IARF is a world community that brings together free and liberal religious groups, individuals, and like-minded organisations across diverse faiths, cultures, and languages. Our membership includes organisations and individuals from 5 continents, 23 countries and various religious traditions, including Buddhism, Baháʼí Faith, Christianity, indigenous faiths, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Unitarianism, and Zoroastrianism, among others. Together we form a treasury of faith and practice. And in unison we share them in dialogue and service.

Our mission is to advance free and liberal religion, promote religious freedom and other human rights, and protect religious minorities. Our general consultative status with ECOSOC, awarded to only a handful of civil society organisations, gives us a unique opportunity and a responsibility to collaborate with United Nations' mechanisms to aid afflicted groups and individuals. We work to help free religious people find each other and serve them by facilitating mutual learning, promoting their values, and creating opportunities for celebrating our community.

Free and Liberal Religion

Free and liberal religion can be found in all religious traditions. It is an impulse that has developed independently in many cultures and religions throughout history. It cannot be traced back to a single person, text or event. Rather, it is an attitude towards one's own tradition: undogmatic, open-minded, tolerant. In a world characterized by increasing polarisation and unwillingness to question one's beliefs, free and liberal religion stands out because it is prepared to challenge accepted views and structures, and build bridges.

Free religion seeks peace, happiness, equality and justice for all. It expresses our desire for liberation from all that enslaves us through personal spiritual growth and work towards a better and more just world for all. It recognises that each of us is on our own unique journey through life in the search for meaning and truth. Through the exploration of existential questions, social issues and relationships, it stimulates a free, critical and honest affirmation of one's own tradition and resists seeking to convert and shape other minds and spirits in its own mould. It promotes inclusiveness and openness to diversity, rejecting prejudice, alienation from others and uncritical dependence on authority.

Religious Freedom

Religious freedom is more than just a human right or a formal principle of law and political systems. We affirm and defend the right of every human being to hold diverse beliefs and worship in their chosen way, as expressed in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: free of unjustified interference by the state. Yet religious freedom also points to the liberating potential of religion itself and the search for true spiritual freedom - not only freedom of religion but freedom in religion.

Human freedom is indivisible and must be considered holistically across all aspects of human existence. Ultimately, religious freedom serves human flourishing and, like all other human rights, must be interpreted in this light. We oppose any attempt to weaponize religious freedom against other fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals. The interrelatedness of all human rights, the complexity of the issues and questions with which our times confront us demand an open and critical attitude.

Education and Learning

We strive to create opportunities for learning - both for our members, to find inspiration in one another's tradition, and for the general public, to learn more about free and liberal religion as a distinct spiritual and intellectual movement. We are committed to collecting and creating resources that inform, explain and inspire in collaboration with our member groups, educational establishments, researchers, activists and religious leaders.

We embrace new technologies that bridge geographical and linguistic divides, creating offerings accessible worldwide in multiple languages. Our Free Religion Institute has been formed to carry out this aspect of our mission. It was born out of a deep-seated commitment to foster liberal religious thought and education across the globe. We recognize that learning is a lifelong journey that transcends formal education. It is a continuous pursuit of understanding across diverse religious traditions, cultures, and philosophies.

Advocacy

We recognize our responsibility to stand up for those who suffer persecution and oppression. This commitment extends to defending religious minorities facing discrimination, indigenous communities struggling to protect their ancestral lands and cultural practices, and progressive faith groups targeted for their inclusive interpretations of religious traditions. Equally, we oppose the misuse of religion and religious freedom to limit individual liberty - through blasphemy laws, denial of bodily integrity, gender inequality, caste discrimination, and all other forms of injustice. When religious authority is weaponized to restrict personal freedoms, whether through laws that criminalize religious dissent, practices that deny individuals autonomy over their own bodies, customs that relegate women to second-class status, or systems that perpetuate social hierarchies, we must speak out. Our dedication to religious freedom includes both protecting the right to practice one's faith and ensuring that religious beliefs are not used as instruments of oppression against others.

Celebration

IARF began over 120 years ago as a gathering of free and liberal religious people, united by their shared commitment to religious freedom and understanding across faiths. Throughout our history, including our recent 36th Congress in 2023, we have continued to come together to celebrate our bonds and find inspiration, wisdom, and comfort in each other's presence and traditions. These gatherings have evolved from small meetings of European and American liberals to truly global conferences, bringing together voices from diverse religious backgrounds and cultural contexts. Whether through worship, meditation, conversation or learning, we provide opportunities for the liberal community to celebrate its insights, richness, and potential, and find strength to persevere in working for a better world. Our gatherings feature interfaith dialogue, shared spiritual practices, educational workshops, and collaborative projects that demonstrate the power of unity in diversity.

Throughout its history, IARF has been confronted with the great crises, tragedies and challenges that shaped our world, and each watershed moment, such as the Second World War or the fall of the Eastern Bloc, has left its mark on it. We can trace this development through its changing names, phrasings of its mission and goals, and its membership. History has not ended, and today we experience its quickened pace as we confront old and new questions and challenges, responding to the uncertainty and unease experienced by many of our members.

