**7. Conclusions**

I am glad that what happens in Las Vegas generally stays in Las Vegas. As a rule, however, what happens in churches and other religious institutions is too important and too valuable to stay within their walls. In order to ensure that what is incubated in religious institutions is free to spread well beyond their sanctuaries, we need a broader, rich, and truly multi-dimensional understanding of institutional religious freedom that goes beyond giving religious institutions concessive carve-outs and ministerial "exceptions" so they can be left alone. Such protections are necessary, to be sure. However, so much more is at stake than the internal autonomy or the well-being of religious organizations in a narrow sense. What is at issue is not just the negative freedom of religious institutions. What is at issue is the hundreds of millions of people around the world—human beings both religious and non-religious—whose political, social, economic, and spiritual flourishing (and not infrequently survival) depends on the self-organizing dynamism of religious institutions of all kinds. Institutional religious freedom is not merely constitutionally correct. In its positive and expansive dimensions, it is globally essential.

In my view, the profound human needs that the COVID-19 pandemic has so dramatically accentuated argue not for restricting religious institutions as much as possible but for unleashing them as much as feasible—while respecting, of course, the essential requirements of public health. This is because religious institutions are demonstrably effective in providing a wide array of basic health and welfare services that the devastating effects of the current crisis have made more essential than ever—especially for the poor, the elderly, and the young. More profoundly, however, this is also because the current crisis has dramatically underscored the far-reaching reality and devastating consequences of a lack of spiritually meaningful and embodied community of the sort that strong religious institutions and religious groups are uniquely able to provide and promote in a wide range of societies and cultures across the globe. In today's increasingly atomized and dangerously divided world, there may be no greater public policy priority or, more clearly, "essential service".

**Funding:** Here is the language we have requested to be included for all articles in this special issue: "Work on this paper was made possible by a gran<sup>t</sup> from the John Templeton Foundation to the Religious Freedom Institute for a three-year research project on the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society".

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
