine.
35 Partial and incomplete accounts of morality are wrong but they need not be harmful.
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
state’s responsibility.’ Furthermore, it follows that the freedom of religion whose
guarantee lies at the foundation of the state must be based upon, and assessed against,
a view of morality that is capable of embracing all those for whom the state is respon-
sible. Religious morality, which is accountable only to those who have freely em-
braced its tenets, does not and cannot meet this requirement.
Three factors then come together. The first is value pluralism, which describes the
diversity of the goods that are available to human beings. The second is human vari-
ety, the range of characteristics, be they biological or cultural in their origin, that dis-
tinguish people from one another. The combination of these two factors leads to the
conclusion that it is the range of human characteristics present in a given population
that establishes the range of goods upon which the well-being of that population may
depend. The third factor at work here is the state’s responsibility for the well-being of
those people who fall within its political jurisdiction, a responsibility that must be dis-
charged, at least in part, by the just design of state institutions and the just description
of the rights and freedoms that are to be respected and enforced by those institutions.
The interplay of these three factors leads to the conclusion that the state is bound to
guarantee freedom of religion to its citizens if and to the extent that the exercise of
that freedom is essential to the well-being of at least some of those citizens, and fur-
ther, that the state is bound to guarantee religion on a basis that is sufficiently com-
prehensive to embrace the full range of religious beliefs and practices to which its
citizens are now or may become committed in the pursuit of their well-being.
Religious doctrine, even when broadly understood, does not and cannot offer that
kind of basis for freedom of religion, for it is not and cannot be that comprehensive
while maintaining its religious character. As I have suggested above and will explore
more fully below, a particular set of beliefs acquires a religious character when those
beliefs are held collectively on the basis of faith, or at least in part on the basis of
faith. It is that particular mode of belief that gives a commitment to religious doctrine
its distinctively religious character, a character that is necessarily singular, stable, and
partial, as opposed to being plural, evolving, and comprehensive. Commitment to re-
ligious doctrine is none the worse for displaying that kind of character as long as it re-
mains within its own realm, for in that realm religious doctrine need only be re-
sponsible to those people who have freely committed themselves to its tenets and to
the manner in which those tenets are held. But if and when it is taken as a justification
for a fundamental freedom, religious doctrine escapes its own realm and enters a very
different realm, that of the state, a realm in which responsibility must be assumed for
the well-being of all citizens, of whatever faith or none, a responsibility that religious
doctrine is simply incapable of fulfilling.” It is for this reason that a guarantee of free-
36 This would also hold true for a value-monist account of morality, although the argument would
have to be revised so as to claim that state policies and institutions must reflect an account of morality
that is comprehensive enough to recognize what is instrumentally, as opposed to inherently, valuable
in the pursuit of human well-being.
3′ Religious morality is entitled to be partial because endorsement of that morality by believers is
and must be free. This means that religious institutions need only concern themselves with the well-
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROITDE MCGILL
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dom of religion that is based upon religious doctrine would diminish the well-being of
the very citizens to whom that freedom is owed, and it is for this reason, therefore,
that a just account of freedom of religion cannot be based upon religious doctrine, no
matter how widely and liberally that doctrine may be interpreted.
What this reveals, then, is that the morality justifying freedom of religion must be
secular, not religious. It follows that religious doctrine cannot serve as the moral inspi-
ration for a guarantee of freedom of religion, and that doctrinal accounts of that guar-
antee, those accounts that assess the meaning and scope of freedom of religion by ref-
erence to the content of religious doctrine, are simply misguided.’ This is not to as-
sume one’s conclusions, to say that the morality justifying a fundamental freedom
must be secular because the morality justifying any fundamental freedom must be
secular. Instead, it is to say that only a secular morality is capable of providing the
connection to human well-being that is necessary to justify a fundamental freedom.
What is more, there is no reliance here upon any rule against the establishment of re-
ligion, for the rule against establishment is not the source of this conclusion, but rather
one of its possible consequences.
B. The Psychological Approach
The semantic approach to freedom of religion has not been without its rivals. A
second strand in American law, which has yet to find favour in the constitutional ju-
risprudence of the United States Supreme Court, but which has nevertheless attracted
the support of a number of academic commentators, takes the essence of freedom of
religion to be the protection of whatever beliefs and associated practices play a fun-
damental role in the life of any particular individual. This approach is sometimes de-
scribed as functional,” but for my own part I find it more revealing to think of it as a
psychological approach and to trace its roots, as have American courts, to the work of
William James. ‘
For the purpose of exploring religion as a psychological phenomenon, in his ‘The
Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, James adopted what
being of those who have freely assented to their tenets (subject of course to the responsibility not to
harm others, in this case non-believers). Political morality must be comprehensive and plural, because
participation in that morality by citizens is not necessarily free, notwithstanding any right of exit. This
means that state institutions must concern themselves with the well-being of all.
” I will consider below, in Part IVC, whether a secular morality could possibly justify the interpre-
tation of religious freedom in terms of religious doctrine.
“Tribe, supra note 22 at 1182.
4 See United States v. Sun Myung Moon, 718 E2d 1210 at 1227 (2d Ci 1983) specifically endors-
ing James’s definition. Compare this with Seeger, supra note 18 at 166 holding that a statutory re-
quirement of belief in a Supreme Being as a condition of conscientious objector status is satisfied if “a
given belief that is sincere and meaningful occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that
filled by the orthodox belief in God of one who clearly qualifies for the exemption”.
4’W. James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature” in Writings, 1902-
1910 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987) 1.
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
he himself described as an arbitrary definition of religion, referring to it as “the feel-
ings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine,”‘” where ex-
perience of the divine is understood to mean a personal emotional experience centred
upon happy acceptance of the universe and what it requires of each of us.43 James in-
tended this definition to be flexible enough to include those spiritual beliefs, such as
transcendentalism, that involve an acceptance of “the spiritual structure of the uni-
verse” but do not refer to a particular deity.” According to James, “from the experien-
tial point of view” beliefs of that kind are as much religions as are Christianity or
Buddhism (itself without a deity). 5 It is this distinctive focus on the internal attitude of
religious believers that has made James’ psychological understanding of religion, and
others like it that have followed, appealing to courts and commentators who have
been reluctant to interpret freedom of religion by reference to the external features of
religious belief, lest by doing so they enshrine religious orthodoxy. Psychological un-
derstandings of religion have yet to be endorsed by the United States Supreme Court
as proper interpretations of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, but
they have been recognized as the proper approach to the interpretation of statutory re-
ligious exemptions from military service.!
1. The Protection of Ultimate Concerns
According to one of the most influential psychological accounts of freedom of
religion, every person has a religion, and that religion is composed of that person’s
deepest commitments or ultimate concerns. ‘ However secular those commitments or
concerns may seem to others they nevertheless merit protection as a religion, for
“[a]utonomy of belief can be safeguarded only if the believer is entrusted with the
task of ranking and articulating his own concerns”‘” In other words, the test of what
constitutes a religion here is purely subjective. The law can require that a belief or activ-
ity be a matter of ultimate concern in order to obtain the protection of freedom of relig-
ion, but only the individual can determine what is of ultimate concern to him or her.
There are some startling consequences to this point of view. To take the most ob-
vious, this account of religion makes it impossible for anyone to lead a secular life,
unless of course his or her life is devoid of anything that he or she could regard as an
ultimate concern. If a person claims that a single-minded pursuit of uncommitted sex
is his or her religion, we cannot assume that the claim is metaphorical, for if that per-
son is a Lothario, then philandering may indeed be his or her ultimate concern, and
12Tbid. at 36.
43ibid. at 36,42,44,50.
“Ibid. at 36.
” Ibid. at 38.
46 Seeger, supra note 18; Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333 (1970).
41 “Constitutional Definition”, supra note 31 at 1056.
41Ibid. at 1076.
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thus his or her religion. Just as surprisingly perhaps, this account of religion makes it
impossible to lead a religious life, and to claim the freedom to do so, unless religion is
at least part of one’s ultimate concern.4 ” A Catholic, for example, cannot obtain the
protection of freedom of religion in support of the practice of some tenet of the
Catholic religion unless Catholicism in general and that tenet in particular form part
of his or her ultimate concern no matter what view the doctrines of the Catholic re-
ligion itself might take on the proper role of religion in individual life.’
2. Semantic Objections to the Equation of Religion and Ultimate
Concern
These consequences suggest reasons to reject this account of freedom of religion
as inconsistent both with the concept of religion and with the moral reasons that must
justify the guarantee of religious freedom. First, while it is true, as I have argued
above, that the concept of religion has a number of possible meanings, only some of
which are capable of being made relevant by the possible moral justifications for free-
dom of religion, religion cannot be made to mean whatever we want it to mean. In
particular, religion cannot be equated with ultimate concern. The ultimate concerns of
human beings may, like religions, deserve some sort of protection as part of the rec-
oguition of human autonomy and what it requires, but it does not follow that those
concerns are religions and deserve protection under the rubric of freedom of religion.
It is certainly true that religion may constitute a person’s ultimate concern, but it does
not follow that all matters of ultimate concern are religions, for the simple reason that
ultimate concern and religion are different concepts. That being the case, ultimate
concerns cannot be protected as religions, for in order to be protected as a religion a
belief, commitment, institution, or practice must fall within the concept of religion. I
have argued above that semantic accounts of religion are incapable of determining the
proper scope of freedom of religion, but it remains true that they can and must set
limits to what a reference to religion in the context of a fundamental freedom can be
taken to mean.’ Those limits exclude the possibility of treating ultimate concern as a
religion.
” Moreover, ultimate concern is “an act of the total personality, not a movement of a special and
discrete part of the total being”. It follows that to qualify as an ultimate concern a commitment must
be “unconditional, made without qualification or reservation”: ibid. at 1076, n.110.
Ibid. at 1083, n.129.
‘ I argued above that a semantic inquiry into freedom of religion must depend upon the outcome of
a prior moral inquiry; what the present discussion shows is that a moral inquiry into freedom of re-
ligion is also dependent upon a prior semantic inquiry, for we have to have some idea of what religion
is capable of meaning before we can ask what it should mean in the context of a fundamental free-
dom. Furthermore, once a moral basis for the freedom has been decided upon, the meaning of relig-
ion can be refined in light of that basis, so as to function as a term of art in the interpretation and ap-
plication of a fundamental guarantee, but it cannot be entirely reinvented, for to do so would be to of-
fer no explanation or justification for the existence of a guarantee of religion rather than a guarantee
of ultimate concern (or whatever other underlying value is taken to be the moral basis for the guaran-
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T0 MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
Notwithstanding the wide variety of religious experience, no religion is or can be
purely individual in its outlook, as ultimate concern is said to be. On the contrary, re-
ligions are necessarily collective endeavours. By the same token, no religion is or can
be defined purely by an act of personal commitment, as the ultimate concerns of an
individual are said to be. Instead, all religions demand a personal act of faith in re-
lation to a set of beliefs that is historically derived and shared by the religious com-
munity. It follows that any genuine freedom of religion must protect, not only indi-
vidual belief, but the institutions and practices that permit the collective development
and expression of that belief.
More fundamentally, while it is possible to understand religion in such a way as
to include practices that would conventionally be regarded as secular, it is simply not
possible to understand religion in such a way that the distinction between the religious
and the secular collapses, for the religious and the secular exist in contradistinction to
one another. Yet such a collapse is implicit in the view that the secular becomes reli-
gious as and when it becomes a matter of ultimate concern to any individual, for
whether a practice is secular or religious would then be a purely subjective question!’
Any objective distinction between the two would disappear 3
The claim that religion is equivalent to ultimate concern, while giving the appear-
ance of objectivity, is in truth just another way of expressing the view that the mean-
ing of religion is a subjective question, for the function of the claim is to transform an
objective inquiry into the meaning of religion into a subjective inquiry into the content
of an individual’s ultimate concern. In other words, treating religion as equivalent to
whatever is a matter of ultimate concern to an individual is tantamount to taking re-
ligion to mean whatever a person subjectively takes it to mean, for it strips the concept
of religion of any possibility of objective meaning, albeit in two stages with the first
stage equating religion with individual concern and the second stage referring to the
content of individual concern in subjective terms. In fact, on any objective view it is
simply not possible to regard a secular activity as religious just because some person
cares about it enough to make it his or her ultimate concern. Stamp collecting is not
and cannot be a religion, no matter how obsessive its adherents may be.M
tee). In effect, this means that the meaning of religion can be narrowed by its moral basis but cannot
be implausibly broadened or altogether transformed.
” In this respect the equation of religion and ultimate concern differs from the equation of religion
with faith-based beliefs, for two reasons. First, unlike ultimate concern, the content of faith is objec:’
tively determinable, so as to be capable of offering a moral reason for guaranteeing freedom of relig-
ion. Second, unlike ultimate concern, the collective endorsement of faith-based beliefs can plausibly
be regarded as religious, so as to be capable of offering a semantic basis for guaranteeing the practice
of those beliefs under the rubric of religion.
53Indeed eliminating that distinction is the point of the theory.
I am assuming that one cannot have faith in stamp collecting as one can have faith in religious
doctrine: see Part V.B.2 below.
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3. Moral Objections to the Protection of Ultimate Concerns
More important than these semantic objections are the moral objections to the
protection of ultimate concerns. The equation of religion with ultimate concern makes
the guarantee of freedom of religion incompatible with any moral justification that
could be offered for the entrenchment of that freedom. This is so for two further rea-
sons.
