P1: KAE 9780521612739c02
CUNY1096/Gill
978 0 521 61273 9
September 19, 2007
18:36
THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
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The “inevitable” and constant global process of modernization is seen as the principal cause of religious freedom. From a structural perspective, modernization produces greater functional differentiation of social roles and results in a multiplication of state agencies and bureaucracies staffed by experts and charged with specific tasks – for example, child welfare services, mental health services, monitoring business practices, and environmental protection. Traditionally, many monarchs and rulers relied on religious institutions to provide many of these goods, and states would often support these religious institutions. With the rise of the bureaucratic expertise and the modern welfare state came the elimination of the public need for church-provided welfare services. Separation of church and state became the first step toward religious liberty (as it is difficult to have true religious liberty where there is one officially sanctioned church).11 At the ideational level, modernization purportedly coincides with a certain set of values privileging the role of individual (as opposed to communal/corporatist) choice. Such choice is not possible without freedom of conscience. Jos´e Casanova summarizes this uniquely Western notion: [R]eligious freedom, in the sense of freedom of conscience, is chronologically “the first freedom” as well as the precondition of all modern freedoms. Insofar as freedom of conscience is intrinsically related to “the right to privacy” – to the modern institutionalization of a private sphere free from governmental intrusion as well as free from ecclesiastical control – and inasmuch as “the right to privacy” serves as the very foundation of modern liberalism and of modern individualism, then indeed the privatization of religion is essential to modernity. (1994, 40)
Other scholars have emphasized the development of particular theological notions that justified the movement toward religious freedom. Historian Fred Hood, for example, in explaining why Virginia was the heart and soul of religious liberty in the American colonies, argued somewhat paradoxically that conservative Protestants, as represented by a majority of the Presbyterians in Virginia, conceived of religious liberty as a religious dogma compatible with an established religion and that the legal separation of church and state did not alter that belief or its influence. The dogma of religious liberty emphasized the Protestant belief that every man had the right to interpret the Bible for himself and affirmed the authority of Scripture for the common life of the 11
See Monsma and Soper (1997) for the nuanced exceptions in Europe. Ironically, many of the states that are considered to be highly secular still manage social welfare programs through traditional confessions (e.g., Germany, Belgium).