It is only when “men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King,” that “society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty.”

Religious Liberty and the Rise 

of Conservative Liberalism

by Aaron Taylor

Both Christian theology and philosophical liberalism, therefore, view religious liberty as important because it protects the human freedom necessary to make the supreme human act. But, in Christian theology, the supreme act is the act of faith, not the assertion of the autonomous self.

In his recent essay, “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage,” Joseph Bottum writes about how he regrets signing The Manhattan Declaration, a culture-wars manifesto “that equated abortion, same-sexmarriage, and intolerance of religion, and vowed to oppose any mainstream consensus that licensed them.”

Reading Bottum’s essay, I found myself nodding along, thinking, “yes, religious liberty is important, but it’s silly to put it on a par with abortion, for example, which has resulted in 57,000,000 deaths since Roe.” So I nearly spat out my tea when, a little further on, Bottum asserted that religious freedom was actually the most important part of the three-legged Manhattan stool:

The equating of these three concerns is a mistake; not only do the possible negative results of same-sex marriage fail to match the horrors of abortion, but religious freedom isn’t even the same kind of thing. It’s like equating a small weed to a giant sequoia – and then lumping them both together with an umbrella … If the document has to threaten civil disobedience, then it ought to be about freedom.

The specter of threats to religious liberty is raised frequently during debates over the redefinition of marriage.
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