First, as the description of its possible consequences suggests, the account would
protect freedom in a sphere of individual conduct that cannot be brought within any
plausible justification for personal freedom, whether that freedom be freedom of re-
ligion or some other freedom. In other words, not only do consequences of this kind
lack any connection with the concept of religion, but they cannot be reconciled with
any plausible description of the legitimate scope of personal autonomy. The require-
ments of personal autonomy entitle people to the resources and opportunities that are
necessary to enable them to pursue their well-being through the development and re-
alization of certain valuable options in life.” Personal autonomy does not, however,
entitle people to pursue whatever goals may be of ultimate concern to them, for the
scope of personal autonomy is limited, on the one hand, by the requirement that indi-
vidual goals be valuable and, therefore, capable of grounding a successful life (an
objective, not a subjective issue), and on the other hand, by the requirement that the
pursuit of individual goals not cause harm to others. As an account of personal auton-
omy, ultimate concern does not respect either of these limits. To return to my earlier
examples, an ultimate concern with stamp collecting is unlikely to yield a successful
life, while an ultimate concern with philandering is not only unlikely to yield a suc-
cessful life but may well cause harm to others.
Second, and what may simply be a variation on the same point, fundamental pro-
tection of the pursuit, in words and deeds, of whatever is of ultimate concern to an in-
dividual is a recipe for individual self-government, the government of each by each
rather than the government of each by all. It describes a state of anarchy, not a democ-
racy; a state of survival, not freedom. For that reason it is incompatible with the very
existence of a democratic state, whose responsibility it must be to secure justice to all
citizens, and is correspondingly incompatible with the requirements of a fundamental
political guarantee,57 whose role it must be to discharge the state’s responsibility to its
citizens by providing an adequate setting for the pursuit of well-being by every one of
those citizens, through both individual and collective endeavours.
note 25 and Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 12.
” Ibis description is of course derived from that given by J. Raz in The Morality of Freedom, supra
6 See Choper, supra note 20 at 596; G. Merel, ‘The Protection of Individual Choice: A Consistent
Understanding of Religion Under the First Amendment” (1978) 45 U. Chi. L. Rev. 805 at 836; Free-
man, supra note 21 at 1564.
” This is true whether or not this is entrenched in a written constitution.
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T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
IV. Alternative Justifications
A. The Elements of Religion
If the semantic and psychological approaches to the interpretation of freedom of
religion are unacceptable accounts of that freedom, primarily because they are incom-
patible with any plausible moral justification for entrenching the freedom in a funda-
mental political guarantee, then some alternative to them must be found if the freedom
is to be justified at all. In order to discover that alternative, it is necessary to return to
the concept of religion itself, for it is the value that religious activities can contribute
to human well-being that provides the moral basis for freedom of religion, and it is
only possible to discover what that value might be by reviewing the concept of relig-
ion and the activities that it is capable of describing. I will try to do this in very broad
terms, so as not to be guilty of prejudicing the outcome.
Let me assume for this purpose, then, that the term religion refers to collective
participation in institutions and practices that manifest a freely given personal com-
mitment to a particular set of beliefs, beliefs that are not based on reason alone but
are held, at least in part, on the basis offaith. There are four principal elements to this
definition of religion: first, institutions and practices that serve as vehicles for the col-
lective expression of religious belief, the protection of which is the distinctive contri-
bution of a guarantee of religious freedom; second, freely given personal commit-
ments to the articles of religious belief; third, the articles of religious belief them-
selves, howsoever they may be defined; and fourth, the mode by which religious be-
lief is held, namely, faith. In my view, only the last of these elements, faith, is capable
of providing the moral basis for a guarantee of freedom of religion, for it is only faith
that can generate a contribution to human well-being that is both capable of meeting
the moral requirements of a fundamental political guarantee and sufficiently distinc-
tive to warrant protection as religion, over and above the protection that is offered to
expression, association, assembly, and other secular activities.
This is not to say that the other elements of the concept of religion have no role to
play in the description of freedom of religion. On the contrary, it is my view that each
is a necessary part of the description of the freedom, but that their role in the descrip-
tion is ancillary rather than primary. As I hope to show, we guarantee freedom of re-
ligion because of the value that faith is capable of contributing to the pursuit of human
well-being. That value can only be secured, however, and the freedom fully justified,
when faith is exercised in relation to certain beliefs, beliefs that are capable of sus-
taining a valuable life. Not all beliefs that fall within the concept of religion have that
capacity, and it follows that some constraint must be imposed upon the scope of free-
dom of religion if the guarantee is not to extend to conduct that does not warrant fun-
damental protection. In my view, that constraint is to be found in the other elements
that make up the concept of religion.
Furthermore, faith is not always exercised in relation to beliefs that would be
conventionally regarded as religious and so recognized as falling within the concept
of religion. If such exercises of faith are to warrant the description of religions, so as
to obtain protection under a guarantee of freedom of religion, they must be accompa-
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[Vol. 45
nied by other elements of the concept of religion, elements that must be shown to
have their own contribution to make to human well-being, unless of course the pres-
ence of faith alone is enough to render a belief religious.
But this is to anticipate the balance of the argument. What needs to be shown at
this point is why faith, and faith alone, is capable of providing the moral basis for a
guarantee of freedom of religion. In my view, the readiest way to do this is to assess
the capacity of the other elements of religion to serve as the moral basis for a funda-
mental political guarantee, and to turn to the evaluation of faith as and when they are
found wanting.
B. The Collective Character of Religious Institutions and Practices
One possibility is that we guarantee freedom of religion, and the institutions and
practices that serve as vehicles for the collective expression of religious belief, be-
cause of the value that the collective character of religious activity is capable of con-
tributing to human well-being. It might be argued that vehicles for collective endeav-
our are in short supply in contemporary society, and that in their absence human be-
ings lack access to certain valuable options that are necessary to the achievement of
their well-being. On this argument, then, the reason that we guarantee freedom of re-
ligion is that religious institutions and practices are an important means of fulfilling
the very real need of human beings to engage in shared activities, and thereby to find
echoes of their own values and commitments in the lives of others, as well as develop
options in life that they could not imagine, let alone pursue, in isolation.
The most obvious merit of this argument, apart from the fact that it draws atten-
tion to the value that social institutions and practices can contribute to human well-
being, is that, in certain important respects, it is consistent with both the meaning of
religion and the moral requirements of a fundamental political guarantee. From a con-
ceptual point of view, it is clearly part of the nature of religion to be a social enter-
prise. Indeed, it is not possible to think of a religion with only one believer, unless of
course that believer is the sole survivor of an extinct social enterprise, as was the last
Shaker in each dying Shaker community.” A person who constructs his or her own
doctrine and commits himself or herself to that doctrine on the basis of faith is a vi-
sionary, not a religionist. Such a person only becomes the founder of a religion, and
thus a participant in that religion, when others join in the faith and commit them-
selves, not only to the doctrines of the visionary, but to the creation and development
of institutions and practices in and through which those doctrines can be nourished,
“‘ITe Shakers, the popular name for the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,
were founded by Ann Lee in Manchester. They flourished in the United States from the late 18th
century to the mid 19th century. Today only one Shaker community survives at Sabbathtown, Maine.
Shaker men and women believed in both the equality and the segregation of the sexes. This commit-
ment to separate and equal sexual communities meant that they had to attract their recruits entirely
from among the children of others. When recruitment failed, the communities died out.
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T0 MACKLEM – FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
preserved, and passed on to others. The collective participation in belief is central to
the meaning of religion.
From a moral point of view, moreover, the collective character of religious con-
duct is not simply an accident of history, or a consequence of the practical need to
pass beliefs on to others if those beliefs are to survive, but is an essential element in
the worth of religious conduct, for the collective aspect of religious practice is consti-
tutive of the value that religion is capable of contributing to human well-being.
That said, however, the difficulty with treating the collective character of religious
institutions and practices as the basis for freedom of religion is that to do so, is in
other critical respects, inconsistent with both the meaning of religion and the moral
requirements of a fundamental political guarantee. From a conceptual point of view,
not every collective commitment to a set of beliefs can be described as a religion. The
pursuit of politics, for example, sometimes forms part of religious practice, but it does
not follow that every collective endorsement of a political belief, and participation in
the institutions and practices that sustain that belief, can or should be regarded as re-
ligious in character. Whatever impression Margaret Thatcher may have given from
time to time, belief in monetarism is not a religion. On the contrary, belief in mone-
tarism would only become a religion if and to the extent that commitment to that be-
lief were based on faith rather than reason, as the critics of monetarism were eager to
charge and its supporters as eager to deny, for in that case, like any other religious
doctrine, monetarism would have no legitimate place in the design of state institutions
and practices. It follows, then, that the collective endorsement of a set of beliefs, the
collective expression of those beliefs, and collective participation in the institutions
and practices that sustain and reflect belief, are necessary but not sufficient conditions
for the existence of a religion.
From a moral point of view, moreover, not every collective endeavour is capable
of furthering human well-being. Indeed, some such endeavours are plainly harmful.
Let us assume, as is probably the case, that collective participation in certain beliefs
and in certain activities is valuable in itself, simply because solidarity is valuable in it-
self. Even if that assumption is justified, however, the value of solidarity will remain
modest where the collective practice in question is without value. Furthermore, it will
be altogether undermined where the collective practice is harmful, as when gang
members get together to wreak havoc upon the members of other gangs or citizens at
large. In other words, the value of a collective activity is ultimately a function of two
separate sources of value: solidarity and the goals to which people commit themselves
on the basis of solidarity. It follows that in and of itself the collective character of a
practice is too undiscerning a criterion to serve as the moral basis for a guarantee of
freedom of religion since it takes no account of the valup of the practice that is collec-
tively defined and pursued. It is worth bearing in mind, in this regard, that while the
guarantee of freedom of association by definition protects acts of association, it has
been held to offer only qualified protection to associative activities, so as to protect
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only the right to do things in association that one otherwise has a right to do, not the
right to do whatever activities involve association. 9
Finally, it does not seem necessary to dwell on the possibility that the moral basis
for freedom of religion can be found in the value of religious institutions and prac-
tices, qua institutions and practices, for the value of those institutions and practices is
indisputably a function of both the value of the religious beliefs that they reflect and
sustain, as well as the value of the manner in which those religious beliefs are sub-
scribed to, namely faith, which are the issues that I will turn to next.
C. The Content of Religious Beliefs
As will be obvious at once, the preliminary definition of religion given above de-
liberately eschews any reference to the content of religious doctrine. There are two
reasons for this. First, and most obviously, if the moral basis for freedom of religion
cannot be found in the substance of religious doctrine, as I have already argued, it is
clearly not necessary to look to the character of religious beliefs, and the similarities
or differences between them, when engaging in a search for the moral basis of free-
dom of religion. Second, for the same reason, it is unnecessary to look to the character
of religious beliefs as a basis for narrowing a guarantee of freedom of religion that is
founded on some other aspect of religion, such as faith.
Is it possible, however, that there are value-pluralist reasons, not found in relig-
ious doctrine itself, for restricting the benefit of a guarantee of freedom of religion to
certain religious doctrines and to the conduct that those doctrines inspire? Is it possi-
ble, in other words, that there are secular reasons to deny fundamental protection to
the institutions and practices that sustain secular beliefs, despite the fact that those in-
stitutions and practices display the same features as the institutions and practices of
conventional religious belief? If there are such reasons, then the moral basis for free-
dom of religion would continue to be the secular requirement that activities protected
by a fundamental political guarantee must have a special contribution to make to the
achievement of human well-being, but that requirement would be satisfied, and only
satisfied, by certain well-recognized religious doctrines and the activities that those
doctrines inspire and sustain. If that were the case, the preliminary definition of relig-
ion offered above would have to be modified so as to restrict the scope of freedom of
religion to the doctrines in question.
The short answer to this query is that I cannot think of any such reason to so re-
strict the benefit of freedom of religion. As I have indicated above, the conventional
approach to freedom of religion assumes that the freedom guarantees certain well-
recognized religious beliefs, ,and guarantees other beliefs only where they bear an
analogy to those well-recognized beliefs. Secular beliefs, those beliefs that make no
” See e.g. the Labour Relations Trilogy: Reference re Public Service Employee Relations Act
(Alta.), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 313, 38 D.L.R. (4th) 161; PSAC v. Canada, [1987] 1 S.C.R. 424, 38 D.L.R.
(4th) 249; RWDSU v. Saskatchewan, [1987] 1 S.C.R 460, 12 D.L.R. (4th) 10.
2000]
0T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
reference to the divine or other doctrinal feature of well-recognized religious beliefs,
are not entitled to the protection of freedom of religion, however valuable their con-
tent may be and however like a religion the mode by which they are held may be.
Clearly, this conclusion can only be justified in secular terms if conventional religious
beliefs, and those analogous to them, have a special connection to human well-being
that is lacked by other beliefs. In fact, however, there is simply no evidence that this is
true. Whatever our forebears may once have thought, we today would be prepared to
acknowledge the distinctiveness, but not the uniqueness of the connection between
religious belief and human well-being.
What needs to be shown, in order to supply a moral reason for restricting freedom
of religion to conventional religious beliefs, say to the Catholic, the Buddhist, or the
Puritan, as is the case for restricting freedom of thought, opinion, and belief to certain
thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, or freedom of expression to certain forms of expres-
sion, is that the beneficiaries of the restriction make a contribution to human well-
being that is not merely different from the contribution made by the victims of the re-
striction, but different in what makes it worthy of fundamental protection. In other
words, it must be shown both that some beliefs, and the conduct that they inspire, de-
serve protection and others do not, and that the distinction between the deserving and
the undeserving is the distinction between the religious and the secular, or, more nar-
rowly, between conventional religious beliefs and other beliefs.
In my view, the first of these propositions is true and the second is false. Not
every belief that otherwise satisfies the preliminary definition of religion given above
deserves fundamental protection, for reasons that I will consider in a moment, but
those beliefs that deserve protection are not exclusively religious, in the conventional
sense, while those beliefs that do not deserve protection are not exclusively secular.
Conventional religious beliefs, and the institutions and practices that they inspire and
sustain, are not inherently more valuable than secular beliefs, nor more vulnerable.
