Church and Business Autonomy in The Secular Economy: A Comparative Study on Corporate Law and Religion

This thesis explores the intersection between business and religion from a legal perspective. Initial discussions take their cue from classical law and religion scholarship on the rights of autonomy and self-direction of ecclesiastical entities to organise their internal religious affairs. As a general matter, religious internal affairs include areas that range from the self-determination to carry out worship services and religious teachings as from the right to settle property disputes, or appoint spiritually qualified ministers without intrusion by state interference. Seen it this way, these scholarly debates have assessed and explained that there are some areas of ecclesiastical governance that the law recognises to be the sole business of churches, and not of governments. In light of this, to think of the relation between religion and ‘business’ in a legal sense, this thesis argues, is first of all to think of the role of religious freedom in preserving a zone of legal autonomy where ecclesiastical entities can freely express their option of a religious way of life. This is what scholars on both sides of the Atlantic call ‘corporate religious freedom’. At any rate, and church autonomy apart, the term ‘corporate’ might bear several other legal meanings that keep the content of the institutional dimension of religious freedom in flux. For instance, US legal doctrine has used this term to describe a recent trend where courts moved initially to protect churches and, from there, to recognising the religious freedom rights of another corporate entity: the for-profit company. What bears note here is that at the centre of this ‘corporate/business’ turn in law and religion are not so much church-affiliated entities as freestanding business enterprises that mix religion with an entirely profit-oriented governance structure and mindset. It is against this background that a central aim for this thesis is to introduce an evolutionary pattern of corporate religious freedom. One in which, if this right was originally designed to maximise church autonomy in the organisation of religious affairs (read, business), it is now stretching beyond traditional houses of worship to maximise the business autonomy of commercial enterprises in secular commerce. In addition, this study asks, and attempts to answer, the difficult questions: is this ‘business turn’ in law and religion also emerging in Europe? And if so, what implications will this have on conventional legal understandings of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ under European law?