Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 18)

　　The context of this affirmation was novel. Shortly after World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was presented to a world of atheistic, nationalist regimes that sought to displace and eliminate religion from the public sphere, often regulating religious bodies into a submissive position of being restricted to the private sphere (freedom of worship). Religious communities and organizations were often denied the ability to maintain links internationally, to govern their own internal affairs and property as they saw fit, to preach their doctrine and evangelize others, to intervene in public debates, or to influence legislation. Thus did the Soviet Union exercise governance over religious bodies within the State, despite having an overall atheistic creed and aiming ultimately at their eventual elimination. The Soviets excluded religious believers from holding any authority in government by requiring a profession of atheism as a necessary condition for holding office.

　　However, the contemporary situation tends unhelpfully to conflate those freedoms listed, where religious freedom is just a species of freedom of speech or association on par with other such freedoms. It has become incomprehensible to many why and how we should privilege other rights to conscience, including speech, association, or protest, over and against government encroachment. Clearly, any negative freedom involves just limits, aimed at securing just public order, as outlined in Article 29 of the same Declaration: “In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

　　Recognizing the nature of these limitations and the way they cohere, however, points to an important theoretical foundation for human rights law. The first of those qualifications listed in Article 29—the limitations of morality itself—then holds a primary place, since unjust demands for public order or general welfare are illegitimate grounds for limiting freedoms of speech, conscience, and so forth.

　　Nationalism or patriotism (like the specific aim of advancing the general welfare of a democratic society) finds no place anywhere in classical Roman or Greek political philosophy, let alone anywhere in the ancient world. The notion of the nation is a modern one, just as that of a patriot. Romans such as Cicero understood devotion to the public good of their country through the lens of a virtue they called piety (pietas). According to Cicero, piety is that virtuewhich admonishes us to do our duty to our country or our parents or other blood relations.” For this reason, pietas was the classical focus for the cultivation of those civic virtues an individual needed to have toward their country. Pietas is a hierarchical virtue, in virtue of which subordinates reverence and fulfill duties toward their superiors. And the classical authors never understood any single country to be the most important thing in the universe, which implies an important place for the gods in the public piety of a country.

　　Pietas thus equally implied duties, incumbent on a country’s leaders and citizens, to fulfill obligations of gratitude toward God (the God/gods), venerable ancestors, public benefactors, and so forth. This virtue of piety was understood to hold the country together and was thus a pre-eminent responsibility for Roman leaders, many of whom were publicly appointed to serve as pontifex, or priests, on behalf of the country. The breakdown of those virtuous dispositions by which citizens honestly and sincerely fulfill these duties of reverence toward parents, country, and gods would lead to the dissolution of society itself: “When these are gone, life soon becomes a welter of disorder and confusion;and in all probability, the disappearance of piety towards the gods will entail the disappearance of loyalty and social union among men as well, and of justice itself, the queen of all the virtues.”

　　Ciceronian and Aristotelian piety would have been easily comprehensible from the perspective of xiao 孝in the Confucian tradition, which implies duties of reverence (jing 敬), even those associated with religion. There are explicit parallels too within the Confucian tradition: Dong Zhongshu’s Luxurious Dew of the Spring and Summer Annals insists that the rightful ruler acts in imitation of Heaven as well as taking practical steps to infuse religious belief and practice into civic rituals: consciously attending to Heaven’s will (including public acts of repentance to Heaven for sins of the ruler, i.e., zuiyizhao 罪己詔), ensuring appropriate filial devotion within his kingdom, and engaging in public worship of Heaven by offering the suburban sacrifices (jioasi 郊祀). Sacrifices were primarily to the high god, Shangdi 上帝, or Tian 天(Heaven), who presided over all lesser spirits: “If service to Heaven is not provided, then even if [you sacrifice to] the numerous [lesser] spirits, it will be of no benefit to you” (67.2). The author insists this sacrifice takes priority even over sacrifices in veneration of the emperor’s own parents.

　　For Dong Zhongshu, then, public reverence for Heaven constitutes a root of social legitimacy, cohesion, and filial devotion, since public authority ultimately devolves upon the ruler from Heaven’s Mandate (天命) in keeping with whether that ruler preserves the moral law. Dong Zhongshu could easily echo the sentiments of Pope Leo XIII who wrote in 1888 that, “civil society, because it is a society, must recognize God as its parent and author, and must reverence and cherish his power and mastery. Justice therefore forbids, reason forbids … that society be atheistic.”