There is no moral reason, therefore, to restrict the benefit of freedom of religion on
the basis of a doctrinal distinction between what has conventionally been regarded as
religious and what has conventionally been regarded as secular.’
That does not mean, however, that there are no moral reasons to restrict the scope
of freedom of religion on doctrinal grounds. On the contrary, an unrestricted freedom
of religion would undermine the very values that the freedom is expected to secure,
for not all beliefs, be they conventionally religious or conventionally secular, are ca-
pable of serving human well-being. Many indisputably religious beliefs, both familiar
and unfamiliar, have been pursued at great cost to human well-being. The most fa-
miliar examples of that cost have been provided by religious cults, whose beliefs from
time to time commit their disciples to self-destruction. Several such cults have
emerged in recent years, from the cult of the followers of Jim Jones and the corre-
60 The same argument applies, mutatis mutandis, to the distinction between conventional and un-
conventional religious beliefs. On the traditional approach to freedom of religion the latter have been
treated as secular, that is, as falling outside the scope of the guarantee.
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[Vol. 45
sponding events of Jonestown, to that of the followers of David Koresh and what hap-
pened at Waco, to the Heaven’s Gate cult and what it led to. In my view, the harm
caused by collective faith in beliefs such as these is reason enough to restrict the pro-
tection of freedom of religion to beliefs that have at least some capacity to serve hu-
man well being, as suicidal cults clearly do not. The possibility of that kind of harm is
no reason, however, to restrict freedom of religion to conventionally religious beliefs,
for as I have already suggested, the distinction between the valuable and the harmful
simply does not coincide with the distinction between the conventionally religious
and the conventionally secular. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that cults,
such as the one led by David Koresh, satisfy the doctrinal criteria of conventional re-
ligious belief, however warped their interpretation of conventional religious doctrine
may be.
Are there semantic rather than moral reasons to restrict the scope of freedom of
religion to doctrines that have been conventionally regarded as religious, as there
would be if secular beliefs could not plausibly be brought within the scope of the con-
cept of religion? Once again, in my view there are not, for it is my view that the ac-
count of the meaning and value of faith given below, and the consequent description
of a faith-based account of religion, can plausibly be brought within the scope of re-
ligion. If this view is wrong, then I do not believe that freedom of religion, as such,
can be justified at all.
If faith-based beliefs, and collective participation in the institutions and practices
that manifest those beliefs, could not plausibly be regarded as religions, on semantic
grounds, then only two possibilities would remain available with respect to the jus-
tification of freedom of religion.
The first possibility is that a different approach to the justification of freedom of
religion could be found. That would not be easy. A different approach would have to
be one that neither looked to religious doctrine for its understanding of religion nor
relied upon religious doctrine for its justification of religious freedom, for the reasons
given above. Furthermore, it would have to be one that did not look to faith for its un-
derstanding of religion, for the mere presence of faith, unaccompanied by recogniza-
bly religious doctrines, would not be enough, on this assumption, to make a belief re-
ligious. For my own part, I cannot think of any such approach, for once both faith and
doctrine have been subtracted from the concept of religion little, if anything, of the
concept is left.
That raises a second possibility, then, which is that the guarantee of freedom of
religion would have to be regarded as unfounded unless and until it was revised as a
guarantee of freedom of faith.’ That, however, would be to acknowledge that a guar-
‘ While it may be that not all religions rely on faith, that in itself does not provide a semantic reason
to reject a faith-based approach to freedom of religion, for those religions that do not rely on faith
would simply fall outside the scope of the guarantee, on the basis that they fail to meet the conditions
of its moral justification, as would other religions to the extent that commitment to them is predicated
on reason rather than faith.
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T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
antee of freedom of religion, as such, cannot be justified. No third option is available,
for what is not possible is to accept faith as the moral basis for freedom of religion
and then seek to restrict that freedom to certain conventionally religious doctrines on
semantic grounds. Any semantic restriction must be morally justified, and a restriction
of that kind would be morally arbitrary.’
D. Mode of Belief
The preliminary definition of religion given above stipulated that commitment to
religious beliefs must be both freely given and based, in part at least, upon faith rather
than reason. Clearly, the bare fact of a freely given commitment cannot provide the
moral basis necessary to justify a fundamental political guarantee, for the value of any
commitment, freely given or otherwise, is a direct function of the value of the object
of the commitment, which may be worthless or even harmful. That leaves the possi-
bility that the act of faith itself provides the moral basis for freedom of religion. In or-
der to explore that possibility it is necessary to explore the meaning and value of faith.
V. Faith and Religion
A. The Meaning of Faith
At its most basic level, the concept of faith describes the manner in which a par-
ticular belief or set of beliefs may be subscribed to by human beings. In that sense of
the word, faith exists as a type of rival to reason. When we say that we believe in
something as a matter of faith, or to put it the other way around, when we say that we
have faith in certain beliefs, we express a commitment to that which cannot be estab-
lished by reason, or to that which can be established by reason but is not believed for
reason’s sake. The rivalry between the two concepts is real, but not complete. Faith
and reason are modes of belief with different sources and different characters, but not
necessarily different consequences. The particular consequences of faith may defy
reason, as when faith prompts us to believe or do what we would otherwise have no
reason to believe or do, but they may also be consistent with reason, as when faith
prompts us to believe or do what we otherwise have reason to believe or do. Christian
faith, for example, asks us to believe in the possibility of a life beyond material exis-
tence, with all that such a belief implies, a possibility that rational thought would re-
gard as, not merely unverifiable, but unknowable and perhaps unintelligible, given the
62 As above, I am assuming that a morally arbitrary decision could not be justified in this setting.
As exemplified in the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven
and earth: And in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born
of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into
hell; The third day he rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, And sitteth at the right hand
of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in
the Holy Ghost; The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints; The Forgiveness of sins; The
Resurrection of the flesh, And life everlasting. Amen.”
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[Vol. 45
intimate connection between the nature of life and the fact of death, between the eva-
nescence of the human spirit and the materiality of the human body.’ Christian faith
also asks us to believe in the redemptive power of love, a power that rational thought
might well endorse. What is important is that, in either case, faith treats itself as a rea-
son to believe, and to act in accordance with belief, without submitting to the condi-
tions of reason.
I must make clear, before going further, that I recognize that this interpretation of
faith, as a mode of belief distinct from reason, is not the only interpretation that faith
is capable of bearing. On the contrary, like religion, faith has several possible mean-
ings, with the result that a selection must be made from among those meanings on the
basis of their relevance to the issue at hand. In other words, it is necessary to make a
choice among meanings of faith, and it is not possible to make that choice either ran-
domly or on the basis of purported fidelity to the core meaning of the concept, for
such bases of choice would be morally arbitrary in the present setting. What is re-
quired here is an understanding of faith that is capable of providing the moral basis
for the guarantee of a fundamental freedom.
I might also say, however, that in my view, a view that I will seek to defend in a
moment, the understanding of faith as an alternative to reason is the only meaning of
faith that describes the distinctive contribution that faith is capable of making to hu-
man well-being, precisely because of its distance from reason. Moreover, this par-
ticular understanding of faith has for so long informed and sustained what we gener-
ally recognize as religious commitment that religions are now commonly referred to
as faiths on the basis of it, so as to be characterized exclusively in terms of the mode
by which their doctrines are held rather than in terms of those doctrines themselves. It
follows that there are, on the face of it, both moral and semantic grounds to rely upon
this conception of faith when examining the possible justifications for freedom of re-
ligion. That initial impression can be confirmed by a brief review of two other promi-
nent meanings of faith.
1. Faith and Trust
The most obvious rival to the meaning of faith, that I have just sketched and will
explore more fully below, is the meaning of faith as a species of trust. For some peo-
ple, patriotic Americans in particular, faith is equivalent to trust, so that it becomes
sensible for such people to maintain that they trust in God rather than that they have
faith in Him. Just as the concept of trust may be used in the place of faith in this way,
so too the concept of faith can be used in the place of trust. According to this meaning
of faith, it makes sense to say that one has faith in one’s doctor, or in one’s bank man-
‘ What is here described as the rational conclusion is not simply a matter of stipulation, of saying
that life means a species of existence that has an ending rather than no ending. On the contrary, it is a
claim that the fact of life is so bound up with the fact of death that to speak of eternal life is an oxy-
moron. Life without age, without children, without generations, would not be a different life; it would
not be life at all.
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T MACKLEM – FAITH AS A SECULAR VALUE
ager, or in one’s husband or wife, for the same reasons that it would make sense to say
that one had trust in those people.
Yet it seems clear, however, without calling the validity of such usages into ques-
tion, that a distinction between faith and trust can and should be drawn. While the two
concepts may, in some respects, overlap one another, they are not synonymous. One
notices at once, as a matter of ordinary speech, that people tend to trust in the concrete
and have faith in the abstract, so that it is common to say that one trusts people or in-
stitutions but has faith in certain values. For example, part of the point of maintaining
that in God we trust is that it makes the presence of God a concrete rather than an ab-
stract fact in the life of a society. Admittedly, this contrast between faith and trust is
not perfect, for as I have already suggested it is clear that it is entirely sensible to say
that one has faith in people (the concrete) as well as in values (the abstract), although
perhaps it is less sensible to say that one has trust in values as well as in people. Nev-
ertheless, the contrast, however imperfect, suggests an implicit recognition in linguis-
tic usage of a significant difference between the two concepts, namely, the very dif-
ference between faith and reason as modes of belief.
In contrast to faith, one has trust in oneself, or another, or in the safety of the
bridge that one is about to step upon, for reasons. It would be simply unintelligible to
claim that one trusted the safety of a bridge, and yet simultaneously to acknowledge
that there was no reason to do so. Trust demands the presence of reasons, and without
their foundation it cannot be justified. Faith, on the other hand, is subject to no such
requirement. It may be unreasonable to claim that one has faith in the resurrection of
the flesh and life everlasting, but it is not unintelligible. If faith and trust are to be un-
derstood as distinct concepts, therefore, it is faith rather than trust that depends upon
non-rational belief. One may have faith in oneself, in friends, in certain practices,
customs, expectations, or beliefs, including religious beliefs, as long as one commits
oneself to those people or beliefs independently of any reason to do so.’
It follows that the concept of faith, when understood as equivalent to trust, is in-
capable of providing the moral basis for a guarantee of freedom of religion, for faith
so understood would be equivalent to reasoned belief. As a general matter, reasoned
beliefs are protected by freedom of belief, and to offer the same beliefs the same pro-
tection in the name of freedom of religion would be superfluous. By the same token,
to offer reasoned beliefs, or some subset of them, additional protection in the name of
freedom of religion would be unjustifiable in the absence of some additional feature
of those beliefs, for example the fact that they are held on the basis of faith understood
as a mode of belief distinct from reason.
According to this account, the reason why people tend to trust in the concrete and have faith in the
abstract is that people find it easier to perceive reasons to commit themselves to the concrete than to
perceive reasons to commit themselves to the abstract.
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[Vol. 45
2. Faith and Conscience
The concept of faith can also be used, in a substantive sense, to refer to the con-
tent of certain beliefs rather than to the manner in which those beliefs are held. In this
sense, faith is commonly used as a synonym for religion. We say that certain people
have faith, or are guided by faith, meaning that they endorse beliefs that are generally
recognized as religious. When we do so, however, we conceal one meaning of faith
within another. In other words, where the concept of faith is used in this substantive
sense, it is just because of the prior presence of faith understood as a mode of belief
distinct from reason. The substance of certain beliefs can be sensibly referred to as a
faith only as and when those beliefs are held on the basis of faith, that is, without re-
gard to the presence or absence of reasons to endorse them. Otherwise such beliefs
could not be described as faiths. We do not call a belief in the laws of physics or the
laws of chemistry a faith, for belief in those laws is held as a matter of reason, not
faith. It follows that the substantive meaning of faith as religion is inherently parasitic
upon the meaning of faith as a mode of belief.
This point can be clarified by comparing the concepts of faith and conscience.
Faith, as a substantive concept, differs from conscience in precisely the same way that
faith, as a species of personal commitment, differs from trust, and faith, as a mode of
belief, differs from reason. From the opposite perspective, the non-rational character
of faith as a mode of belief is felt, first, in the distinctive character of a consequent
commitment to the belief in question, a commitment that we accordingly describe in
terms of faith rather than trust, and second, in the description of the substance of what
is believed, as an article of faith rather than an article of conscience. In short, religious
belief is sustained by faith, conscientious belief by reason. It is true that the claims of
religion and the claims of conscience frequently coincide, as in conscientious objector
cases, for religion commonly asks us to believe what there is reason to believe as a
matter of conscience. Yet only the claims of religion are consequently referred to as
faith, for only the claims of religion are endorsed as a matter of faith. The claims of
conscience, by contrast, are the product of reason.’
It follows that the concept of faith, when understood in the substantive sense as
referring to the content of certain beliefs rather than to the manner in which those be-
‘ It might be noted here that the United States Supreme Court has taken the view that quasi-
religious beliefs that are not held on the basis of faith are not protected by freedom of religion. See
Yoder, supra note 9 at 216:
[I]f the Amish asserted their claims because of their subjective evaluation and rejection
of the contemporary secular values accepted by the majority, much as Thoreau rejected
the social values of his time and isolated himself at Walden Pond, their claims would
not rest on a religious basis. Thoreau’s choice was philosophical and personal rather
than religious, and such belief does not rise to the demands of the Religion Clauses.
For this reason matters of religion and matters of conscience may require distinct guarantees, whether
contained in a single clause, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, supra note 8 (and
those conventions modelled on it), or in separate clauses. For further discussion of Yoder and of the
relationship between religion and reasonable belief see Part VIA.2.
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
liefs are held, is not capable of providing the moral basis for a guarantee of freedom
of religion. First, if faith, in this sense, is parasitic upon the presence of faith as a
mode of belief, as I have claimed, then it is the latter meaning of faith that must be as-
sessed as a justification for freedom of religion. Second, if, contrary to my claim, faith
in this substantive sense is not tied to the presence of faith as a mode of belief, then it
is simply a synonym for religious doctrine, and as such is incapable of providing the
moral basis for a fundamental freedom, for the reasons given above.
