Self-Determined Religious Practice

Sor Juana's complex relationship with religious vows—her intellectual commitment to faith alongside her resistance to institutional religious coercion—illustrates the libertarian distinction between voluntary faith and compulsory religiosity. While she may have genuinely believed, institutional authorities sought to weaponize her religious commitment, forcing her to renounce scholarship in the name of obedience. This concept establishes that even within institutions one voluntarily joins, individuals retain property rights over their own practice and belief. Self-determined religious practice means that faith cannot be conscripted into institutional service; that prayer and devotion must flow from internal conviction, not external command. Sor Juana's resistance to compulsory religious obedience—her insistence on the right to study even when authorities framed learning as spiritually dangerous—asserts that libertarian justice protects religious freedom as a form of conscience property. Her example reveals how institutional religion becomes tyrannical when it demands not authentic faith but compliant performance, transforming the self into property of ecclesiastical power.