Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli  (McGill – Faculty of Law) has posted The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty. The abstract follows. – ARH

The model of religious freedom in diverse liberal-democracies has been mistakenly incorporated into the multicultural paradigm. The wholesale incorporation of the religious liberty paradigm into the multicultural paradigm is an institutional, historical, and conceptual mistake, and it distorts our understanding of the institutions that enshrine religious liberty and underlie our justification of them. The Western paradigm of religious liberty is a complex product of diverse historical conflicts and political traditions, and only contingently overlaps the multicultural argument. The purpose of this essay is to differentiate religious liberty from multiculturalism as theoretical categories, and to at least identify some of the consequences of this differentiation.