3. The Impact of Faith on the Character of Belief
In my view, then, the meaning of faith as a mode of belief distinct from reason is
the only meaning capable of sustaining a fundamental guarantee of freedom of relig-
ion. Given the fact that, according to this understanding of faith, one does not have
faith for reasons, it follows that the articles of one’s faith are not subject to modifica-
tion by reason. Where reason and faith are in conflict with one another, one may de-
cide to give priority to reason and so abandon one’s faith, in whole or in part, but one
cannot, consistently with one’s faith, rely upon reason either as a guide to or critic of
that which faith has revealed. On the contrary, the content of beliefs that are based on
faith, having been acquired through revelation, can only be altered through revelation,
or less dramatically, through a gradual evolution in the culture of belief, perhaps as a
consequence of theological inquiries into the true implications of what has been re-
vealed, inquiries whose conclusions may, over a sufficient period of time, acquire the
status of revelations themselves.
When understood as a mode of belief, therefore, faith differs from reason in one
crucial respect: it does not embody the instrument of its ongoing evaluation and re-
form. The chief feature of faith, from some perspectives its greatest strength, from
others its greatest weakness, is what might be called this wilful suspension of disbe-
lief. Since revelations are rare, and since theological inquiries tend to be modest in
scope lest they challenge the substance of what has been revealed, commitments to
moral doctrine that are based on faith are inherently static. In this respect, they are to
be contrasted with commitments to moral doctrine that are based on reason, which are
inherently dynamic.67
Stability of belief is not the only consequence of this conception of faith as a
mode of belief distinct from reason. It is also in the nature of faith to demand a com-
prehensive, unqualified endorsement of what has been revealed, subject only to verifi-
cation of the authenticity of the revelation and examination of its implications. Reve-
lations cannot be treated as limited truths, unless they so limit themselves. Even the
most tolerant of religions does not and cannot take other accounts of morality to be as
true as its own. It is in the nature of reason, on the other hand, to permit only qualified
endorsement of that which has been shown to be rationally justified. Properly under-
6′ On the latter point see J. Raz, “Moral Change and Social Relativism” (1994) 11:1 Soc. Philo. &
Pol’y 139.
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[Vol. 45
stood, rational conviction is not only provisional, because subject to revision, but
modest, because subject to recognition of the existence of parallel, often incompatible
rational convictions.
The difference between faith and reason, in this respect, has an important effect
upon the claims to status and authority of beliefs that are based on faith. When faced
with rival claims, be they the claims of reason or the claims of some other faith, sub-
scribers to beliefs that are based on faith can neither argue with nor acknowledge the
force of those rival claims, but can only invite unbelievers to recognize what has been
revealed, or remain lost and unredeemed in a world without the fundamental moral
and metaphysical truths that faith has revealed. This is the necessary consequence of
the fact that faith provides no basis upon which to recognize the claims of reason or
the claims of other faiths as qualifying or supplementing the scope of its own claims.
It follows then, as suggested above, that faith-based views of the world are necessarily
singular rather than plural, partial rather than comprehensive, in that they cannot em-
brace the possibility of their co-existence with views of the world that are based on
the recognition and pursuit of values that are radically different, sometimes incom-
patible, with their own.
B. The Value of Faith
While faith is not equivalent to trust, in that it is indifferent to the presence or ab-
sence of reasons to believe, its popular association with the idea of trust is no acci-
dent, and, in some respects, no mistake. Faith and trust, I will argue, not only mean
different things, but are valuable for different reasons. Yet the distinctive value of
faith, which arises from its capacity to bridge the unknowable, is readily intelligible
only when contrasted to the distinctive value of trust, which arises from its capacity to
bridge the unknown.
1. Overcoming Ignorance and Doubt
The most obvious role that might be played by faith in the conduct of human life
is the same role played by trust, namely, to function as a device that will serve to fore-
stall the need of individuals to undertake a reasoned examination and assessment of
every significant issue confronting them on every occasion that such an issue may
arise. When we have faith in certain values, or have trust in certain people, we are able
to rely on those values and on those people as a matter of course, without having to
ask ourselves constantly whether that reliance is justified. From this point of view,
then, the role of faith, like the role of trust, is to stand in for the knowledge upon
which rational judgment must depend. The presence of trust and faith in our lives
means that there is no need for us to be doubting Thomases, at least in the colloquial
sense of that phrase. We do not need to conduct spot checks on the fidelity and integ-
rity of our friends, or our partners, in order to depend on them. Similarly, we do not
need to subject moral doctrine to rigorous and regular examination in order to be
guided by it. In this sense, faith, like trust, might be said to have a practical, functional
aspect, in that it enables us to make commitments of a certain kind, and to act upon
those commitments, in the absence of full reason to do so, and thus facilitates the re-
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
alization of whatever value those commitments are capable of yielding. It follows, ac-
cording to this account, that the presence of faith and trust in our lives promotes hu-
man well-being by enhancing our capacity to pursue certain values successfully.
But is this the true value of faith, or is it the value of faith only if one equates the
concepts of faith and trust, as I have already suggested one should not? If the realiza-
tion of value in these settings depends on the presence of general reasons to believe,
reasons that enable us to overcome moments of ignorance and doubt, then that value
plainly cannot be realized on the basis of faith as I have defined it as a mode of belief
distinct from reason. In that case one would have to look elsewhere for the true value
of faith in the promotion of human well-being.
The doubting Thomas image, taken literally, offers some sense of the difference
between the value of trust and the value of faith, and some indication of a more fruit-
ful direction in which to look for the value of faith. A decision not to place one’s fin-
ger in the wound, the decision that faith requires, is not simply a decision that fore-
stalls the need to engage in a reasoned examination of the possibility of bodily resur-
rection, but rather is a decision to believe in the Resurrection despite the absence of
any possibility of reasons to believe, or more troublingly perhaps, despite the presence
of good reasons not to believe. It is in this sort of setting, in my view, that faith and
trust necessarily part company, and that the distinctive value of faith becomes appar-
ent.
It follows from the meaning of faith that the value of faith is something that can
only be realized in situations where one believes without regard to reason to believe.
The value of trust, on the other hand, can only be realized in situations where one be-
lieves because there is general reason to believe, a reason that enables one to over-
come one’s ignorance and doubt in a particular setting, and thus enables one to over-
come the absence of any specific reason to believe, and to act in accordance with be-
lief, that ignorance and doubt give rise to in that setting. Both faith and trust, there-
fore, enable one to believe and to act in the absence of full reason to do so, but trust
depends upon the presence of prior, albeit incomplete reasons, while faith does not
depend upon reason at all. Given the difference in their characters, it cannot be as-
sumed that faith and trust are necessarily valuable in the same settings. In which set-
tings, then, is the exercise of faith justified, and so capable of yielding value, and in
which settings is trust the proper response? Put another way, which sorts of ignorance
and doubt are profitably overcome by faith, and which are the necessary province of
trust?
As I have just said, one trusts for reasons, general authorizing reasons that justify
one’s neglect to seek specific reasons in specific settings. One trusts one’s bank, for
example, for general reasons, and it is those general reasons that justify one’s neglect
to seek specific reasons to rely on the bank’s probity whenever one makes a deposit.
Trust thus makes it possible to benefit from the bank’s probity without having to con-
firm that probity in every step of one’s dealings with the bank. It is also possible to
have faith in one’s bank, but it would clearly be unwise to do so, for in the absence of
reasons to believe in the bank’s probity, faith in that probity cannot be regarded as
valuable, and indeed may well be harmful.
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To repeat, one trusts for reasons, but has faith without regard to reasons. Yet if the
role of trust and faith in overcoming ignorance and doubt is to facilitate the realization
of certain benefits, as this account of their value assumes, then the value of trust and
faith is entirely dependent on there being some benefit to realize. Where there is no
reason to expect that benefit, there is no reason to regard the exercise of faith as valu-
able. To put it from the opposite perspective, since there is no reason to have faith in a
particular consequence, there is no reason to expect that the exercise of faith will fa-
cilitate the realization of beneficial consequences, and thus no reason to regard the ex-
ercise of faith as valuable in terms of those consequences. To have faith in one’s bank
despite the absence of any reason to do so is simply foolish, for belief in one’s bank is
justifiable and so valuable only where there is reason to believe that the bank will be-
have honestly, and that reason is something that faith cannot offer. Trust is what is
called for in such a setting.
It follows that it is trust, not faith, that enables us to bridge the unknown, over-
coming ignorance and doubt where there is some deeper, underlying reason to do so.
Where there is reason to believe one should trust, not have faith; where there is reason
not to believe, both faith and trust are misplaced.
2. Leaps Into the Dark
This gives rise to an obvious problem. The assessment of value, and thus the as-
sessment of devices such as fundamental freedoms that are designed to yield value, is
necessarily rational. Yet faith is not based on reasons. How can an irrational at-
tachment be rationally determined to be valuable?’ Are we driven to the conclusion
that faith is incapable of yielding value other than accidentally, as when it calls upon
us to endorse what we have independent reason to endorse? The answer is negative in
form. One of the things that we have to deal with in life, and one of the things that can
affect our well-being, is the unavailability of reasons. The quest for reasons in life is
sometimes troublesome and difficult, but at other times impossible. Where the quest
for reasons is impossible, but commitment is potentially valuable, faith can come into
play. It follows that there is reason to seek, and value in finding, a way to come to
terms with the unknowable where to do so is necessary to human well-being.
” Faith is something like love in this regard, which is perhaps why a number of religions describe
the relationship between the human and the divine in terms of love. One possible response to the
question posed here is that the value of both faith and love is entirely derived from the value of the
commitments that are made on that basis. In that case faith and love would be without value where
what we have faith in or love cannot be rationally demonstrated to be valuable. In fact, I do not be-
lieve that it is as simple as that, for the reasons given in the text above. If it were true then it would
follow that the value of a religious commitment based on faith would be entirely derived from the
value of the doctrine that one committed oneself to on that basis. Yet, for the reasons given above, the
content of religious doctrine cannot be looked to as the basis for a guarantee of religious freedom. In
short, if faith does not have some independent value, then the guarantee cannot be justified.
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
Faith, in the sense of the word that I have drawn attention to, comes into play and
acquires its distinctive role, in precisely those contexts, be they generally or specifi-
cally described, where examination of the options before one would not be revealing
of the value latent in those options, simply because the information necessary to the
evaluation of the options is, not only unknown, but unknowable. Thus, faith makes it
possible to benefit from commitments that there is and can be no prior reason to
make. In this it differs from trust, which merely makes it possible to benefit from
commitments that there is prior reason to make, admittedly a reason that is not fully
established in advance of the commitment, but nevertheless a reason that could be
fully established at that point, albeit at some cost.
It follows that all ventures into the unknowable depend on faith, ventures where
one not only lacks the information necessary to the exercise of rational judgrnenlt, but
where one could not acquire that information without first committing oneself to the
project or activity in question. It is often the case in life that one cannot know in ad-
vance that something is worth doing, for it is in the nature of the project or activity
that one can only know whether it is worth doing by doing it. This is not simply a
matter of lack of information. Rather, it is a question of activities the value of which
derives in part from the very fact of commitment to that activity, so that the value of
the activity is unknowable in advance of commitment to the activity. When we decide
to move from one city to another, or to exchange one job for another, or to start living
as the partner of one person rather than another, we necessarily commit ourselves, to a
neighbourhood, to a workplace, to a man or woman, without full reasons to do so, for
one can only know fully whether a neighbourhood is worth living in by living in it,
whether a place is worth working in by working in it, whether someone is worth liv-
ing with by living with him or her.’ In each of these settings an act of commitment
has to be made in advance of the existence of the value that might justify the com-
mitment, and that act of commitment cannot be based upon reason, therefore, but
must be based on faith.
It is for this reason that I have described such ventures as ventures into the un-
knowable, rather than as ventures into the unknown, for the information that might
serve to justify the commitment is not unknown, in the sense of being present but un-
available to the actor and perhaps any other person, but rather is unknowable, in the
sense of not existing unless and until the commitment in question has been made. All
ventures into the unknowable, all leaps into the dark depend on faith. Or to put it
somewhat differently, faith is required in order to make any commitment that involves
a projection into the future where one’s ability to realize the value that arises from the
commitment is incompatible with the existence of reasons for making the commit-
ment in the first place. It follows that faith is facilitative of those activities that depend
on the connection between oneself and others, or between oneself and certain sets of
It is of course possible to know quite a lot about a neighbourhood, a job or a partner before corn-
mitting oneself to them. It is not possible, however, to know these things fully in advance of one’s
commitment to them, and what one cannot know in advance often is critical to their value.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
circumstances, when a search for reasons to commit oneself to those activities would
be inconclusive. Activities of that kind often constitute valuable options in life.”0 In
such settings faith provides a basis for action in the absence of any possibility of ade-
quate reasons for action.”
This does not mean that all ways of coming to terms with the unknowable are
valuable. It may well be that some questions that confront us should simply be left
unanswered, that some commitments that are offered to us should be left ungrasped,
that we should be prepared to acknowledge the mysteries of life and to accept the
limits of our condition. It is certainly the case that some purported responses to such
questions and commitments are dangerous or worse. It follows that the role of faith in
enabling us to make leaps into the dark is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for
regatding the exercise of faith as valuable, and hence for protecting the institutions
and practices that make faith possible.
Something more needs to be said here, therefore, since these comments about the
contingent character of the value of faith raise obvious concerns about the value of
faith in the making of religious commitments. Those concerns are reinforced by the
highly specific nature of the examples of faith that I have chosen to illustrate my ar-
gument. It is a weakness of my account of faith and its value, as I have so far de-
scribed it, that the examples of faith that I have relied upon, namely, faith in the value
of a commitment to a new neighbourhood, to a new job, or to a new relationship, all
involve individual and local, as opposed to collective and comprehensive, acts of faith.