Ever since the establishment of IARF the world has been becoming increasingly secularised. The people who have shaped our organisation have aided this process in many ways - championed the separation of church and state, spoke against religiously motivated censorship, supported the freedom and independence of science, pointed out and opposed ways in which religion was used to justify and cement structures of oppression or silence voices of dissent. In many ways secularisation has been a needed and liberating phenomenon that has helped our societies mature. Yet it also presents a challenge. On the one hand, it has led to some religious communities growing more and more hostile towards the changing world, building their identities in opposition to it and alienating themselves from it. On the other hand, many have become hostile to religion as such, perceiving it as oppressive and backwards, and unwilling to enter into dialogue with it. Religion has not become less polarising, but perhaps even more so - old tensions between different faiths have not been resolved, and the conflict between fundamentalist religion and primitive anti-religion sentiments has grown in intensity.

We are facing rising nationalism and sectarianism, even in regions which can be considered prosperous and highly developed. Many societies are becoming increasingly polarized and intolerant. Different ethnicities and social groups are pitted against each other as populists offer simplistic solutions to complex problems and blame minorities instead of addressing root causes of issues such as climate change, migration and economic inequality.

On the religious landscape, free religious groups are few and far between. They have been experiencing a decline in membership and are overshadowed by orthodox and fundamentalist forms of religion in the public eye. They are also most vulnerable to persecution in regions where freedom of religion is not guaranteed as the smallest minorities with bold, non-conformist views.

These are the challenges that we have to address. We need a way to overcome the rising tendency to perceive the world and think of solutions in black-and-white, binary terms. We need to facilitate liberation of the mind and spirit, and the courage to venture outside our safe spaces and question our beliefs and prejudices in dialogue with others, open to consider their point of view. The experience of free religion, which has always attempted to transcend binary thinking and embrace the tension of living in doubt and uncertainty, looking for new, creative solutions is very valuable, even though it has often failed in this. And we have new tools at our disposal - it has never been easier and more affordable to communicate across geographical and linguistic boundaries. Whether it's building grassroots relationships between individuals or coalitions of communities, disseminating information and offering education opportunities, or learning about the plight of oppressed people and reaching out to those who can help them, it has never been more accessible.

Building Our Community

We are excited about new tools that help us maintain our sense of community across time and space. They complement our traditional in-person gatherings, creating a hybrid approach that strengthens our global network and projects. Since the 2023 Congress we have developed our Community Platform. We envisage it as a safe meeting place and collaboration environment for IARF members from all over the globe. It must be easy to find other individual IARF members, publish articles, share thoughts and resources, strike up conversations, participate in various dedicated spaces and learn about volunteering opportunities in the growing number of our working groups. We are deepening our collaboration with member groups and partners, their outlets and editorial teams to reach more people with our message and projects.

Developing Our Educational Offering

The establishment of the Free Religion Institute marks an exciting new chapter in our educational mission. Inwardly, we want to strengthen connections between free and liberal religious people worldwide. Outwardly, we seek to increase awareness of free and liberal religious thought and the traditions of our member groups. We are developing a comprehensive digital library and e-learning courses, webinars, workshops and discussions, so that the Institute can become a hub for scholars, practitioners, and interested individuals to explore free and liberal religion's rich heritage and its relevance to contemporary challenges in partnership with our members and their educational establishments. Through multilingual offerings made possible by modern technology, we aim to ensure these resources reach across linguistic and cultural boundaries, making free and liberal religious thought accessible to diverse audiences worldwide.

Expanding International Engagement

We are strengthening our engagement with the UN, Council of Europe, and other institutions to help those whose rights are violated and amplify the voice of free and liberal religion - a voice distinct from, though not incompatible with, those of mainstream religion and secular humanism. We want to monitor developments related to human rights, especially with regard to minority groups, indigenous peoples and women, partnering with our member groups and organisations like the International Association of Liberal Religious Women. Minority groups whose religious freedom is violated and/or religion is threatened we can help with advocacy, advice and finance. Several small religious groups have become a member of IARF to seek protection, becoming part of a larger entity. Our general consultative status with ECOSOC gives us an opportunity to engage with United Nations' bodies and mechanisms, such as the UPR, Human Rights Council, NGO Committees, special rapporteurs and independent experts: through statements, reports, organisation of and participation in events. We are dedicated to supporting and expanding our team of volunteers tasked with overseeing our advocacy efforts.

Supporting Youth and Human Rights Education

We are working on aiding the RFYN, our youth organisation, to grow and reach new members across our member organisations in various regions. We want to support our young leaders to build an active and well-organised movement that promotes free and liberal religious values and develops old and new programmes, such as human rights education, conflict resolution initiatives, international interfaith dialogue and exchanges.