Contemporary disputes about religious freedom and religious exemptions are often interpreted as clashes between perspectives of liberty and equality, with the latter seen as increasingly gaining the upper hand. This thesis investigates how these disputes can indeed be explained - and even resolved - in terms of liberty and equality-based views on religious freedom, focusing on both normative theory and Dutch politics. The author provides a comprehensive elaboration of two opposing views - Liberty- and Equality based Theories of Religious Freedom (LTRF and ETRF) - and shows that stances of individual theorists suggest a shift towards an egalitarian status quo. He also argues, however, that both LTRF and ETRF are too inconclusive and indeterminate to offer solutions to concrete disputes, and that contextual assessments are indispensable. Resolving religious freedom disputes is ultimately a matter of weighing the underlying interests of rights and laws against each other on a case-by-case basis, and the thesis contributes to these balancing processes by developing a moral classification of the harms of religious exemptions. With the conceptual tools developed in the first theoretical part of the thesis, the second part analyses how conflicts and shifts between views of religious freedom take shape in the Dutch context. The author shows, firstly, how the equality-based view has increasingly left its mark on historical Dutch church and state relations. Secondly, an extensive frame analysis of parliamentary debates about the Dutch Equal Treatment Act details the ways in which the equality-based frame of religious freedom has become ever more dominant over the last decades, and how the balance has clearly tipped from religious interests to the interests of discriminated citizens