” Such options are not only valuable but may be critical to the achievement of well-being for some
people, so that lack of faith in them leads to a loss of well-being. For example, those people whose
caution in the absence of full reasons to commit themselves prevents them from entering into a rela-
tionship such as marriage remain single by default, rather than because they are the kind of people
who are capable of realizing the value of a solitary life, and so deny themselves access to a condition
that is critical to their well-being.
“The argument might also be presented schematically. Given that there is no reason to have faith in
x, where x stands for the object of faith, one cannot find reason to value faith in the value of x, for
there is no rational connection between the presence of faith and the value of x. One can, however,
find reason to value faith in the possibility of the value of x, where reason to believe in x or not to be-
lieve in x is unavailable and where the absence of such reason, and the consequent inability to believe
in x or commit oneself to x, has a negative impact on human well-being. This is not the same thing as
having reason to believe in the possibility of the value of x, for in the circumstances that I have de-
scribed, that possibility is not rationally verifiable.
A similar point has been made by John Stuart Mill in regard to religion:
When the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can be known, we do not, by this
knowledge, gain any new fact by which to guide ourselves; we are, at best, only dis-
abused of our trust in some former guide-mark, which, though itself fallacious, may
have pointed in the same direction with the best indications we have, and if it happens
to be more conspicuous and legible, may have kept us right when they might have been
overlooked. It is, in short, perfectly conceivable that religion may be morally useful
without being intellectually sustainable …. (J.S. Mill, ‘Three Essays on Religion” in
J.M. Robson, ed., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Ethics, Religion and
Society, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) 369 at 405).
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T MACKLEM – FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
For that reason, none of these examples can be regarded as an entirely persuasive ex-
planation of the value of religious commitment, which plainly involves a collective
and comprehensive act of faith.
Further argument is required, then, if this account of the value of faith is to ex-
plain the value of religion and clarify the basis upon which freedom of religion is
guaranteed. Yet that argument will take us into rather different territory, for, as I have
already suggested, the distinction between the examples of faith, discussed above, and
religious faith is not simply a matter of scope. Faith, as I have so far considered it, in-
volves commitments that there can be no prior adequate reason to make, because the
nature of the commitment is such that the value of the commitment is unknowable
until the commitment is made. Religious faith, however, is typically attached to beliefs
in and commitments to matters which, from the perspective of rational believers, are
far from unknowable and which there may well be reason to make or not to make.
That being the case, it is questionable whether faith in such matters is justified, and if
so, when and under what circumstances it is justified.
a. The Content of Religion and Its Relation to the Act of Faith
It will be remembered that in order to assess alternatives to the conventional justi-
fications for freedom of religion I offered a preliminary definition of the elements of
religion, one that carefully eschewed any reference to the content of religious doc-
trine, for reasons that I sought to justify in the argument that followed. According to
that definition, the term religion refers to collective participation in institutions and
practices that manifest a freely given personal commitment to a particular set of be-
liefs, beliefs that are not based on reason alone but are held, at least in part, on the
basis offaith.
It will by now be obvious that however well-fitted to its original purpose that
definition may have been, it is not ultimately satisfactory as the basis for an explana-
tion of the value of religious freedom, for the value of an act of faith, the value that I
have argued must underpin a guarantee of freedom of religion, cannot be determined
entirely in isolation from the value of the beliefs that are adhered to on the basis of
faith. Let me then offer a revised approach to the meaning of religion, one that explic-
itly addresses the question of religious doctrine, and so comes closer to explaining the
most central and most familiar instances of what we intuitively recognize as religion.
Such an approach may make it possible to determine whether and on what basis faith,
in doctrines of that kind, can be said to be valuable. As above, this description of the
elements of religion is to be regarded as preliminary and provisional. Nevertheless, it
seems clear that if freedom of religion cannot be justified in terms of the value of faith
in beliefs such as these, it is doubtful whether the freedom can be justified at all; if the
freedom could be justified on some other ground, it is doubtful whether its guarantee
could be plausibly understood in terms of religion.
Assume for the time being, therefore, that the elements of religion are as I origi-
nally described them, but with the addition of a doctrinal qualification. Religious
doctrine, it seems fair to say, has been traditionally and typically based upon a set of
beliefs, first, about the nature and purpose of human life, and in particular, about the
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possibility of a life other than material existence, and second, about the nature of the
good, and in particular, about the possibility of moral grounds that lie beyond human
life and beyond human reason.
If this very crude description of the content of religious doctrine is generally ac-
curate, in the sense that it comprehends most beliefs that we intuitively recognize as
religious, then it might be argued on the basis of it that faith is necessary to the prac-
tice of religion because the substantive beliefs that form the content of religion are by
their very nature not verifiable by reason, or if verifiable, would provide less effective
moral guidance were verification to be demanded of those who hold them. It might be
argued that the possibility of a life beyond material existence is inaccessible to reason
and must, therefore, be taken on faith or not at all. By the same token, it might be ar-
gued that the possibility of moral grounds that lie beyond human life and beyond hu-
man reason, by definition, must be taken on faith or not at all. In this respect, the role
of faith could be said to be just as I have described it, namely, to enable human beings
to make commitments that serve their well-being despite the unavailability of any rea-
son to do so.
It is just as possible, however, to use the same description of the elements of re-
ligion as the basis for a much less benevolent account of the consequences of religious
faith. According to this less benevolent account, the topics of religious doctrine,
namely, the possibility that there is life beyond material existence and the possibility
that there are moral grounds that lie beyond human life and human reason, are not in
fact inaccessible to reason, so that the role of religious faith cannot be said to be a
function of the unavailability of reasons. In other words, on this account it cannot be
said that the role of religious faith is to supplement reason. Instead, the role of reli-
gious faith must be to supplant reason and so forestall the conclusions that reason
would otherwise yield on the topics of religious belief.
It has been both assumed and argued above that religion is by its nature a collec-
tive enterprise, part of the purpose of which must be to eliminate individual differ-
ences of belief among its adherents on the issues that form the fundamental content of
religion, thereby creating a community united in belief and concerted in the actions
that follow from that belief. According to this less benevolent account, faith is neces-
sary to religious practice because it ensures the conjunction of the beliefs of religious
adherents, preventing any questioning of or challenge to those beliefs, other than by
heresy, and thereby securing general conformity to doctrine in the thoughts and ac-
tions of individuals. Were religious belief not based upon faith, and were the topics of
religious belief accordingly vulnerable to rational analysis, the independent ap-
plication of reason to the broad topics of religious doctrine would almost certainly
lead to pluralist, rather than uniform, outcomes on particular moral issues. That being
the case, it can be plausibly maintained that the role of faith is to suppress the conclu-
sions that reason would otherwise yield.
According to the first account, then, religious faith is valuable and so perhaps
worthy of fundamental protection; according to the second, it is harmful. Which of
these pictures of religious belief is correct? Before addressing the question it must be
remembered why we are asking it in the first place. Faith, I have argued, comes into
play in those settings where a commitment to a particular option or course in life can-
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not be made on the basis of reason, simply because the reasons to make or not to
make the commitment cannot be known in advance of making it. Clearly, this is not
enough to show that faith fosters human well-being, however, for not all commitments
based on faith are valuable. That being the case, I have argued further that faith con-
tributes to human well-being when the inability to make the commitments that faith
makes possible would have a negative impact on well-being, both because the com-
mitments in question are potentially valuable and because failure to make them would
be harmful. In evaluating the contribution of religious faith to human well-being,
therefore, two distinctions need to be drawn. The first distinction is between what is
knowable and what is unknowable, between what is accessible to reason and what is
not. The second distinction lies within the realm of what is unknowable and so inac-
cessible to reason, and is between what does and what does not need to be addressed
in order to secure human well-being. Faith is only valuable in dealing with what is un-
knowable, and is only valuable there if the unknowable must be addressed in order to
secure human well-being. In short, faith is not valuable unless both those conditions
are met.
b. The Value of Religion
Are both conditions met in the case of religious faith, as the benevolent account
would have it? Are the topics of religious belief truly unknowable, and if so, must
they be addressed on the basis of faith in order to enable human beings to make com-
mitments that are essential to their well-being? From a fully rational point of view, the
answer must be no. A commitment to life itself, and to the various projects that con-
stitute the particular life of any person, does not involve a venture into the unknow-
able, and indeed could not be thought to do so unless one regarded life as being so
bound up with death as to make the fact of life as unknowable as the fact of death
sometimes appears to be. Even from that point of view, however, life could not be said
to amount to a venture into the unknowable, for from a rational perspective death is
no mystery, however upsetting it may be.
By the same token, a commitment to the good and all that it requires of us does
not involve a venture into the unknowable either, for moral grounds do not lie beyond
human life and are not inaccessible to human beings on the basis of reason. On the
contrary, it is a necessary feature of morality that any account of it must be fit for hu-
man beings and the lives that they are bound to lead,’ and it is one of the principal
functions of reason to offer us a rich and complex account of the content of that mo-
rality. It follows that human well-being, which clearly depends upon a complete
commitment to life and a full understanding of morality, is not necessarily dependent
upon an act of religious faith. Just as the non-benevolent account of the consequences
of religious belief claimed, the role of religious faith for most human beings, namely
all those who endorse a fully rational point of view, is to suppress the conclusions that
reason would otherwise yield. As Mill put it over a hundred years ago:
n See J. Raz, “A Morality Fit For Humans” (1993) 91 Mich. L. Rev. 1297.
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It is time to consider, more impartially and therefore more deliberately than is
usually done, whether all this straining to prop up beliefs which require so great
an expense of intellectual toil and ingenuity to keep them standing, yields any
sufficient return in human well being; and whether that end would not be better
served by a frank recognition that certain subjects are inaccessible to our facul-
ties, and by the application of the same mental powers to the strengthening and
enlargement of those other sources of virtue and happiness which stand in no
need of the support or sanction of supernatural beliefs and inducements.73
But is this true for all human beings? Is it the case that we are all capable, or should
be, of adopting a fully rational point of view in response to all issues that confront us?
If what is required here is an approach to well-being that is capable of accommodat-
ing the character and commitments of very different people, and if the guarantee of
certain rights and freedoms is one way of ensuring that the well-being of every per-
son, however idiosyncratic, is capable of being realized, is it not essential that the
guarantee take into account the fact that for some people the nature of life and the
content of morality are unknowable on the basis of reason alone? It is possible that
such people are merely superstitious, or fearful, or in need of grander, more compre-
hensive explanations than reason can offer, but that is in itself no answer, for two rea-
sons.
First, it seems to be the case that most of us from time to time invoke mythic be-
liefs in order to deal with certain issues in life, beliefs that are supportable only on the
basis of faith, although our ability to do so successfully depends upon our willingness
to heed rational reminders of the status of those beliefs as myths. All that is distinctive
about religious believers, then, is that they rely upon what, from the rational point of
view, are myths for the very foundation of their commitment to life and to the basic
conception of the good that makes the successful pursuit of the project of that life
possible. Moreover, their commitment to faith compels them to ignore rational re-
minders of the status of those beliefs as myths.
Second, the fact remains that whether religious believers are merely superstitious
or not, and whether they are distinctive in that regard or not, for them faith in the be-
liefs that form the content of religious doctrine is critical to the achievement of well-
being. Their character is such that their well-being requires them to commit them-
selves to what, for them, is and must remain unknowable. The question is whether
they are to be condemned for this, or whether our account of morality and the institu-
tions and practices that serve to implement that morality must be such as to serve
them as they are. The answer clearly depends on the nature of the beliefs to which
they have committed themselves.
There is an important difference between religious faith and the individual and lo-
cal acts of faith that are often involved in commitments to new neighbourhoods, new
jobs, or new relationships. Religious faith is not faith in the value of a particular
commitment, but faith in the value of a belief that is designed to sustain all or at least
” Mill, supra note 71 at 404-05.
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TMACKLEM- FAITHAS A SECULAR VALUE
most of one’s commitments in life. Following the line of argument sketched earlier,
faith is only valuable where the inability to make the commitments that faith makes
possible would have a negative impact on well-being, both because the commitments
in question are potentially valuable and because failure to make them would be harm-
ful. The difficulty with religious faith, then, is that it does not merely function as the
trigger for the making of a commitment, like faith in a new neighbourhood, a new job,
or a new partner, but, since it is faith in a certain set of beliefs, governs the character
of any consequent commitment and so governs the value of that commitment. It fol-
lows that religious faith can only serve the well-being of religious believers if and to
the extent that religious beliefs have the capacity to inspire commitments that are ca-
pable of contributing to well-being. Otherwise there is simply no value in religious faith.
i. The Price of Faith
As a general matter, then, the value of faith, be it religious or secular, is not
merely facilitative, in the sense of making easier what could otherwise be done
through reliance on reason. Rather, the abdication of rational assessment that faith re-
quires creates conditions of confidence that are essential to the pursuit of certain valu-
able activities and relationships. In the most literal sense of the phrase, faith means
that one does not have to be a doubting Thomas: one does not need to have placed
one’s finger in the wound to believe in the resurrection of the body.
However, that example also suggests the price of faith. The difficulty with faith,
secular or religious, is that it often serves as a substitute for knowledge and reason in
settings where those are not only available, but constitute a sounder basis for action
and belief. New relationships, for example, may require an act of faith, as I have ar-
gued above, but the scope of that faith must be carefully circumscribed, for new rela-
tionships must also be consistent with reason. This is not simply to say that faith is a
necessary, but not a sufficient condition of any new relationship. Rather, it is to say
that faith is a necessary condition of a new relationship in certain dimensions of that
relationship only, namely, those dimensions the value of which cannot be determined
until one has committed oneself to the relationship. Other dimensions of the relation-
ship must be rationally founded if the relationship, overall, is to contribute to the well-
being of both parties. Relationships that are founded on faith, and faith alone, are
valuable only by chance (in terms of the fundamental compatibility of the parties) and
as the result of ongoing acts of concern, commitment, and good management, acts
that are themselves rationally based (in terms of the capacity of the parties to develop
and pursue their relationship successfully).
