European concept of religious freedom: ideological sources and legislative fixation

The purpose of the article is to research the concepts "religious freedom" and "freedom of conscience" in the European culture on the basis of the analysis of works of the thinkers who brought the most essential contribution to the development of idea of religious freedom. The basic stages of the dramatic way of setting this freedom in the European society and law are given. The features of the development of the idea of religious freedom according to socio-cultural conditions of concrete national traditions are underlined. In the article the history of the modern concept of the individual and collective right to religious freedom is described. It arose in the course of Reformation and for the first time received legal fixation in self-governing laws of Providence formulated by R.Williams. Ideas of English (J. Lock, J. Milton, E.K.Shaftesbury, J. Toland, E.Collins, D.Defoe, J. Priestley, J. Swift, E.Berk), Anglo-American (R. Williams, W. Penn), French (M. Montaigne, R. Descartes, D. Diderot, J. d'Alembert, F. Voltaire,S. Monteskie, J.-J. Rousseau) and German (M. Luther, G. Lessing, I. Kant) thinkers are analysed. The most essential aspects of religious freedom proved by the European philosophers are marked: the idea of the right of religious freedom as natural and inalienable; the idea of toleration in the context of working out of notions on independence of reason and belief, on subjectivity of truth and necessity of internal acceptance of belief; the rejection of compulsion in the matters of belief and of persecutions for belief; the idea of necessity of the secular state in which creed and civil competency do not depend on each other. In the conclusion the legal embodiment of the idea of freedom of conscience in the legal acts of European countries (in constitutions in the first place), and in the international legislation, which allowed generating the modern standard of religious freedom, is shown. The basic threats on the way of its realisation and a system of effective measures of protection of religious freedom and freedom of conscience are listed.

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