The Right of Freedom of Religion: An Historical Perspective from the West

This chapter traces the history of religious freedom and its abridgement from the earliest biblical and classical sources of the West until today. This chapter highlights a few of the decisive steps, sometimes born of hard and cruel experience, in the development of religious freedom and religion-state relations. It traces religious freedom among the Church Fathers and within the Roman Empire; medieval scholastic theology and canon law; the Protestant Reformation with its Lutheran, Anabaptist, Calvinist, and Anglican branches, and the Catholic Counterreformation; the early modern clashes of religious establishments and religious freedom movements on both sides of the Atlantic; the gradual constitutional protection of liberty of conscience, religious equality, and free exercise of religions during the age of democratic revolutions; and the essential place of religious freedom in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its progeny and in the modern teachings of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian traditions.