It follows that faith, which can be vital to the achievement of well-being in some
dimensions of life, in particular those dimensions where reasons are unavailable, will
undermine well-being if and when it is invoked in dimensions where reasons are both
available and constitute a sounder basis for action and belief. As far as religious faith
is concerned, this means not only that religious beliefs must be capable of furthering
well-being, but that the endorsement of religious belief must be confined to those
people whose well-being depends on it, as described above, and further, must be re-
stricted to those dimensions of their lives where their well-being depends on it. Faith
is inappropriate as a wider guide either to the individual pursuit of well-being or to the
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collective exercise of responsibility for the design of institutions to further that pur-
suit.
VI. The Place of Religion in Public Life
A. Freedom of Religion
1. Definition
If freedom of religion, properly understood, is founded upon the value that faith
in certain beliefs, beliefs in matters that are for some people inaccessible on the basis
of reason, is capable of bringing to the lives of those people, then the essence of the
freedom must be to offer protection to the institutions and practices that foster and ex-
press the beliefs in question. As far as freedom of religion is concerned, therefore, re-
ligion refers to collective participation in institutions and practices that manifest a
freely given personal commitment to a particular set of beliefs commitment to which is
capable of enhancing human well-being, beliefs that are not based on reason alone
but are held, at least in part, on the basis offaith.
I must stress that this definition is a term of art, designed to meet the purposes of
a fundamental political guarantee. It does not pretend to be acceptable to, or to cap-
ture the full value of, any or all of the institutions and practices that have been tradi-
tionally regarded as religions. Such is not and could not be its purpose, for the role of
the definition is, as I have said, to describe the scope of freedom of religion as a fun-
damental political guarantee in a secular constitution, not to describe the scope of re-
ligion itself.
It will be clear at once that this definition of religion is based upon the prelimi-
nary definition that I offered above, now modified to recognize that religious faith is
not valuable except when attached to a set of beliefs that are capable of enhancing
human well-being. This modification does not mean that the value of a particular re-
ligious belief is dependent upon the existence of a necessary connection between en-
dorsement of that belief and the achievement of well-being, for no commitment,
whether to a person, to a course of action, or to a set of beliefs, can ever be expected
to guarantee well-being. Nor does it mean that the value of a religious belief is a func-
tion of the degree to which that belief sustains human well-being, for commitments
are not susceptible to that kind of evaluation. Rather, it means what it says, that relig-
ious belief must possess the capacity to enhance the well-being of those who commit
themselves to it. Whether it ultimately does so will depend upon them, upon others,
and upon chance.
It is important to emphasize, however, that apart from the requirement that there
be a connection between belief and well-being, this definition of religion is entirely
silent, and hence entirely open-minded, as to the content of religious doctrine. Any
belief that both is and must be held on the basis of faith, in the sense described above,
whether or not it bears any similarity to conventional religious beliefs, is entitled to
fundamental protection under the rubric of freedom of religion if it is capable of en-
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hancing human well-being. It follows, as will be explained more fully below, that the
distinction between protected and unprotected beliefs should no longer turn on com-
parisons between the content of traditional and non-traditional religious doctrines, but
should be determined by a frank examination of the contribution that any doctrine
held on the basis of faith, be it traditional or non-traditional, is capable of making to
well-being. If what are commonly known as cults, for example, are to be denied the
protection of freedom of religion it must be because and to the extent that commit-
ment to those cults diminishes human well-being, not because of the success or failure
of a comparison between the doctrines espoused by those cults and conventional re-
ligious belief. ‘
a. The Relationship Between Religion and Well-Being
Yet to describe the scope of freedom of religion in such expansive terms is a trifle
misleading, for I have already indicated that the range of religious belief that is enti-
tled to the protection of a fundamental guarantee is not in fact unlimited, but is neces-
sarily constrained by the contingent nature of the capacity of faith to enhance well-
being. In other words, the requirement of a connection between faith and well-being
places significant constraints upon freedom of religion, albeit not the same constraints
as have been recognized in conventional analyses of that freedom.
I have argued above that faith, which can be vital to the achievement of well-
being in certain dimensions of life, those dimensions where reasons are unavailable,
will undermine well-being if and when it is invoked in regard to dimensions of life
where reasons are both available and constitute a sounder basis for action and belief.
It follows that religious belief is only capable of enhancing well-being if and to the
extent that it calls for faith in regard to dimensions of life where reasons are inac-
cessible to the believer. Conversely, religious belief will undermine well-being if and
to the extent that it calls for faith in regard to dimensions of life where reasons are ac-
cessible to the believer. In short, religious faith must be confined to realms where rea-
son is inaccessible and yet belief is necessary to well-being. Outside those realms reli-
gious faith diminishes well-being, not so much because its consequences may not
coincide with the consequences of rational belief, but because the exercise of rational
thought in relation to the selection and pursuit of goals in life, to the extent that it is
accessible, is a necessary element in the achievement of human well-being. It follows
that any definition of religion that is designed to serve the purposes of a fundamental
guarantee by linking religious faith to human well-being must successfully distinguish
those two realms.
In my view this can only be done by imposing two requirements upon any belief
that presents itself as a candidate for the protection of freedom of religion, first that
74This is to ignore for the moment the very real possibility that cults should be denied the protection
of freedom of religion because commitment to them is normally not freely given, as the above defini-
tion of religion requires, but rather is obtained and maintained by a form of psychological manipula-
tion that is inconsistent with free will.
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the belief in question be freely endorsed, and second, that the content of that belief be
confined to those dimensions of a believer’s life in regard to which his or her well-
being depends upon faith. The first of these requirements is entirely familiar, the sec-
ond less so. Yet each is a necessary albeit not a sufficient condition of the link be-
tween faith and well-being.
Free endorsement of belief is not only central to religious tradition (cults aside),
but is a necessary feature of freedom of religion. The fact that a religious belief has
been freely endorsed is the surest evidence of the believer’s own conviction that his or
her well-being depends upon faith in the substance of that belief. But that in itself is
not enough to establish a link between faith and well-being, for believers may be and
indeed often are mistaken as to the value of their beliefs. If a belief is genuinely capa-
ble of serving well-being the fact that it has been freely endorsed is the best evidence
available that it serves the well-being of the particular believer in question. However,
the fact that a belief has been freely endorsed is not in itself evidence that the belief is
genuinely capable of serving well-being, for the act of endorsement has neither the
power to make a belief serve well-being nor the capacity to determine whether or not
that belief is actually capable of serving the well-being of the believers in question. In
short, beliefs do not serve well-being just because they are freely endorsed.
How otherwise, however, are we to determine that the content of religious doc-
trine is restricted to those dimensions of the believer’s life in regard to which his or
her well-being depends on faith in that doctrine? The answer is in some respects fa-
miliar. Freedom of religion has always recognized restrictions on the content of re-
ligious doctrine, namely, the semantic restrictions that have been relied upon to de-
termine whether a set of beliefs qualifies as a religion or not. I have argued above that
supporters of those restrictions have mistakenly taken the features of traditional re-
ligions to be definitive of the scope of freedom of religion. Yet while the features of
traditional religions can no longer be regarded as providing a template for access to
freedom of religion, they remain reasonably sound illustrations of faith-based beliefs
that have been formulated in such a way as to ensure that their adherents are offered
access to religious faith in order to deal with issues that they find unknowable, while
leaving those adherents free to rely upon reason in all other aspects of their lives. It
follows that there may be good reason to protect the exercise of traditional religious
beliefs, not out of an unwarranted attachment to history or habit, but because of the
connection between adherence to those beliefs and the achievement of well-being, a
connection whose existence we have always assumed but never tested. It further fol-
lows that any exploration of the scope of freedom of religion, and of the link between
religious faith and human well-being upon which that freedom depends, requires that
we both test the assumption that adherence to traditional religious beliefs serves well-
being and examine the possibility that adherence to other faith-based beliefs also does
SO.
I suggested above that religious doctrine has been traditionally and typically
based upon a set of beliefs first, about the nature and purpose of human life and in
particular about the possibility of a life other than material existence, and second,
about the nature of the good and in particular about the possibility of moral grounds
that lie beyond human life and beyond human reason. It is clear that for some, indeed
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T MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
perhaps for many human beings a rational approach to such matters is either intel-
lectually inaccessible or psychologically unendurable. Yet the ability to come to terms
with those matters is frequently, perhaps normally, essential to the achievement of
well-being, and where reason cannot provide that ability faith must step in. It follows
that the value of traditional religious faith lies in its capacity to enable certain people
to make commitments to the project of a life and to the moral values that sustain that
project, commitments that are essential to the achievement of their well-being, despite
the inaccessibility to them of any reason to do so.
What is important for present purposes is that this predicament and the response
to it is one that human beings who do not share in it can recognize and respect with-
out themselves either endorsing or seeing reason to endorse. It is often the case in life
that one can recognize the legitimacy of doubts and uncertainties that one does not
share and sees no reason to share. This is because there is a zone of perception be-
yond the known and the unknown, a zone of understanding beyond the reasonable
and the unreasonable “when the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can be
known”,, a zone where issues are widely recognized to be in some sense mysterious
or unknowable. There are things that we do not know and there are things that we
cannot know. The precise scope of the latter zone is in dispute, so that certain issues
fall into it for some people and not for others. Moreover, the ability to deal with issues
that fall into this zone is essential to the achievement of the well-being of some people
but not others.
It is in regard to issues that fall into this zone that religious faith may be essential
to well-being, and correspondingly, it is upon such issues that religious doctrine must
be focused if it is to attract the protection of freedom of religion. If a body of people
claims that Jesus lives and that they depend upon faith in that fact for their sense of
purpose in life, it is possible for us to recognize and respect that claim without either
endorsing it or seeing any reason to endorse it, for faith in the Resurrection and its
implications is one way of coming to terms with death, an issue that we can all recog-
nize to be in some sense genuinely mysterious. But if a body of people claims that El-
vis lives and that they depend upon faith in that fact in order to carry on in life we
would be forced to conclude that they needed professional help, for belief that Elvis is
still alive is not a way of coming to terms with death or any other mystery in life, but
is simply an unfortunate and damaging consequence of the cult of celebrity.
The topics of traditional religious doctrine are, of course, not the only mysteries
that people find it impossible to deal with or to live with, nor is traditional religious
doctrine the only way to address the topics that it focuses upon. Yet it remains the
case that those topics are paradigmatic examples of matters that are, for many people,
unknowable and yet essential to the achievement of well-being. It follows that in as-
sessing whether commitment to a faith-based belief is capable of enhancing well-
being the question will be, not whether the belief in issue has doctrinal features in
common with traditional religions, but whether like them it enables people to address
7′ Mill, supra note 71 at 405.
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and overcome matters that we can all recognize, if not accept as being in some sense
profoundly mysterious and so inaccessible on the basis of reason, and yet respect as
central to the achievement of the well-being of at least some people, those who freely
endorse a faith-based response to them.
b. Religiously Inspired Conduct
There is a further, related point to be made here about the role of religious institu-
tions and practices. The presence of such institutions and practices is essential to the
survival and development of faith in religious beliefs, the existence and nourishment
of which depends first, upon contact with the sources of revelation, second, upon the
guidance of clerics (for want of a better word), and third, upon the commitment of
other believers. In this respect faith-based beliefs differ somewhat from rational be-
liefs, and it is that difference that is the source of the requirement that freedom of re-
ligion extend to the protection of religiously inspired conduct, despite the fact that
conduct based upon other beliefs is entitled to no such protection.
0
It is true that rational beliefs also depend first, upon sources (in the form of a his-
tory of reasoning), second, upon the guidance of scholars, and third, upon contact
with other thinkers, and so might be said to be parallel to religious beliefs in those re-
spects. One might be tempted to conclude that, as a matter of consistency, protection
ought to be accorded to the institutions and practices that sustain both types of belief,
rational and non-rational, or neither. It is also true, however, that these features of a
culture of rational belief are separately guaranteed by other rights and freedoms,
whether formally expressed in a constitution or not, such as freedom of expression,
freedom of association, and the right to a decent education. By contrast, the institu-
tions and practices that foster and sustain faith in religious beliefs are and must be a
direct reflection of the distinctive, non-rational character of the belief in question and
so must be protected as such. In other words, those institutions and practices cannot
be independently guaranteed but must be treated as necessary implications of the
guarantee of freedom of religion, for they cannot be fully described other than by ref-
erence to the content of a particular religious belief and what the protection of that
belief entails.
In short, the guarantee of freedom of religion extends to religiously inspired con-
duct because a religion is not a set of ideas like any other, but rather is a faith-based
institution and set of practices, the character and consequences of which are, from a
rational point of view, idiosyncratic and consequently must be protected idiosyncrati-
cally.
c.
Individual and Collective Acts of Faith
There are two further features of this definition of religion to which attention
must be drawn, for they distinguish religious faith, which warrants fundamental po-
litical protection, from individual acts of faith of the sort described above, such as
commitment to a new neighbourhood, a new job, or a new relationship, which do not
warrant such protection. First, for the reasons just given, the protection of freedom of
religion extends primarily to the institutions and practices that foster and sustain the
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TMACKLEM- FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
collective development and expression of religious belief. As long as religious beliefs
remain entirely interior, as they do unless and until they are displayed in religious in-
stitutions and practices, they neither require nor are entitled to fundamental protec-
tion, although in fact that protection is conventionally accorded to them by constitu-
tional clauses that protect freedom of thought and belief in company with freedom of
opinion and expression. In other words, as long as acts of faith remain interior they do
not need protection, any more than do reasons, in whose place they serve. This ex-
plains why freedom of religion protects collective acts of faith but not individual acts
of faith of the sort described above. Such individual acts of faith remain interior and
so invulnerable. On the other hand, collective acts of faith, or to be more precise, indi-
vidual acts of faith in collective beliefs, are manifested in the institutions and practices
that foster and sustain those beliefs, at which point they come to be in need of protec-
tion.
