Let me conclude with a few words about the centrality and one might even say priority of religious freedom among the basic civil liberties. Observed from a certain perspective, any basic liberty might be assigned a kind of priority: free speech, for example, which is so essential to the enterprise of republican government (and, in truth, good government of any kind); or freedom of association and assembly; or the right of self-defense and defense of one's family and community. The collapse of any of these rights would place all the others in jeopardy.
Still, there is a special sense in which freedom of religion has priority or at least a sort of pride of place. It is rightly labeled in America "the first freedom," not only because it is listed first in our Bill of Rights and because of its foundational historical role in establishing free institutions but even more significantly because it protects an aspect of our flourishing as human persons that is architectonic to the way we lead our lives. Religion concerns ultimate things. In the focal cases, it represents our efforts to bring ourselves into a relationship of friendship with transcendent sources of meaning and value. Our religious questioning, understanding, judging, and practicing shape what we do not only in the specifically "religious" aspects of our lives (prayer, liturgy, fellowship, and so forth) but in every aspect of our lives. It helps us to view our lives as a whole and to direct our choices and activities in ways that have integrity—both in the moral sense of that term and in the broader sense of having a life that hangs together.
Religion is not the only basic human good; nor are the other basic human goods mere means to the fuller realization of the good of religion. But religion is an intrinsic and constitutive aspect of our integral flourishing as human persons and also a good that shapes and integrates all the other intrinsic and constitutive aspects of human well-being and fulfillment.
(Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism, American Ideals and Institutions Series, ed. Robert P. George [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013], 113 [italics in original])
