Friday, April 30, 2010
My colleague, Gerard Bradley, has a very thoughtful paper up at The Immanent Frame about anti-proselytism laws, and the dangers they can pose to religious freedom, properly understood. In the paper, he engages those who "frame[s] the question in terms of a 'right to win adherents by persuasion' balanced against a 'right of communities to defend their respective traditions.'” He concludes:
The duty of any political community to respect religious liberty as it is defined in countless constitutional, legal, and, yes, religious documents, and the extension of this duty, even to people whose beliefs and practices are largely false or misguided, is rooted in the basic moral (not legal or social) duty of everyone to seek the truth about reality, including reality’s furthest reaches—which reaches transcend the concerns of the political community itself. The political community’s duty is further rooted in everyone’s moral duty to shape his or her life according to what one judges to be the truth about reality. From here—this foundational ground—one can see straightaway that anti-conversion and anti-proselytizing laws strike at the heart of religious liberty.
From here, you can see, too, that if one thinks that religious liberty attaches to an established social order in which religion plays an important role, and if one credits reports that even peaceful encounters with articulated alternate conceptions of reality are “experiences” of attempted “destruction,” then one might well affirm some putative right to “non-interference.” But then one will have drifted very far from a sound understanding of religious freedom—the understanding on offer in so many authoritative documents—and one will have abandoned its foundations altogether.
I also tried, a few years ago, to say something worthwhile about persuasion, evangelization, and proselytism in this paper, "Changing Minds: Proselytism, Religious Freedom, and the First Amendment."