Second, and to reprise briefly points that were made earlier, this definition of re-
ligion requires commitment to a doctrine, or set of beliefs, beliefs that are capable of
enhancing well-being, for religious faith differs from the individual acts of faith de-
scribed above in that it is necessarily mediated by the presence of a belief. Since indi-
vidual acts of faith are not so mediated, they do not require fundamental protection.
2. Application
As one moves from the problem of defining freedom of religion to the problem of
applying the freedom that has been so defined one is forced to face the question of
what difference, if any, a shift in the justification of the freedom and a consequent
modification of its definition makes or should make to the present beneficiaries and
non-beneficiaries of that freedom. Would the approach to freedom of religion that I
have just urged, if adopted, have the consequence of denying fundamental protection
to certain faith-based beliefs that we have traditionally recognized as religions while
extending that protection to other faith-based beliefs that we have traditionally refused
to recognize as religions?
I have already suggested that traditional religious beliefs should continue to be
protected under the approach that I have recommended, provided that it can be dem-
onstrated that what we have always assumed to be true is in fact true, namely, that be-
lief in the doctrines of those religions, when freely endorsed on the basis of faith, is
capable of enhancing human well-being in the manner indicated above. Indeed, were
this not so, and were most traditional religious beliefs not protected under this ap-
proach, the approach would have to be judged a failure, for the semantic constraints
upon any explanation and justification of freedom of religion are such that an ap-
proach to freedom of religion that excluded a significant number of traditional reli-
gious beliefs from the scope of the freedom could not be regarded as an acceptable
account of freedom of religion, although it might of course serve as an acceptable ac-
count of some other freedom.
The question remains, however, to what extent the approach to freedom of relig-
ion that I have recommended would offer protection for the first time to faith-based
beliefs that we have heretofore refused to recognize as religions, would offer a differ-
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[Vol. 45
ent form of protection to faith-based beliefs that we have heretofore recognized as re-
ligions, or would deny protection to what we have previously protected as religion.
While I clearly cannot offer answers to every sort of hypothetical question that might
possibly be raised as to the scope of freedom of religion, or perhaps even to all the
questions that I have just sketched, a few examples may help to give a sense of what
this approach to freedom of religion that I have recommended might entail in practice.
The first example is the example of marginal, unconventional religious beliefs.
Two questions arise here, first, whether such beliefs are entitled to fundamental pro-
tection under the rubric of freedom of religion, and second, if they are so entitled what
degree and scope of protection they are entitled to. As to the first question, I have al-
ready indicated that under the approach that I am recommending a decision whether
to extend protection to the institutions and practices that express and sustain belief in
what is alleged to be a religion should be based, not on a comparison between the
doctrines of the alleged religion and the doctrines of traditional religions, but on a
frank examination of the contribution that faith in the doctrine of the alleged religion
is capable of making to human well-being. The result of such an examination would
not necessarily confirm conventional conclusions as to the non-religious character of
what are commonly described as cults.
On the one hand, it is indisputable that faith in the doctrines of self-destructive, or
suicidal cults, such as those led by Jim Jones or David Koresh, is incapable of en-
hancing human well-being. On the other hand, it is less clear whether faith in the
doctrines of quasi-religions such as Scientology is incapable of enhancing well-being.
It is true that there seems to be reason to question whether the doctrines of Scientol-
ogy are at all times freely endorsed by their adherents. If they are not, then they can-
not be said to enhance human well-being, for the reasons given above. If they are,
however, then the further question must be whether the content of the doctrines of
Scientology is such that faith in that content is capable of enhancing human well-
being, by enabling the adherents of Scientology to address and to deal with matters
that are for them unknowable and yet central to the achievement of their well-being,
matters that can from the rational point of view be recognized to be in some sense
genuinely mysterious or unknowable, albeit not necessarily so. This is a question that
I cannot pretend to answer myself, for I have no special knowledge of Scientology. I
can note, however, that conventional approaches to the question of whether Scientol-
ogy is a religion deserving of fundamental protection have not addressed this question
at all, but have instead contented themselves with a comparison between the doctrines
of Scientology and the doctrines of traditional religions, a comparison that for the rea-
sons given above is, in my view, an illegitimate means of determining the scope of
freedom of religion. It follows that while I would be privately surprised if the insti-
tutions and practice of Scientology merit the protection of freedom of religion, I rec-
ognize that it is only possible to know that this is so by asking straighforwardly
whether Scientology is capable of enhancing human well-being.
Other marginal, unconventional religious beliefs raise somewhat different ques-
tions about the scope of freedom of religion. In particular, under the approach that I
have recommended a belief is only entitled to the protection of freedom of religion if
and to the extent that it is held on the basis of faith. A set of beliefs that is endorsed
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T0 MACKLEM – FAITH AS A SECULAR VALUE
entirely on the basis of reason is not a religion, therefore, at least not for these pur-
poses, and is not entitled to be protected as such. This may be what the United States
Supreme Court had in mind when it observed in Wisconsin v. Yoder.
[]f the Amish asserted their claims because of their subjective evaluation and
rejection of the contemporary secular values accepted by the majority, much as
Thoreau rejected the social values of his time and isolated himself at Walden
Pond, their claims would not rest on a religious basis. Thoreau’s choice was
philosophical and personal rather than religious, and such belief does not rise to
the demands of the Religion Clauses.16
It is not clear from this passage whether the Supreme Court’s objection to the idea that
Thoreau’s beliefs were religious was based on the view that those beliefs were merely
subjective or were philosophical. Indeed the Court seems to have equated the two.
Nor is it clear whether, as a matter of fact, the Court was correct in its characterization
of Thoreau’s beliefs. But if the Court meant to say that Thoreau believed what he did
because he had arrived at a reasoned rejection of the prevailing values of his time,
then in my view it correctly concluded that Thoreau’s beliefs did not constitute a re-
ligion. According to the account that I have given, religion must be based on faith, not
reason, for it is the presence of faith that gives religion its distinctive capacity to en-
hance human well-being.
What then of atheists and agnostics? In my view, the answer is clear and follows
from what I have just said. Atheism and agnosticism are rational positions, the es-
sence of which is either to deny or to remain non-committal as to the legitimacy of
religious faith. That being the case atheism and agnosticism plainly do not warrant the
protection of freedom of religion, although in practice the related requirement of non-
establishment of religion, which I will turn to below, is likely to yield them a similar
degree of protection.
Other categories of belief may be less easy to characterize as rational or non-
rational. Political beliefs are typically based on reasons, but from time to time com-
mitment to them may change its character, either temporarily or permanently. We are
all familiar with political commitments that it is only possible to explain in terms of
faith. Does it follow that such commitments are entitled to the protection of freedom
of religion? The answer, in my view, is that there is no categorical bar to the protec-
tion of a political faith on the basis that it has become a religion, but that in practice
such protection is unlikely to be accorded, for when political beliefs come to be mat-
ters of faith it is generally because it has come to be recognized that the connection
between the realization of those beliefs and the achievement of human well-being is,
from any rational point of view, extremely dubious.
I have argued above that religious faith can only be said to be capable of enhanc-
ing human well-being when it is confined to issues that, from the point of view of the
believer, are inaccessible to reason and, from the point of view of reason itself, are in
76 Yoder, supra note 9 at 216.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
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some sense genuinely mysterious. If political beliefs come to be matters of faith sim-
ply as a way of concealing their inadequacy from those who are committed to them,
those beliefs do not thereby begin to address matters that are genuinely mysterious,
and for that reason faith in them is not capable of enhancing human well-being. On
the contrary, such forms of political faith are no more than delusions, delusions that
notoriously can be and have been extremely harmful to those who are subjected to
them. And, of course, as a general principle beliefs that are harmful to others do not
assist well-being, even of those who subscribe to them.
So, for example, if and to the extent that in certain of its manifestations Commu-
nism was a faith-based political belief, it would not for that reason have warranted the
protection of freedom of religion (unlikely though it is that any of its adherents would
ever have sought such protection), for faith in Communism arose as and when the ca-
pacity of Communist principles to foster and nourish human well-being in dimensions
of life that were, from any point of view fully knowable, came to be questioned. At
that point Communist doctrine could not have been said to serve the well-being of ei-
ther those to whom it was applied or those who believed in its application (who may
have been the same or different people).
The final question of application, as I have already indicated, is what degree and
scope of protection faith-based beliefs are entitled to once it has been shown that they
are entitled to the protection of freedom of religion. To some extent, there can be no
general answer to this question. Freedom of religion protects the institutions and
practices that express and foster faith in the doctrines of a particular religion. The
character of those institutions and practices is as varied as the character of the doc-
trines that they foster and give expression to. Beyond that the limits to the freedom
can only be determined as they are now determined, by asking to what extent an al-
leged exercise of freedom of religion fulfils the purposes for which that freedom has
been fundamentally guaranteed, and by weighing the answer to that question against
the purposes for the sake of which, it is alleged, that freedom is presently being in-
fringed. Since I have given an explanation of the purposes for which freedom of re-
ligion has been fundamentally guaranteed that differs from the conventional explana-
tion of that guarantee, I must expect that this weighing process and its consequences
will correspondingly differ from the present process and its consequences. And yet I
cannot say exactly what that difference will be without going through the weighing
process myself on a case by case basis, something that I clearly cannot do. What I can
say, however, is that the focus of the first branch of the inquiry must be on the ques-
tion of religious faith and the extent to which an alleged exercise of religion can be
said to express that faith in a way that fosters human well-being. In other words, those
who wish to claim religious freedom for their conduct must be able to show that the
conduct in question is central to the possibility and the practice of their faith, and fur-
ther, that their faith is central to their well-being. This is something quite different
from what they have traditionally been expected to show.
This shift in focus may well give rise to somewhat unfamiliar conclusions con-
cerning the freedom that is owed to the doctrines and practices of traditional religions.
The approach that I have recommended is likely to offer those religions protection of
a rather different character than the protection they have traditionally enjoyed. In ex-
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T MACKLEM – FAIT-HASA SECULAR VALUE
ceptional cases, it may even deny them protection altogether. I have already suggested
that in principle traditional religions can expect that the bulk of their doctrines and
practices will continue to be-protected under the approach that I have recommended.
Indeed I have even suggested that the approach would be a failure were traditional re-
ligions not so protected by it. It does not follow, however, that traditional religions can
expect to be protected in precisely the same way that they are now protected, for there
is no particular reason to believe that the present approach to the scope of freedom of
religion has yielded conclusions that correspond precisely to the conclusions that
would be yielded by a faith-based approach to the freedom. If, as I have argued, tradi-
tional religions should continue to receive fundamental protection because and only
because they constitute paradigmatic examples of beliefs that offer their adherents the
possibility of faith in relation to dimensions of life that those adherents reasonably re-
gard as inaccessible other than on the basis of faith, dimensions of life that are critical
to their well-being, then traditional religions should be denied protection to the extent
that they have misidentified those dimensions of life, so as to embrace matters in re-
gard to which reason is not only accessible but constitutes a sounder guide to the
achievement of human well-being. Since this is not the test that traditional religions
have had to meet in the past, it is almost inevitable that if asked to meet it now they
would receive a different, perhaps lesser protection.
However, there should be nothing particularly surprising or disturbing in this fact.
On the contrary, it simply confirms and continues an accepted historical trend. As I
indicated in the introduction to this paper, the story of the modem era has in part been
the story of the ascendancy of reason in relation to matters that were once regarded as
inherently matters of faith, and thus as matters falling within the exclusive preserve of
religion, matters such as the exercise of moral conscience, the expression of moral
and political belief, and the investigation of our place in the world and beyond. The
ascendancy of reason in relation to these matters has not entirely displaced faith, as
the continuing existence of.religious conviction confirms, but it has limited faith’s
authority. Faith in such matters remains permissible, indeed is guaranteed freedom by
the state for the reasons that I have advanced in this paper, yet that freedom is now
limited by the requirement that the pursuit of faith involve no harm to others and re-
quire no endorsement by the state.’ To put it from the opposite perspective, faith in
such matters may be denied the protection of freedom of religion, and indeed often
has been, in settings where reason is not only accessible but constitutes a sound and
necessary basis for the achievement of human well-being. We do not, for example,
permit parents to insist that the state provide their children with a form of education
that reflects their particular faith, nor do we permit parents who wish to opt out of the
system of public education to insulate their children entirely from the requirements of
that system, such as its basic syllabus, even where those requirements are incompat-
ible with the parents’ faith. There is no reason to assume that this ongoing process of
secularization has now come to an end. The shift in approach to freedom of religion
7See
the discussion in Part VIB. of the rule against any establishment of religion.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DEDROITDE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
that I have recommended neither furthers nor curtails the process; it merely makes its
reflection in freedom of religion explicit, as it surely should be.
3. Rights and Freedoms, as Categories and as Moral Ambitions
It will be clear by now that this account of freedom of religion is based upon or at
least consistent with a general attitude to the character of rights and freedoms, an at-
titude that is in some respects unconventional and that might be regarded as implausi-
ble for that reason. Freedom of religion, as I have described it, offers fundamental
protection to what might be described as a certain moral ambition or moral purpose, a
purpose that must be endorsed by any state the population of which includes people
for whom access to the institutions and practices of religious belief is critical to well-
being. By contrast, freedom of religion as it is conventionally described offers fun-
damental protection to a certain category of human conduct, a category that is as-
sumed to embody the moral purpose for the sake of which that freedom has been
guaranteed. Where that category of conduct is accorded protection in law, following
the decision of a constitutional convention or otherwise, it is the duty of courts to de-
cide whether any given instance of human behaviour falls within the category, and
then to offer that behaviour protection if it does and to deny it protection if it does not.
