J. Daryl Charles - Natural Law and Religious Freedom: The Role of Moral First Things in Grounding and Protecting the First Freedom

Every successive generation finds fresh reasons for the study of natural law. Current interest in the natural law may well be due to a pervasive moral pessimism in the Western cultural context and wider contemporary geopolitical challenges. Those geopolitical challenges result from two significant and worrisome global developments: unprecedented violent persecution of religious minorities on several continents and a growing climate of secular hostility toward religious faith in Western societies. Natural Law and Religious Freedom aims to address what is relatively absent from the literature by demonstrating the importance of natural law ethics in both establishing and preserving basic human rights, of which religious freedom has pride of place.

Probing contemporary challenges to natural law thinking that are both internal and external to religious faith, and examining the character and constitution of natural law ethics, Natural Law and Religious Freedom will be of interest to theologians, ethicists, and philosophers, as well as policy analysts, politicians, and activists who are concerned to anchor religious freedom and human rights policy considerations in an enduring way.

J. Daryl Charles serves as a contributing editor to Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy; is an affiliated scholar of the John Jay Institute, USA; and is the author, co-author, or editor of 14 books, including (with David D. Corey) The Just War Tradition: An Introduction (ISI Books, 2012), Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things (Eerdmans, 2008), Virtue amidst Vice (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), and, most recently, (with Mark David Hall), Americas Wars: A Just War Perspective (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). Charles has taught at Taylor University and Union University; was a 2013/14 visiting professor in the honors program at Berry College; served as a 2007/8 William B. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life at the James Madison Program, Princeton University; and served as a 2003/4 visiting fellow of the Institute for Faith and Religion, Baylor University. He is a member of the James Madison Society, Princeton University. The focus of Charless research and writing is the natural law, the ethics of war and peace, criminal justice ethics, and religion and society. Prior to entering the university classroom, Charles did public policy work in criminal justice in Washington, DC.

J. Daryl Charles

First published 2018
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2018 J. Daryl Charles

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Charles, J. Daryl, 1950 author.

Title: Natural law and religious freedom : the role of moral first things in grounding and protecting the first freedom / J. Daryl Charles.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014519 | ISBN 9781472467775 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315597539 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Freedom of religion. | Religion and law. | Natural law.

Classification: LCC K3258 .C474 2018 | DDC 342.08/52dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014519

ISBN: 978-1-472-46777-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-59753-9 (ebk)

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Two global developments combine in our day to create what may be the most significant story of the twenty-first century. One is the unprecedented violent persecution in many parts of the world of religious minorities often (though not exclusively) Christian minorities. The second is the war on religion that is a primary feature of Western societies. With the latter, I refer to a growing climate of secular hostility toward religious faith; given the religious history of these nations, this hostility unsurprisingly is aimed chiefly at Christianity. Tellingly, neither of these two phenomena, however, is a part of mainstream news reporting. In fact, unless such conflicts are perceived as being political in nature, they will go largely unreported. This stunning silence is but one feature of the hostility that characterizes an aggressive, unreflective secularism and serves as an accurate measurement of religious freedoms precarious state.

But it needs to be said that religious freedom is not simply an issue for religious people. In the words of Paul A. Marshall, senior fellow at the Hudson Institutes Center for Religious Freedom, The persecution of all peoples of any or no religion should be equally as offensive in our eyes as that of believers in any particular religion. Hence, it cannot be viewed solely as a Western concern, even when great responsibilities are lodged with these nations as a result of their cultural history and the influence that they carry for better or worse in the world.

There are any number of very helpful books, reports, and surveys in print that since 2000 have called attention to the war on religion around the world. Why is religious freedom of utmost importance? In what view of human nature is it anchored? What is the link between religious freedom and human rights violations? Why is this a perennial issue? On what is religious freedom founded? Why is it universal in scope? And what becomes of a society which fails to safeguard this most fundamental of freedoms for its citizens?

These are the questions that stand behind much of my argument as it unfolds in this volume. My contention is not that we should simply become activists for the cause of faith and religious freedom, although responding in humane ways to socio-political atrocity and basic human rights violations both globally and in the West will require a measure of activism on our part. But the problem with activism is that it is often not properly guided by a morally serious view of the world, of human nature, and of the common social good. Often it lacks sufficient moral-philosophical grounding, even when it might be well intentioned. Permit me to clarify myself. My intent here is not to pit theory against practice, or knowing against doing. Rather, it is to argue that genuine and sustained attempts to safeguard basic human rights, which begin with the sacred rights of conscience, must both conform with moral reality (What constitutes just and unjust, good and evil?) and find application with the needy (Who is my neighbor?). For this reason, the ethical model of the Good Samaritan surfaces in several chapters of this volume, leading to an extended discussion in contains a specific test-case for its application: humanitarian intervention.