**Preface to "Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society"**

The eleven chapters in this Religions edited volume provide a theoretical, historical, and contemporary exploration of the meaning, value, and state of institutional religious freedom in societies throughout the world. This body of work reflects research and analysis conducted under the auspices of the Freedom of Religious Institution in Society (FORIS) project, an initiative that is funded by the John Templeton Foundation and led by the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI). The FORIS project is based on the proposition that religious liberty is not an individual right alone, but rather includes the right of religious communities to found and gather in synagogues, churches, mosques, temples, and other houses of worship. Freedom of religion, moreover, includes the right of faith communities to establish religious institutions such as schools, hospitals, ministries to the poor, universities, and countless others that seek to embody the teachings of their respective religious traditions. Institutional religious freedom encompasses this full range of congregational and organizational expressions of religious faith.

In the first chapter, Timothy Shah, architect of the FORIS project and a Distinguished Research Scholar at the University of Dallas, answers the question at the heart of this volume: "What is institutional religious freedom?" Shah defines it as, "*the presumptive right of a religious institution to be free from coercive interference on the part of individuals, social groups, governments, or of any human power in three main areas or dimensions: self-definition, self-governance, and self-directed outward expression and action*." Shah also suggests a multitude of reasons why institutional religious freedom in a robust form deserves robust protection. In the second chapter, and in a similar vein to Shah's, Paul Marshall, Director of RFI's South and Southeast Asia Action Team and Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor University, argues convincingly for an understanding of rights as attached not merely to individual persons of faith but also to religious institutions.

Chapters three through six help us answer the following question: How is institutional religious freedom faring in the world? In the third chapter, Chad Bauman, a Senior Fellow with RFI's South and Southeast Asia Action Team and Professor of Religion at Butler University, describes the various minority and majority concerns about institutional religious freedom in India and demonstrates that many of them relate to the Indian government's distinctive approach to managing religion and religious institutions. In the fourth chapter, Shah makes his second contribution to this volume by surveying influential studies of the conditions of religious freedom in India, identifying both their tendency to generate flat, one-dimensional mappings of those conditions and their consequent failure to account for restrictions on the religious freedom of India's majority Hindu population, including constraints on the freedom of their institutions. In the fifth chapter, Robert Hefner, also a Senior Fellow with RFI's South and Southeast Asia Action Team and Professor of Anthropology and International Relations at Boston University, argues that the concept of institutional religious freedom provides an important corrective to conventional, individualistic approaches to religious liberty. Within the context of Indonesia, Hefner notes the Indonesian government's refusal to gran<sup>t</sup> official status to a multiplicity of religious minorities and their institutions, which are subsequently left stigmatized and vulnerable to prejudicial treatment. In the sixth chapter, Mariz Tadros, Professor of Politics and Development at the University of Sussex, and human rights advocate Akram Habib, explore the Egyptian context in which the space for civic action to demand rights for equality and religious freedom are circumscribed. They also examine the implications of institutionalizing religious freedom in light of the tension between arrangements that may benefit Coptic laity and others that may benefit church leadership, while also keeping the promotion of the greater public good in Egypt in view.

The seventh and eighth chapters point us to where institutional religious freedom is flourishing in the world and where is it declining. In the seventh chapter, FORIS scholars Roger Finke, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Religious Studies, and International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University, and Jonathan Fox, Professor of Religion and Politics at Bar-Ilan University, provide an analysis of restrictions across the world on institutional and individual religious freedom for majority and minority religious communities. In the eighth chapter, Fox and Finke join Dane Mataic, Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Dakota State University. Using rigorously compiled datasets, Fox, Finke, and Mataic examine the impact of religiosity in Christian-majority countries on discrimination by non-state actors against religious minorities.

Lastly, chapters nine through eleven help us answer the most crucial question: Why is institutional religious freedom worthy of public concern? In the ninth article, Rebecca Shah, Senior Research Fellow at Archbridge Institute, examines conditions surrounding institutional religious freedom in India, observing that fewer restrictions on faith organizations' freedom to define their mission and governance practices would contribute to greater flourishing and innovation and would enhance their ability to contribute to the common good. Byron Johnson, RFI Senior Fellow and Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, maintains, in the tenth chapter, that religious freedom has consistently been linked to volunteerism and enables religious individuals and organizations to address a variety of social problems, including crime and delinquency, substance abuse, offender behavior in confinement settings, and recidivism. In the eleventh and final chapter, Lihui Zhang, of the University of Oklahoma, observes that international human rights organizations can more effectively secure a greater enjoyment of individual human rights by defending the integrity and rights of religious institutions, which provide avenues for the exercise of many individual rights.

> **Timothy S. Shah, Nathan A. Berkeley** *Editors*

#### *Article* **Institutional Religious Freedom in Full: What the Liberty of Religious Organizations Really Is and Why It Is an "Essential Service" to the Common Good**

**Timothy Samuel Shah**

> Politics Department, University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75062, USA; tshah@udallas.edu

**Abstract:** Should the freedom of churches and other religious institutions come down to little more than a grudging recognition that "what happens in the church, stays in the church"? In this article, I provide a more robust definition of what I call institutional religious freedom than a crabbed and merely negative understanding. In addition, I also go beyond a libertarian-style defense of institutional religious freedom as the ecclesiastical equivalent of the "right to be left alone" by suggesting a multitude of reasons why institutional religious freedom in a robust form deserves robust protection. Especially amidst exigent challenges such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, an anemic appeal to an ecclesiastical version of negative liberty on merely jurisdictional grounds will not be enough to defend religious organizations from an increasingly strong temptation and tendency on the part of political authorities—often acting on the basis of understandable intentions—to subject such organizations to sweeping interference even in the most internal matters. In contrast, the article offers an articulation of why both the internal and external freedoms of religious institutions require maximum deference if they are to offer their indispensable contributions—indeed, their "essential services"—to the shared public good in the United States and other countries throughout the world. Underscoring the external and public dimensions of institutional religious freedom, the article follows the work of law and religion scholar W. Cole Durham in that it analytically disaggregates the freedom of religious institutions into three indispensable components: "substantive", or the right of self-definition; "vertical", or the right of self-governance; and "horizontal", or the right of self-directed outward expression and action.

**Keywords:** religious freedom; religious liberty; religious institutions; religious organizations; institutional religious freedom; religious autonomy; church autonomy; freedom of the church; W. Cole Durham, Jr.
