Religious Liberty and Natural-Rights Constitutionalism

Religious liberty faces threats from opposite ends of the political spectrum. America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions supply wise answers to both. Scorn for religion drives the threat to religious liberty from the left. The progressive threat is less openly articulated but more ensconced in elite institutions. Many on the left regard religion as an oppressive and dehumanizing superstition. Christianity, they believe, suffuses and corrupts the great literary and philosophical works of Western civilization and sustains what they regard as the West’s surpassing sins toward minorities, women, other civilizations, and the environment.