Religious liberty remains at the forefront of our nation’s mind with a slew of recent Supreme Court victories. Before adjourning for the summer, SCOTUS sided with conservatives in cases including U.S. v. Skrmetti, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, and Mahmoud v. Taylor. These landmark decisions set precedent in the worlds of human sexuality, human dignity, and religious liberty respectively.

The historic Mahmoud v. Taylor case specifically set precedent for religious liberty in the states. Originating in Montgomery County, Maryland, this decision allowed parents once again to opt out their school-age children from indoctrination via Pride Storybooks. Parents offered significant pushback, claiming the lack of opt out violated their First Amendment right to exercise their religion, since such a practice grossly violates the convictions and commands of many religions. The Washington Stand here delves deeper into this decision.

But not only was this case a win for conservatives, Christians, and families — it was also a win for human rights.

Unique about this case is that its proponents represented religions beyond Christianity, including Islam and Judaism. Theologians want to claim that worshiping is inherent to being human. This case appears to confirm this reality and highlight another: man’s impulse not to interfere with another man’s religion.

But from where do we draw this impulse of non-interference when it comes to religious practice? And is it actually true that religious liberty is an inalienable right?

This article will explore a framework for understanding religious liberty as an inherently human right with which no one has the right to interfere.

Religious Liberty: Given by God

When discussing human rights, there are two crucial categories to understand. Those are the categories of positive and negative freedoms.

Isaiah Berlin introduced these terms in his 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” He defines positive freedoms as liberties given to a person that he does not inherently have. In essence, they answer the question, “Who may reasonably dictate what I do/who I am?” in a given instance. Negative freedoms, then, are liberties which a person inherently has and with which no one may interfere. They answer the question, “In which occasions should I be left to do/be what I choose, free of interference?”

Examples of positive freedom include the right to vote, to receive an education, and to access health care. We generally understand these to be arbitrary rather than inherent, dependent on the social contract rather than the dictates of a universal human nature. It is the nature of positive freedom to be given by men/institutions before it can be acknowledged. This is not the case with negative freedom.

Examples of negative freedom include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are acknowledged, rather than given by men, because they are given by God at conception. Just as at conception a person has all the necessary material he needs to fully develop, at conception a person has everything he needs that would grant him these negative freedoms: namely, (and simply) membership in the human race.

Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, argues that a person may have one of two understandings of where his worth originates. Namely, it is either achieved or received. If it is achieved, then it is true that those who achieve more are more valuable than others and even that a given individual’s value may fluctuate throughout his life based on his achievements. If it is received, namely received from God, as Scripture teaches, a person’s value is a fixed constant from which he operates, not for which he operates. The only way this perspective of received value is true is if it participates in the larger narrative of received good, such as the narrative made clear in Scripture.

Because of this, because there are certain freedoms which are our “default” by virtue of being ingrained in our nature, we are often not compelled to examine these negative freedoms. It is only once they are threatened that the freedoms distilled in our design are called into question. This is what Pride Storybooks did.

A Victory for an Inalienable Right

In Isaiah Berlin’s essay, he nods to philosophers of antiquity such as Burke, Paine, and Mill in their frameworks for personal freedom. He writes, “We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to ‘degrade or deny our nature.’”

Exactly right. The context of this quote reveals that when push comes to shove and certain freedoms contradict each other, we must preserve those which are most essential to being human. Are those the rights conferred by the state, an institution whose moral dictates fluctuate every election? Or are those rights, those most essential to what it means to be human, conferred by the only non-human, personal being capable of creating an eternal, incarnate race of spiritual beings?

So, to answer Berlin’s query, when there is a conflict between your rights, say between your right to religious freedom and your right to public education — as in Mahmoud v. Taylor — which one gives? For years, Montgomery County parents could not send their children to school without risking the violation their religious freedom once there. They had no choice. Either refrain from the education their hard-earned tax dollars earned their participation in or risk religious compromise by allowing the state to disciple their children about their sexuality.

But now they can choose. Along with parents across the nation, they can safely exercise both rights with integrity.

When push came to shove, to not “degrade or deny our nature” meant preserving religious liberty, maintaining the area of noninterference which negative freedoms protect.

This reflects the reality that man is in his essence a worshiper, and it is interfering to the point of degrading human nature to compromise his ability to worship. This is part of the cumulative case for religious liberty being an inalienable human right. To alienate it is to deny an essential characteristic of man’s nature.

It is important to note that we need both understandings of freedom. There is territory in a person’s life in which only he may have authority, and there is also territory in which the state must have authority in order to ensure a just, livable society. Without positive rights, what’s to stop complete anarchy?

Yet, the lesson our culture needs to learn more is that there are truly fixed realities that communicate necessary truths to us about how to flourish. These realities are fixed in the providence of God’s good design for all of humanity, starting with his good design of humans

Mahmoud v. Taylor prompts us to consider more carefully the grounding for the rights we believe are essential. Either everyone is entitled to freely exercise their religion or no one is. Because this court ruling advocates for religious liberty across religions, it reveals the reality that men are worshipers, and no one is justified in withholding them from realizing this design.

Rebekah Ruth Basie serves as an intern for Family Research Council.