　　Religious freedom represents a rationale for principled limitations and checks on government power.

　　Modern political philosophers might be sympathetic with the view that society should not be atheistic, exclude religious believers from public life, or prevent their freedom of association, but would usually reject a need for public normative judgments that human rights protections rest on orientation toward higher goods. This could seem to violate certain kinds of restrictions on the State endorsing substantive moral claims—State neutrality—which aim precisely to protect alternative religious views within the State. For instance, unbelievers should not be excluded from public life or required to profess a specific religious creed. Nevertheless, I propose that we can vindicate the classical conception of public duties toward religion precisely in terms of the just limits on freedoms.

　　Even though modern states are not confessional regimes in the classical mode of Dong Zhongshu or Cicero, the acknowledgment of religious freedom constitutes a basis even today for appropriately understanding those rights of the person that give them freedom from State interference for higher ends that surpass temporal ends secured by the State. The key to ensuring the appropriate just limits on freedom therefore requires distinguishing those disagreements that lie beyond the State’s remit, and those disagreements that lie within its proper mission to secure the temporal common good of its citizens, a just civil peace. Because there are potential aspects of the human good that lie beyond what the State could possibly secure—a peace that the world cannot give—the State acquires both negative and positive duties toward those potential religious ends to ensure that citizens can pursue them appropriately.

　　Thus, duties toward religious ends on the part of the State have not simply been abrogated; those duties of piety in our current situation imply not only that the State has duties to protect the rights of citizens to enjoy freedom of worship without State interference, but also substantial rights for citizens to engage corporately in public discourse about policy, through those institutions which do not fall directly under the State’s proper jurisdiction to control or regulate, such as religious bodies or churches. The temporal activity of the State is essentially subordinate to those potential higher ends which in principle would lie outside of its jurisdiction. In this picture, the motivation for the State preserving a place for religious voices within public discourse lies in a corporate and salutary fear that, were to State overstep its bounds, its policies could inadvertently offend God.

　　Pope John Paul II argued in Centesimus Annus that “the source and synthesis of [all other human] rights is religiousfreedom, understood as the right to live in the truth of ones faith and in conformity with ones transcendent dignity as a person.” The rationale for this claim was given in a speech before the UN General Assembly, where he proposed that aims such as seeking justice, knowledge, and fulfillment in religious pursuits are those which specify how (and reason for) seeking material peace and prosperity; “the pre-eminence of the values of the spirit defines the proper sense of earthly material goods and the way to use them. This pre-eminence is therefore at the basis of a just peace.”

　　On this view, religious freedom represents a rationale for principled limitations and checks on government power both in general and in particular. We only rightly seek material prosperity considering higher ends which transcend the material order, the moral aims of human life. The end of human life is not the general welfare of society nor the public order; temporal community life might constitute an intrinsic good, integral to human flourishing, but it remains subordinate to higher aims such as those represented by what are traditionally thought of as religious ones. Because the State should not be the end of human life, given that human beings have ends beyond those the State can provide, the State has normative duties to remain within its proper sphere and no further. Especially the State must allow proper expression and freedom to associate outside the confines of State regulation or control for those higher ends. Specifically, the State has no authority to declare what is or is not the truth about such ultimate ends; asserting that there are no such ends beyond itself represents a serious overstep of its legitimate authority.

　　God asked Job from the whirlwind: “Will [Leviathan] make a covenant with you? Will you take him as a servant forever?” (Job 41:4). Government institutions are inherently liable to abuses of power that are not preventable simply by further checks and balances within institutions. Religious citizens, as well as those who dedicate their lives to philosophical, political, and moral truth, provide a valuable public service since their associations ensure that the State is appropriately humble about its own ends and power, specifically by calling attention to the conditions under which the State exercises its power only within circumscribed limits and with a legitimacy which does not derive from itself.

　　There is no just State power [1] without public profession that there are such ends higher than itself, [2] without the ability of ordinary citizens to challenge the limits of State power and bring about confession by the State that it has illegitimately infringed upon those ends, and [3] without concrete steps to ensure that the pursuit of such aims is not simply grudgingly tolerated as a concession but supported by the State as integral to the progression of its citizens and thus to their welfare.

　　Leviathan can be tamed only by the One who can say that “everything under heaven is Mine” (Job 41:11).