If categorization becomes difficult, then the court should refer to the moral purpose
for the sake of which the category, in this case religion, has been protected and decide
whether the behaviour in question fulfils that purpose.
This is a rather crude sketch of the conventional approach to constitutional inter-
pretation and I do not wish to place any great weight upon it, although I would claim
that it accurately reflects at least one way in which constitutional interpretation is ac-
tually practised.78 Nevertheless there are two features of this kind of approach to the
interpretation and application of freedom of religion that the arguments that I have of-
fered clearly reject, namely, the role played by a category of human conduct in the
application of the freedom that it describes, be it the category of religion or the cate-
gory of speech or some other, and the weight that is to be given to the moral purpose
that underlies the protection of that category.
My earlier discussion of the semantic approach makes plain my reasons for re-
fusing to refer to the meaning of a concept in order to determine the ambit of the pro-
tection that the concept enshrines. Freedoms are guaranteed for moral reasons. Yet
concepts such as speech are not moral concepts, while concepts such as religion, if
moral, express a moral purpose different from and alien to any purpose for the sake of
which the freedom that they refer to could justifiably be guaranteed. Furthermore, it
cannot be assumed, for the reasons given above, that there is a sufficient correlation
between the concept, be it religion or speech or some other, and the purpose for the
sake of which that concept has been constitutionally entrenched, that the concept can
7 See Hunter et aL v. Southam Inc., [1984] 2 S.C.R. 145 at 156-57, 11 D.L.R (4th) 641 at 650-51
(sub non. Canada (Director of hvestigation & Research, Combines Investigation Branch) v.
Sout ham Inc.); Big M, supra note 9 at 344.
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00 MACKLEM – FAITH ASA SECULAR VALUE
be relied upon in order to determine the scope of the freedom, such that central in-
stances of the concept can be regarded as central instances of the freedom and vice-
versa.
Clearly there must be some correlation between concept and purpose or the con-
cept would not have been selected as the means of fulfilling the purpose that underlies
its entrenchment. Some other concept would have been chosen instead. Yet given the
complexity of certain concepts, and the varying purposes to which those concepts are
capable of being put, apparently central instances of a concept may do little to reflect
the purpose for which the concept has been constitutionally entrenched as a funda-
mental freedom, while apparently marginal instances of the concept may be central
instances of the freedom. It follows that those responsible for recognizing and apply-
ing the freedom, be they courts in the exercise of their judicial responsibility (where
the freedom has been entrenched in a written constitution), or politicians in the exer-
cise of their legislative responsibility (where it has not) are bound to turn for guidance
to the moral purpose underlying the freedom, and to treat the concept that describes
the freedom, be it speech or religion or some other, as simply a place-marker, pre-
sumably the best available, for the recognition and summary expression of that moral
purpose. 9
This may appear to impose an undue burden upon judges and politicians, given
that judges and politicians are not and do not pretend to be moral philosophers. That
kind of criticism may have been what Greenawalt had in mind when he rejected what
he saw as the otherwise attractive possibility that freedom of religion could be ex-
plained in terms of faith on the ground that a faith-based approach to the meaning of
religion is too abstract a basis for the interpretation of a legal guarantee:
In this brief discussion of the ordinary concept of religion, I have not explored the
plausible claim that some deep characteristic such as “faith” or the “transcending of
ordinary experience” does unite all instances of religion. My reason is that a common
characteristic as vague and general as these would be little help for someone trying to
classify beliefs and practices as religious or not. For legal purposes, one needs to con-
centrate on features of religion that are specific enough to be employed by judges and
other actors in the legal system.’
As I have already suggested, it is entirely reasonable to ask that an obligation, be
it moral or legal, be sufficiently specific that it is capable of being understood and re-
spected by the person to whom it is addressed in the discharge of the responsibilities
that it gives rise to. But that does not mean that judges, politicians, or citizens can re-
ject or reshape their moral responsibilities on the grounds that those responsibilities
are abstract and therefore the business of philosophers. On the contrary, each of us
must be enough of a moral philosopher to discharge the moral responsibilities that at-
” Of course, this practice will gradually elucidate the meaning of the concept as a term of art, so
that it may become possible over time to refer directly to the concept of religion rather than to the
purpose underlying it in order to determine the scope of the freedom in certain cases.
0 Greenawalt, supra note 21 at 768-69, see also supra note 24.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROITDE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
tend our respective roles in life, as judges, as politicians, or as citizens. It is true that to
the extent that those responsibilities are functions of the particular roles that they gov-
ern, be it the role of judge, politician, or citizen, they cannot require that those who
are subject to them betray their roles, the roles that the responsibilities govern. No
judge, for example, is or can be said to be obliged by the moral responsibilities of ju-
dicial office to betray his or her role as a judge, although, of course, a judge may well
be so obliged by his or her moral responsibilities as a citizen. But by the same token a
judge cannot reject the moral responsibilities of judicial office, including the respon-
sibility of determining the scope of a constitutional freedom in accordance with the
moral purpose for the sake of which that freedom has been guaranteed, on the
grounds that he or she is not a moral philosopher, for that is precisely what that re-
sponsibility demands that he or she be. It may or may not be wise to impose such a
responsibility upon the judiciary, by entrenching rights and freedoms in a written con-
stitution, but once imposed the responsibility cannot be rejected or avoided.
There is a practical dimension to this conclusion. A judge is in no position to re-
ject his or her moral responsibility, as I have described it, other than by resigning of-
fice, for a judicial decision on the scope of a freedom such as freedom of religion that
refuses to engage in moral inquiry and relies instead on the exposition of the concept
of religion does not thereby avoid moral responsibility but simply executes that re-
sponsibility improperly. To offer protection to a set of beliefs, and to the institutions
and practices that express and foster those beliefs, solely on the basis that those beliefs
clearly fall within the generally recognized bounds of the concept of religion, or con-
versely, to deny protection to a set of beliefs solely on the basis that those beliefs fall
outside those same bounds, is not to avoid or reject a moral responsibility and the role
that the responsibility entails, but to betray that role. One can execute a moral respon-
sibility well or badly but one cannot avoid it, for decisions that purport to reject the re-
sponsibility are in fact decisions that fail to fulfil that responsibility, other than by ac-
cident.
For example, the proper bounds of a concept that has been made the subject of a
fundamental guarantee, a concept such as religion, are determined by the moral pur-
poses underlying that guarantee. It follows that decisions that refer to non-moral
sources in order to determine the bounds of the concept, sources such as semantics,
and that consequently either ignore the issue of moral purpose or relegate it to a sec-
ondary role, are decisions that purport to entrench a freedom other than that which has
in fact been entrenched, a freedom that will in some respects overlap the freedom that
has in fact been entrenched, but nevertheless a freedom that there is no moral jus-
tification for securing.
More needs to be said but cannot be said here. The purpose of the above account
is simply to acknowledge the implications for judicial decision-making of the ap-
proach to freedom of religion that I have recommended and to offer some indication,
however preliminary, of the arguments that might be offered in support of the kind of
decision-making that I believe the freedom requires.
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B. Non-Establishment of Religion
There is one final point to be made about the place of religion in public life. I
have already suggested that freedom of religion does not require a rule against the es-
tablishment of religion, although in practice, of course, freedom of religion has been
closely associated with that rule as the result of their conjunction in the First Amend-
ment to the United States Constitution. Yet in support of my suggestion, and in oppo-
sition to the lessons of American constitutional practice, stands the fact that in certain
countries where freedom of religion is apparently enjoyed, such as England, there is
an established church, and in other countries where there is a written constitution with
a guarantee of freedom of religion, such as Canada, there is no constitutional rule
against the establishment of religion.”1 Of course it might be the case that the people of
England do not now enjoy freedom of religion to the extent that they are affected by
the presence of an established church, and similarly it might be the case that the peo-
ple of Canada do not now enjoy freedom of religion to the extent that the failure to
entrench a rule against the establishment of religion has permitted one or another re-
ligion to be established, officially or unofficially, as Catholicism might once have
been thought to have been established in Quebec.
In fact, I do not believe that this is so. Indeed, notwithstanding the lessons of
American constitutional law, I find it in some ways difficult to see how a rule against
the establishment of religion could possibly be regarded as an aspect of freedom of
religion, given that any account of freedom of religion implicitly or explicitly assumes
that the primary purpose of that freedom is to promote the well-being of religious be-
lievers. Establishment is on balance a benefit to those believers, a benefit that may be
critical to the well-being of at least some of them. Moreover, the rule against estab-
lishment prohibits any establishment of religion, however ecumenical, however toler-
ant, and so denies religious believers the very real benefit of the presence of religion
in public life. In other words, the purpose of freedom of religion is to secure to relig-
ious believers a benefit to their well-being, namely, the value that adherence to relig-
ious faith is capable of giving rise to, the very benefit that the rule against establish-
ment at least partly denies to them.82
It is true, of course, that the rule against establishment has the effect of guaran-
teeing a form of equality to different religions, by ensuring that no religion enjoys
precedence over any other by reason of its having been granted a privileged place in
public life. Yet this is not a form of equality that can be said to make any contribution
to the well-being of religious believers,’ for it secures its egalitarian goal by ensuring
8 Nevertheless, certain aspects of the rule against establishment, as expounded in United States law,
have been held to be implicit in a guarantee of freedom of religion. See Big M, supra note 9 at 339-
41.
I am assuming of course, in accordance with my previous argument, that freedom of religion of-
fers no protection to those who lack religious faith.
Unless, of course, this privatization of religion ultimately contributes to the well-being of the ad-
herents of what would otherwise have been the established religion.
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROITDE MCGILL
[Vol. 45
that no religion enjoys the benefit of establishment, thus eliminating the contribution
that establishment makes to the well-being of religious believers, rather than by en-
suring that all religions enjoy whatever benefit is enjoyed by any one religion, thus se-
curing equal access to any established practice. ‘ In fact, the effect of the rule against
establishment is to protect the interests of those who do not believe at the expense of
those who do, and therein, in my opinion, lies its justification.
In the debates surrounding the entrenchment of what has become known as the
Bill of Rights, namely, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, dif-
ferent views were taken of the establishment clause and its justification. Some thought
that a rule against establishment was a corollary of freedom of religion. Others, most
famously Thomas Jefferson, believed that a rule against establishment was necessary
for the protection of the public realm against the influence of religious belief. Still
others, such as James Madison, took a compromise position.m’ It will be clear from the
course of my argument, and particularly from my earlier discussion of the necessity
for a secular basis for freedom of religion, that I am broadly of Jefferson’s view.
Given that religious beliefs are adhered to, not on the basis of reason alone, but at
least in part on the basis of faith, and given that the impact of faith, as a mode of belief
distinct from reason, is to impart to beliefs that are held on the basis of it a character
that is singular, stable, and partial, as opposed to plural, comprehensive, and evolving,
it follows that the requirement of non-establishment is simply a reflection of the moral
limitations of religious belief, limitations that do not detract from the value that relig-
ious belief is capable of contributing to the lives of those who freely endorse it, but
limitations nevertheless that make that belief unacceptable as a basis for the design of
state institutions and state practices, even when expressed ecumenically. In other
words, the rule against establishment insulates state institutions and practices from the
straitening effect upon morality of religious belief, thereby ensuring that those institu-
tions and practices are capable of fostering valuable ways of life that religion does not
recognize and may even forbid, ways of life that are critical to the well-being of at
least some of those to whom the state is responsible, namely, those non-believers
4 1 should also note that the egalitarian argument for a rule against establishment of any religion
does not merely fail to serve human well-being but implicitly assumes that an ecumenical establish-
ment of religion is impossible, as is surely not the case. It is true that I have argued above (see supra
note 34) that one cannot invoke an ecumenical understanding of the meaning of religion as part of the
justification for a semantic approach to the interpretation of freedom of religion, for one can only be
ecumenical in one’s approach to religion once one has decided what religion means, or ought to
mean. Nevertheless, it follows that once one has decided what religion ought to mean, there is no
logical reason why one could not then grant the benefit of the establishment of religion to all those
practices that meet that definition. There is moral reason not to do so, however, and it is this that in my
view constitutes the justification for the rule against any establishment of religion.
‘ For a summary account of these different views, see Tribe, supra note 22 at 1158-59. These were
actually views as to the overall place of religion in public life, a place ultimately secured by both
clauses of the First Amendment, rather than views about the establishment clause alone. Of course,
the fact that these views apply to the free exercise clause does nothing to diminish their application to
the establishment clause.
T0 MACKLEM – FAITH AS A SECULAR VALUE
2000]
whose way of life is inconsistent with the requirements of one or more religious be-
liefs. One does not have to look far for instances of such non-believers. Homosexual-
ity, for example, is condemned by certain religious beliefs, yet the ability to pursue a
homosexual way of life free from public censure is clearly essential to the well-being
of some, indeed many people. ‘
In short, the moral character of religious belief places it in conflict with value plu-
ralism and so leads to the common requirement of liberal political cultures that there
be no establishment of religion. This is a corollary of freedom of religion only in the
sense that, like that freedom, and indeed like any other right or freedom, the rule
against establishment reflects and respects the basic moral requirements that govern
the just design of state institutions and state practices.”
This paper is concerned with the general principles underlying freedom of religion, so I cannot
address here the specific implications for that freedom of what is also true, namely, the fact that for
many people the ability to combine religions commitment with a homosexual life is critical to the
pursuit of well-being, with the consequence that well-being is denied to them when their religion is
homophobic, as it often is.
It follows, further to the discussion in Part IIIA.5.a., that the presence of an established church in
countries such as England does not violate freedom of religion but does violate the equally necessary
rule against any establishment of religion.
