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March 4, 2003
Religious Freedom and the Dignity of the Human Person

Kevin "Seamus" Hasson delivered a lecture on "Religious Freedom and the Dignity of the Human Person" at Christendom College on March 3.

Speaking as part of the College's Major Speakers Program, Hasson, the founder and President of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, began by explaining that every culture has a certain philosophy, a "public philosophy." There are certain common assumptions and principles that everyone holds true, for example, the fact that "everything is relative" or "all men are created equal." And part of that public philosophy is the assumption that politics and religion should be separate. As a result, there tends to be a culture war over religion and its place in public life.

Many believe that religion, and the practice of religion, is acceptable as long as it is practiced in private. These same people believe that it is the government's job to protect society from religion in the public arena. In short, the idea of "freedom of religion" really tends to be taken as "freedom from religion."

In its ten-year history, The Becket Fund is 42-0 in litigation. True to Pope John Paul II's teaching that religious liberty is based on human dignity, The Becket Fund has successfully defended clients from a wide variety of faith traditions.

"And why do we defend the religious freedom of people from all religious faiths," asked Hasson, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School with a master's degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame. "Because no matter how profoundly disparate their beliefs, each and every person shares the same common humanity, an essential part of which is a yearning for truth, a thirst for the transcendent; and that aspect of human nature is so valuable that it deserves the strongest possible protection in law."

Before founding The Becket Fund, Hasson was an attorney at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he focused on religious liberty litigation. From 1986 to 1987, he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department where he advised cabinet departments on church-state relations.

"The religious nature of the human person is manifest," continued Hasson. "It is as clear to the casual student of human nature as it is to the academic." This human phenomenon is not a mere brute fact without moral consequence. Instead, hunger for the divine is so fundamental that it warrants legal protection as a matter of foundational law, said Hasson. The religious impulse holds the potential for the highest form of human flourishing and is thus a wellspring of our universal dignity. It is among those characteristics unique to human beings that gives each and every one inestimable value. "That potential can only be achieved in freedom. Religious belief or expression undertaken under coercion or duress can hardly be described as religious at all. Free cultivation of human religious potential is also essential to social harmony. Not only does religious repression give rise to civil strife seemingly as durable as the religious impulse itself, but social cohesion depends on the transmission of those virtues typically fostered by religious participation," said Hasson.

From this belief, Hasson holds that governments at all levels should acknowledge human religious potential, avoid interference with its full expression, and actively promote its voluntary cultivation. "In light of this conclusion, the answer to my initial question becomes clear: The Becket Fund defends the religious expression of all people, not for political advantage, and not as an evangelistic tactic, but because religious freedom is a basic human right."

Hasson stated that the the institutional separation of church and state becomes the unworkable separation of anything religious from anything political. Thus, religious values must not inform any public moral debate. Though the state may not specifically target religion for suppression, the state remains free to act in callous disregard of it. The "neutrality" of the state may be called into question if the state accommodates religious expression.

"The problem with this approach is anthropological: ‘neutrality' is understood to require the state to ignore the religious nature of humanity, to pretend it does not exist, rather than to acknowledge, accommodate, and promote it," said Hasson. "But the human desire to seek the truth, and especially religious truth, cannot be overlooked, much less eliminated."

For much of its history, Catholic thought included the notion that error has no rights, said Hasson. Today, as Pope John Paul II puts it, the church recognizes "religious freedom as an inviolable right of the human person."

"What happened? Has the pope become a relativist," asked Hasson. "No, the pope has been reading Vatican II. The Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, refused to divorce truth and freedom. Instead it grounded freedom in a great truth: that we humans come with a built-in thirst for transcendence, an innate desire to seek and embrace an ultimate truth that lies far beyond the horizon of ourselves. Truth is knowable but it can only be embraced authentically when it is embraced freely. The truth about man is that man is born to seek freely the truth about God. It is this truth that bestows on us the dignity that guarantees our freedom. While error may have no rights, erring people truly do."
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