5 - Epilogue: The Question of Religious Freedom

Summary

Despite their differences, all three women’s movements examined in this book frame their cause as falling under the purview of the right to religious liberty. Using secular liberal arguments alongside religious ones, they seek to change their wider publics’ perceptions of their struggle and the importance of the site they contest. They construct the space as a site of the state’s failure to respect the basic liberal right to religious freedom rather than as a site of preoccupation for religious zealots with extreme or radical political agendas. Tracing the various arguments from religious freedom this chapter contributes to the growing critical engagement with the political lives of the idea of religious freedom and its effects. In all three cases this powerful ideal is used, intentionally by some, unintentionally by others, not just to advance civil equality but rather to expand discriminatory state sovereignty that grants and denies rights based on religious affiliation.