A Secular Charter With a Religious Freedom Clause

The United Nations was founded in 1945 by fifty one states meeting in San Francisco, in the aftermath of a war in which the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities had been carried out on an industrial scale. Its founding Charter takes no position on religion as such, and the organization has no religious mandate of its own. What it produced instead, in 1948, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article 18 states that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change one's religion and to manifest it in teaching, practice, worship and observance. The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights restates the same guarantee in binding treaty language for the states that ratify it.

This makes the United Nations an unusual presence in a project like this atlas: a body with no theology of its own that has nonetheless become the chief source of the international legal vocabulary in which religious freedom and its violation are now argued, whatever a given tradition's own internal account of its rights and obligations might say. The Declaration's universalist framing has itself been a subject of theological and philosophical argument since 1948, including from within traditions that hold their own account of duty and freedom to differ from the individual rights language the Declaration assumes.