And Should the First be Last?

From the very outset of its being recognized as a part of the canon of international human rights law, the freedom of religion has been the subject of a double pressure, both from within and from without. From within, it has been under pressure to be aligned with freedoms pertaining to non-religious forms of belief. The idea that religious belief per se should be the subject of particular protections as a human right has never gained particular traction, and as a result, the freedom of religion is internally moderated by this parallelism with other forms of conscience-freedoms. This tends to mean that, rather than focusing on freedom of religion itself, attention is more often focused on the manner in which other human rights ideals -- such as thought, expression, association, equality, and nondiscrimination -- find their outworking in the context of religious belief and belief systems. Across this time, the influence of religion as an ordering worldview has remained a dominant force, and perhaps increasingly so.