ABSTRACT
In the lecture Glendon, a Professor of Law at Harvard University and a former US Ambassador to the Holy See, argued that in the United States religious freedom is well on its way to becoming a second-class human right. In a lecture delivered exactly 20 years after her article on 'Structural Free Exercise', moreover, Glendon had to concede that the right to freedom of religion or belief in the West was 'at heightened risk from, inter alia, the erosion of conscience protection for religious individuals and institutions, restrictions on the autonomy of religious institutions, and inroads on the rights of parents regarding the education of their children'. According to Michael Paulsen, a leading scholar of constitutional interpretation, 'the fundamental liberal paradigm of constitutional religious liberty is that the state recognizes and protects religious liberty as a natural right, out of an essentially religious acknowledgement that God's authority categorically prevails over the state's'.
