**1. Introduction**

The idea of institutional religious freedom has become increasingly controversial and confused in recent years, especially in the United States, and pressure for such freedom has been growing. The notion that institutions and organizations, including commercial ones, can have rights has been described as outlandish and unprecedented. Much of the controversy relates to the still common American supposition that rights and their concomitant freedoms can apply only to individuals. Contentious U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as *Citizens United* and *Hobby Lobby*, have also contributed to widespread suspicion about the rights and freedoms of institutions.<sup>1</sup>

Given this situation, I will in this paper attempt to give an overview and defense, with historical and contemporary examples, of the roots of institutional religious freedom, its nature and extent, and what particularly needs to be protected for these institutions in terms of competence and vocation. I argue that one of the principal reasons for forbidding governmen<sup>t</sup> discrimination on matters such as religion is precisely so that private institutions, and not only religious ones, will be able to appropriately employ staff and carry out policies according to their own particular beliefs as to what supports their distinctive mission. As Laborde (2017, p. 125) puts it: "the state should be secular so that citizens do not have to be." Governmental neutrality is intended to be a foundation for a lively and diverse societal pluralism, not for society to become a mirror of the governmen<sup>t</sup> itself (McConnell 2020).

One key issue on this topic has been growing dispute and uncertainty over the very nature of rights themselves, so I will seek to address that first (Rhodes 2018; Moyn 2019).

**Citation:** Marshall, Paul. 2021. Institutional Religious Freedom: An Overview and Defense. *Religions* 12: 364. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel12050364

Academic Editors: Timothy Shah and Nathan A. Berkeley

Received: 20 April 2021 Accepted: 12 May 2021 Published: 20 May 2021

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