Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Sweden Recognizes File Sharing As a Religion

Earlier this month, Sweden’s Legal, Financial, and Administrative Services Agency, the Kammarkollegiet, recognized a new religious organization, the Missionary Church of Kopimism. Kopimism – the word derives from “copy me” – is, according to the church’s website, a comprehensive philosophy of life “animated by the desire to be copied and copy.” Its spiritual leader is 20-year old philosophy student Isak Gerson. Kopimism is non-theistic, but it has “priests” and axioms of faith, including the belief that file sharing is “sacred” and the internet “holy.” Followers are called to live their lives according to Kopimist values, encapsulated in this basic creed: “From all to one and from one to all – and then back again – exchange without beginning and without end.” (Kopimism is not big on copyright laws). The fact that it is now a registered religion means that Kopimism can apply for government subsidies and permission to conduct marriage ceremonies.

Western legal systems, including the American, have had a notoriously hard time coming up with a workable definition of “religion,” one  comprehensive enough to cover the variety of human religious experience but narrow enough to be meaningful. Judges have used substantive, functional, and analogical tests. I’m not sure which the Kammarkollegiet uses. Frankly, though, it’s hard for me to see how Kopimism would qualify as a religion under any of these approaches. The Kopimists themselves seem to endorse the analogical approach: although many Swedish Christians condemn Kopimism as a joke, they say, Kopimism actually resembles traditional Christianity, whose monks understood the value of copying and disseminating information. No word yet whether Kopimism’s American branch will seek a religious exemption from SOPA, the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 6 Comments

Dressler & Mandair (eds.), “Secularism & Religion-Making”

Here is a collection of essays by religious studies scholars, Secularism & Religion-Making (OUP 2011), edited by Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair.  Given the description of the contents of the essays, it should come as no surprise that it has been praised heartily by Talal Asad.  To my mind, it also tacitly suggests why religious studies and law often seem to be academic ships passing in the night.  The publisher’s description follows.

This book conceives of “religion-making” broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered “religious” are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular – mostly liberal-secular – assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion.

The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion – and its dialectical counterpart, the secular – into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Classic Revisited: Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane”

Today’s classic revisited is one in the sociology and history of religion, Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, first published in 1957 (the first edition pictured at right).  The field of religious studies, unlike theology, is a comparatively new one — beginning in earnest in the 19th century and heating up only in the 20th.  One connection to law is the ‘definition-of-religion’ issue: how can we find an essence or core of what religion is — and so what the scope is of the constitutional commitments against its establishment and to its free exercise.  The issue appeared in some of the Supreme Court’s mid-twentieth century conscientious objection to military service opinions, which, while not strictly about the Constitution (they were statutory interpretation decisions), confronted the Court with the problems of how to distinguish a religious reason of conscience from a different sort of reason, and whether to do so at all.  But there are other less obvious and so far unexplored connections to law, particularly constitutional law. 

The eminent and supremely cultivated theorist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, Romanian by birth, taught at the University of Chicago after a turbulent early life.  Together with Joachim Wach and others, Eliade made Chicago the heart of the academic study of religion in the mid-late-20th century, and to this day it retains some of the preeminent figures in religious studies (J.Z. Smith, Martin Riesebrodt, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, among many others).

Though Eliade never had any particular influence on the Court (a treatise of his was cited in the majority opinion in the Lukumi Babalu decision, as well as in a handful of 2d and 3d circuit decisions), his ideas about the nature of religious experience are extremely interesting and possibly deserve further study by legal scholars and courts — including by those  interested in the psychology of originalism.  One of Eliade’s crucial ideas was that the conceptions of “sacred” and “profane” time differ fundamentally.  In sacred time, every time that we engage in a ritual or a ceremony, it serves to reactualize the “mythic beginning” which is “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable.”  (69)  Sacred time is therefore cyclical; while profane time is linear.  That “beginning” is not to be found in a historical moment because no time can precede “the appearance of the reality narrated in the myth.”  (72)  It is in this way that sacred time (and, we might say, sacred legal time) creates fissures or what Eliade called moments of “hierophany” in the humdrum linearity of profane time, in which a (legal) “beginning” is recalled and reactualized in (legal) ritual.

Eliade’s writing (laced in part with the writing of Freud and Jung) has not penetrated the constitutional discourse, but it has something worthwhile to offer.