The sense of the right to religious freedom in liberal democracies between accommodation and laicization. A study of the North American and Brazilian cases

This work intends to investigate the different conceptions-accommodation and laicization-that underlie processes of legislative regulation and judicial decision in matters of conflicts involving the right to religious freedom, in the legal systems of North America and Brazil. We will also investigate the potential for harmonization of legal in conflicts with other fundamental rights. The objective here is to build possibilities in order to establish a synthesis meaning for the right of religious freedom, in accordance with the democratic constitutional models of law to begin with, the recent modulations which allowed the fundamental right to religious freedom, especially from the edition of some US federal and state legislation, as well as from a set of decisions taken by Brazilian courts. As a corollary of these modulations, the article intends to assess the consequences that these new laws and judicial decisions caused in the legal system, through social andinstitutional democratic practices related to any fundamental rights. We used the dialectical method, since the idea and the foundation of the right to religious freedom follow a three-stage approach: thesis (religious freedom in its original sense and secularized conception), antithesis (right to religious freedom as a possibility to act in the exercise of belief, by claiming accommodation with other rights), and synthesis (the perspective to elaborate a proper sense to liberal democracies). Initial results indicate that both models based on secularization and accommodation can generate democratic and undemocratic meanings to the right of religious freedom; both models can either harmonize conflicting rights or escalate social antagonisms.