Cecile Laborde

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration

The study of the reception of Rawls in Europe provides some insights into the persistence or erosion of national and European traditions of political thought since the 1970s. It notably allows us to test the relevance of the divide between `analytical' and `Continental' philosophy, and to measure the impact on political thought of the `liberal' turn of the 1980s. Reception should be seen not a process of absorption but as one of dialogue. The reception of Rawls can be approached along six axes of analysis: the themes, politics, areas, channels, temporality and geography of reception

Until now, there has been no direct and extensive engagement with the category of religion from liberal political philosophy. Over the last thirty years or so, liberals have tended to analyze religion under proximate categories such as 'conceptions of the good' or 'culture'. US constitutional lawyers and French political theorists both tackled the category of religion head-on but neither of these specialized national discourses found their way into mainstream liberal political philosophy. This is somewhat paradoxical because key liberal notions were elaborated as a response to 17th Century European Wars of Religion, and the fundamental structure of liberalism is rooted in the western experience of politico-religious conflict. So a reappraisal of this tradition - and of its validity in the light of contemporary challenges - is well overdue. This book offers the first extensive engagement with religion from liberal political philosophers. The volume analyzes, from within the liberal philosophical tradition itself, the key notions of conscience, public reason, non-establishment, and neutrality. Insofar as the contemporary religious revival is seen as posing a challenge to liberalism, it seems more crucial than ever to explore the specific resources that the liberal tradition has to answer it.

Egalitarian theories of religious freedom deny that religion is entitled to special treatment in law above and beyond that granted to comparable beliefs and practices. The most detailed and influential defense of such an approach is Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager's Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007). In this essay I develop, elucidate, and show the limits of the strategy adopted by Eisgruber and Sager. The strategy requires that religion be analogized with other beliefs and practices according to a robust metric of comparison. I argue that Eisgruber and Sager fail to develop a consistent and coherent metric and I further suggest that this failure is symptomatic of the broader difficulty encountered by liberal theory in fitting the concept of religious freedom into a broadly egalitarian framework

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration.

Should religion be singled out in the law? This Article evaluates two influential theories of freedom of religion in political theory, before introducing an alternative one. The first approach, the Substitution approach, argues that freedom of religion can be adequately expressed by a substitute category: typically, freedom of conscience. The second, the Proxy approach, argues that the notion of religion should be upheld in the law, albeit as a proxy for a range of different goods. After showing that neither approach adequately meets crucial desiderata for an inclusive theory of religious freedom, the Article sets out the Disaggregation approach and defends against the alternatives