The state, religion, and freedom: a review essay of Persecution & toleration
In: The Review of Austrian Economics
Persecution and Toleration offers a novel and superb analysis of the birth of religious freedom. Rather than seek an ideational account of the rise of religious freedom, Johnson and Koyama investigate changes in the institutional environment that governed the relationship between religion and the state. These changes made it in the interest of policy makers in modern Europe to grant greater religious freedom by transitioning from identity rules to impersonal laws in maintaining order. The book introduces a new thought-provoking conceptual framework that can be extended to examine the complicated history of the state's interaction with religion, comparative analysis of the relationship between state capacity and political legitimacy, and various other issues concerning the treatment of minorities and heterodox practices around the world.