What Is Religion: The Legal Context

Abstract

Religious freedom possesses both a moral and a legal dimension. Legal cases involving the need to define religion tend to favour a subjective definition, as in the Amselem case in Canada, which is criticized by Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson, who speak in terms of religious, secular, and hybrid worldviews, which provokes the question: Is Communism a religion? An investigation of the question leads to an examination of the possibility, highlighted by James Nickel, that religious freedom may be best protected through the protection of basic freedoms themselves, rather than as a separate category.