One day a major case concerning religious freedom is going to appear before the Supreme Court. That will be a fateful day because on that day, the Court will either interpret religious freedom in a very constricted way, or in a much more (genuinely) liberal way. The implications of either decision will be immense.

If Dr Eoin Daly of UCD law department has his way, the Court will opt for the constricted view.

In an article in Thursday’s Irish Times, he appears to reduce religious freedom to freedom of practice only, and that appears to mean what individuals do in private and what takes place inside the walls of specifically religious institutions devoted to purely religious purposes, such as say, seminaries.

Outside of this, he appears to believe religious freedom can be subject to all kinds of curbs in the public interest.

Hence he has no truck with denominational schools being permitted to have enrolment policies that give first refusal to children from their own denomination, nor with exemptions from employment equality laws that allow them not to employ teachers they believe will undermine their ethos.

In a similar vein, he has little sympathy with the view that the Mater hospital has a right to refuse to perform abortions in violation of its ethos once the State has ordained that a woman has a right to have an abortion under circumstances laid down by the law.

The State, in Daly’s schema, looms large indeed. It is the vindicator of whatever it deems to be a right, and once it has declared something to be a right, all public institutions, especially publicly-funded ones must fall into line like it or not.

As I argued in my column in The Irish Independent last Friday, this is not only an issue of religious freedom, it is also about the autonomy of civil society generally.

In a truly liberal society, the State will respect institutional autonomy and will not have a one-size-fits-all view of rights. It will declare a relatively small number of rights to be fundamental and it will not use its vast legal and financial resources to bully everyone into line.

Very few religious freedom cases have come before our courts to date, but that is bound to change as the State aligns itself with a particular and very expansive view of fundamental human rights and then forces everyone else to toe the line. The Churches are going to have to defend themselves.

When the Court makes its ruling in such a case, it will have implications not just for the freedom of faith-based communities, but for civil society itself.

One possible ray of hope for this non-legal expert is that when the exemption for religious employers from aspects of the Employment Equality Act came before the Supreme Court in the 1990s, the Court upheld the exemption. This showed respect for religious freedom. Let’s hope this respect hasn’t been extinguished in the meantime.