Religious Freedom: A Natural Right?

Hadley Arkes, a member of the First Things advisory council, spots a problem in our current discussions of the right to religious freedom. On Right Reason he points out :

We cannot insist on the one hand that our judgments on law and public policy are formed of moral reasoning and the Natural Law [rather than revelation accepted only by believers], and yet claim on the other that when the law runs counter to our moral judgments we have suffered a denial of our “religious freedom.”

Arkes later connects the omission of the Catholic understanding of reason and revelation to (the oddly inconsistent) recent American jurisprudence on matters of religious freedom. Despite this apparent omission over the past several decades, he believes Chief Justice John Roberts “may have backed into a truth that has not broken through yet to the lawyers” in  Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC :

The canons of reason do indeed come into play in gauging just who is a plausible “minister,” just as they come into play in barring certain claims drawn from revelation, whether it is the claim to burn widows on funeral pyres, or withhold blood transfusions from children. The canons of reason will indeed be woven into the law on religion because, as Michael Novak has pointed out so powerfully, they have been bound up, from the beginning of the American law, with the Creator who endowed us with rights.