Most liberal, Western citizens don't have significant worries nowadays about religious persecution in their own countries, but it wasn't always this way. How did we get to this point on the road of religious freedom?

On this episode, Hayek Program scholar Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson share a conversation on their new book, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom [1] (Cambridge University Press, 2019) which seeks to answer this question.

The pair discuss their inspiration for the book and how the project came together before expounding on some of their findings. In particular, they point to the role of the contrasting governance structures of identity rules vs. general rules in shaping the process, and examine the effects of key historical events such as the Reformation. Along the way, they share some surprises they encountered in their work and offer up possible areas for further exploration by interested scholars.