Economic and Religious Freedom are Inseparable

Pundits and professors love to divide conservatives into camps, specifically, economic vs. religious. Like most of the dichotomies they concoct, it is a false one.

At the Family Research Council last Thursday, Catholic University professor Jay Richards showed that there is an overwhelming overlap among countries that score highly on both the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom and the Pew Research Center survey of religious liberty, outliers such as Singapore notwithstanding.  Moreover, in this country alone, the lawsuit that the Little Sisters of the Poor brought against Obamacare shows the startling degree to which the interests of secular libertarians and “people of faith” overlap.

Richards is the co-author of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that J. R. R. Tolkien Got and the West Forgot. He described Obamacare as “more than half the length of Lord of the Rings and not nearly as interesting.”

Richards is an assistant research professor in the School of Business and Economics at Catholic U. He is also the author of Money, Greed and God.

“There’s a tendency now to move religious freedom back to freedom of worship,” Richards says. “We tend to take religious freedom for granted.”

By the way, here’s a bit of trivia for those enamored of the German economic system: Germany taxes its churches.

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