RFI’s Ismail Royer wrote an article for the Berkley Forum, the blog of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, as part of a series assessing the Religious Liberty Commission established by a White House executive order in May. An appointee to the Commission’s advisory board, Royer discusses his approach to its work and mission, emphasizing the Commission’s focus on the foundational principles underlying American religious liberty. He writes:

Created by executive order and housed within the Department of Justice, the Religious Liberty Commission is tasked with investigating the current state of religious liberty in the United States and issuing a set of policy recommendations to address areas in which that fundamental right is under threat. As an appointee to the commission’s Lay Leaders Advisory Board, I want to present here my approach to the commission’s work and how I think it can best achieve its mission. 

While focusing on practical action, a key aspect of the commission’s mandate is theoretical: an inquiry into the history and foundational principles that have shaped understandings of religious liberty in the United States. This, in fact, was the focus of the commission’s inaugural meeting this summer. And appropriately so, because an investigation into whether, or to what extent, religious liberty is under threat necessarily involves gauging our lived reality against the principles to which we aspire. 

But there is another, and more urgent, need to identify the principles that form the foundation of religious liberty in the United States. Without a public consensus on religious liberty’s foundations, content, and scope, we risk losing it, along with the institutions created to preserve it. There is, after all, “a mutual dependence and a reciprocal influence between ideas and institutions, between theory and practice, between ideologies and practical politics,” wrote political philosopher John Hallowell. As he explained in his 1946 study of the collapse of liberalism in the Weimar Republic: 

Vigorous institutions require deep-rooted convictions. So long as there is a close correlation between the faith, the aspirations and ideals, of any particular society and the institutions that are established to translate those aspirations into practice, the order thereby created appears stable, rational, and orderly. When, however, this close correlation is lacking, when institutions, in the eyes of the great mass of people, fail to fulfill the faith which originally inspired them, the order becomes disorder, the system appears irrational and degenerate. 

Hence, the commission’s mission of safeguarding religious freedom rightly includes, at a minimum, invigoration of the public understanding of the theoretical foundations of religious liberty. But public understanding of those foundations without faith in them is insufficient; indeed, it is impossible. To paraphrase Augustine: in order to understand, one must believe. That is, there is no hope of safeguarding and renewing public commitment to religious liberty unless those truths remain alive, credible, and hence truly intelligible, to the public. 

Read the full article: “Reviving the Spirit of American Religious Liberty.”