To some early modern thinkers, a primary concern was that governments protect, or at least not threaten, individuals’ liberty to believe what they wish about God and other matters. Yet the American Constitution goes further, guaranteeing “the free exercise” of religion. This broader definition is of particular import to Jews, for whom practice is paramount. In his review of Robert Louis Wilken’s Liberty in the Things of God, John Inazu explores this distinction:

Conscience is indeed important to the history of religious freedom. But religious practice is sustained and transmitted through religious communities. . . . The role of religious communities is [therefore] not a subsidiary motif of religious freedom but integral to its proper understanding and defense.

Fortunately, most of Liberty in the Things of God underscores exactly this point. For example, Wilken notes that the Christian writer Tertullian, the first Western thinker to use the phrase “freedom of religion,” defended Christians against charges that their gatherings amounted to “illegal factions.” As Wilken observes, “Tertullian was defending the rights of Christians to assemble for worship, to organize, to choose leaders, to care for one another, even to have their own burial places for their dead.”

The kind of religious freedom that allows us to live in peace in a pluralistic society depends upon a careful parsing of two paired ideas: (1) public and private; and (2) individual and communal. Religious practice is public as well as private and communal as well as individual. This means religious freedom must not be limited to either individual or private religion.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.