By asking after the moral economy of religious freedom, I mean to ask: What do we have to believe about religion, religious faith and religious practice to support an attractive and robust view of religious freedom? Do we, for example, have to believe that religious commitments and activities are more valuable to individuals or groups than other deeply motivated projects? Or, if not more valuable, more important in some phenomenological or conceptual sense? Do we have to believe in the truth or falsity of some set of premises that are at the bottom of all, most, or at least some religions? Do we have to assign special status to religion on grounds of its particular value or importance to the state? Do we, in sum, have to find some grounds of this sort to justify a privileged status for religion and its entailments, from which status we can in turn derive a reasonably warm-blooded view of religious freedom?

The stakes here are high. If religious freedom depends on a view that religion is in the sense suggested by these questions a privileged activity among the many activities that sometimes matter greatly to some people, then religious freedom is at best deeply controversial by its nature. Worse, as we will see, if religious freedom depends on religious privilege, then the idea of religious freedom is self-contradictory at its core.