Religious Freedom: It’s Not a License to Control Others | ACS

Taking Liberties was written to remind people what religious freedom really is—and to warn them away from the dangerous substitute being passed off by the far right.

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Author Rob Boston addresses why he wrote his latest book Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn't Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do. A book I plan on getting.

Religious freedom is crucial to the American experience. Indeed, a longing for the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience is one of the reasons our nation exists.

Religious freedom encompasses many concepts. Fundamentally, it means the power to choose where and how you will worship—or if you’ll worship at all. It also means that the government has no right to compel anyone to take part in religious exercises or force its citizens to directly subsidize houses of worship. It means that decisions about faith are private and belong firmly anchored in what Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark once eloquently referred to as the “inviolable citadel of the heart.”

That’s what religious freedom is. Here is what it is not: a tool to control others or to diminish their rights. Yet, increasingly, this is how some Americans are defining religious liberty. Because religious freedom is central to our democracy, it’s important that we get this right.

I wrote Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn’t Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do because I was concerned that a noble principle designed to protect individual freedom was being warped into an instrument of mass oppression. This must not happen.

Religious freedom gives you the right to make decisions for yourself—not others. Religious freedom bestows upon people no power to meddle in the private health-care matters of others. Religious freedom grants the government no power to foster the majority faith.

Religious Freedom: It’s Not a License to Control Others | ACS