https://westminster-institute.org/events/liberty-in-the-things-of-god-the-christian-origins-of-religious-freedom/
Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the  History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is an  elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past  president of the American Academy of Religion, the North American  Patristics Society, and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He is chairman  of the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the  publisher of First Things. His new book is Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of  Religious Freedom. (It will be available at his lecture for purchase and  signing.) Dr. Wilken states: “Religious freedom rests on a simple  truth: religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart  and for that reason cannot be coerced by external force.” Chronicling  the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early  Christian movement through the seventeenth century, he shows that the  origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious,  not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and  women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without  liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on  writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth  centuries, reminds us of how “the meditations of the past were fitted to  affairs of a later day.”; For instance, Dr. Wilken quotes Tertullian  (ca. 155-240): “the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another.  It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by  choice not coercion that we should be led to religion.” Carlos Eire, author of Reformations, says, “Wilken argues convincingly  that the concept of religious freedom originated with Christian  thinkers, challenging one of the most revered paradigms in Western  intellectual history. In the process, he also injects a corrective twist  into current debates about secularist hegemony.” Dr. Wilken received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has  taught at Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, the  Institutum Patristicum (Augustinianum) in Rome, the Gregorian University  in Rome, Providence College, and Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is the author of more than 10 books, including The First Thousand  Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale, 2013), The Spirit of  Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale, 2003),  Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995), and The Christians as  the Romans Saw Them (Yale, 1984).

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