Gerard Bradley’s volume usefully outlines some of the contemporary challenges of religious liberty, and the authors advance our understanding of the ways in which religious freedom should be conceived and protected within complex, diverse political societies.

Challenges to Religious Liberty in the Twenty-First Century arose from a scholarly consultation held in 2009 at the Witherspoon Institute, and Bradley frames the volume in a broad and approachable manner. Across the spectrum of geopolitical events, including ethnic turmoil, minority oppression, and policy disputes, religious liberty is at issue. In modern, plural orders, there is “deep disagreement and confusion about the nature, foundations, and practical demands of religious freedom” (p. xi). Bradley rightly recognizes that contests over religious liberty occur within a context of contestations over all moral and political norms. At stake is nothing less than balancing social and policy goals enforced through law with the practices and identities of religious persons who find those policy goals disruptive of their conscientious ways of life.

The volume is organized around five questions Bradley considers key to understanding the modern challenges to religious freedom, and two essays address each question. The first of these is how the originalist meaning and context of the First Amendment can come into conversation with contemporary judicial interpretation. Given the decidedly global framing of the challenges to religious freedom that Bradley cites, this is a curious, and narrow, place to begin, but the first two essays make a good introduction to some of the touchstone issues in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. For Stephen Smith, the Establishment Clause (EC) was intended to address the presence of the church and limit the power that government might wield over those communities. The modern move to make the Establishment Clause about separating “religion” from the public sphere misapprehends the problem, on Smith’s account. The resulting “endorsement” and “coercion” tests as a primary mode of EC jurisprudence leads to troublesome separations of politics from citizens’ deepest beliefs. For Bradley, against Justice John Paul Stevens, the Founders believed America to be a Christian nation, but they thought that the Establishment Clause protected all religions. The argument uses historical and textual evidence to affirm the cultural dominance of (even preference for) Christian sects, while also providing evidence that in spite of this dominance, the EC was intended to broaden who gets protected under the First Amendment. It does so through an “incompetence norm” that “ordains that the truth of certain religious matters is outside the competence of the national government to determine” and gives “muscle and specificity” to the current Court’s minority position of “non-preferentialism” (pp. 42–43).

The second question is about how the law might protect citizens from coercion from other citizens, including their co-practitioners. Kent Greenawalt outlines a number of different types of coercion and then focuses on a few types of private coercion, including recruitment practices, shunning, disclosure of embarrassing facts, and the get as related to civil divorce. Greenawalt’s concern is to measure how much of an interest the state might have in combating or intervening into some of these practices and how the courts might treat tort claims about these practices. Richard Garnett approaches this question through an inquiry about the church’s status as more than “voluntary associations with a cause” (p. 78). Pushing beyond the limits of treating churches like other expressive associations, Garnett aims for a view of the special status of religious institutions qua institutions (and more than the sum of the individual members’ rights) that might make coherent the special exemptions from policies (like antidiscrimination statutes) that churches enjoy under the First Amendment.

The third question revolves around conscience protection, what Bradley calls the “most urgent challenge to religious freedom in the United States” (p. xv). He frames the urgency of this matter through an examination of the loss of moral persuasiveness in the modern culture by traditional religious authority and the impact of certain policy changes (such as liberalization of policy toward homosexual behavior) on religious freedom as a right of dissent and alternate practice from the mainstream policy culture. On Bradley’s account, Christopher Wolfe and Christoper Tollefsen “supply the philosophical and constitutional framework for understanding and resolving conscience protection” (p. xvi). Wolfe poses the question about when the civil law should grant believers exemptions and how this should be understood, and Tollefsen, after laying out some generic premises about the nature of conscience, poses the challenge for religious adherents that they will increasingly face the demand to judge “which laws and regulations they should comply with, becoming material cooperators in the process, and which … they should resist” (p. 134). While Wolfe lays out some basic norms about balancing conscience rights with compelling civil policy goals, both essays inadequately consider the other side of the equation: when an exemption granted to a religious observer might “endanger the securing of an important public interest” (p. 108). This is, after all, the crux of the argument in Employment Division v. Smith and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It takes more than a claim-of-conscience burden to gain an exemption if the government’s interest is compelling enough.

The fourth question is about the “unique challenges that globalization presents to religious liberty” (p. xvi). José Casanova presses on the many meanings of religious freedom and the contestation over the category of religion as inherently tied to local discursive practices. At the same time, he traces something akin to an emerging consensus about religious liberty amid a growing “global trend of [the] mutual recognition of cultures” (p. 151). Casanova could develop further how this interreligious/intercultural respect can help fashion a peaceful balance between individual religious liberty and communal rights of self-preservation. Will Inboden’s essay examines the ways that globalization, including commercial and technological exchange, can serve both advances in religious freedom and religious repression.

The final set of essays address “what are the United States’ basic moral responsibilities to promote religious freedom abroad (p. xvii)?” Daniel Philpott seeks a “framework for analyzing the behavior of religious actors” so that foreign policy can better comprehend and interact with those agents who can more effectively democratize and reduce violent tendencies (p. 176). Philpott’s essay effectively marshals empirical examples to make his case about the lack of insight about religious motivations in the foreign policy community and the ways that working with certain actors as legitimate political groups might have a moderating effect on them. Tom Farr begins with a claim that religious liberty arises from the core of the human person. For Farr, there are good reasons of basic justice for the United States to defend religious liberty abroad. There are also strategic national security interests because religious freedom, on Farr’s view, is “one of the linchpins of stable, durable self-governance” and is a precondition for the “rooting” of democracy (p. 193). As such, encouraging religious liberty promotes the development of civil society and stable democracy (p. 198). Much more needs to be said, however, about how religious liberty is thus encouraged.

Some will find the approach of this volume lacking in specificity and too focused on U.S. issues. Instead, it would be better for a reader to recognize the complex range of ideas confronting scholars who study religious liberty and to view this volume as a solid effort to advance our understanding of some of these important issues.