ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter rehearses the linkage between human dignity, religious freedom, and moral law. It reiterates that, based on the natural law tradition, there is a common moral ground shared by all human persons. There are moral truths that are common to all human beings. And the name of that common moral ground is the natural law, the law “written on the heart,” in the words of one ancient writer. Stated in negative terms, not everything that is “legal” or culturally permissible is morally permissible and just. Laws can be enacted or put in place that are counter to human dignity and human flourishing, even in a democratic context. “Democratic tyranny” may arise where law, justice, and moral principle are arbitrary. Where social and cultural constructions about moral reality are “created,” modified or discarded, the notions of “good” and “evil,” “just” and “unjust,” disappear. And where they become malleable, fashioned at will by those in power, “civil society” as we have known it collapses. But justice, which is the foundation of law, and moral “truths” are not arbitrary. All citizens – indeed, atheists, theists, and all types of citizens in between – can be exceedingly glad that the natural law in its essence is pre-legal and pre-political. And because of this “pre-political” and antecedent character of moral law, it follows that natural rights and human flourishing are possible, facilitating that most basic of “sacred rights,” the right to religious freedom.
