Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Secular Britain?

Contemporary Britain, Americans understand, is a secular place. Weekly church attendance is quite low. Although in surveys majorities continue to identify themselves as “Christian,” most observers dismiss this as evidence of merely vestigial attachments, like the crosses on the Union Jack (left). When Americans think of religion in Britain, they tend to think of stories like sociologist Peter Berger’s, about the time he asked a London hotel concierge for the nearest Church of England parish. Not only did the concierge not know where the parish was; he didn’t know what the Church of England was.

It’s always a little surprising for Americans, then, when Britain’s Christian identity reasserts itself, as it did on two occasions this month. On Sunday, the BBC broadcast the traditional Queen’s Christmas Message, which ended with a meditation on the “great Christian festival” of Christmas and a prayer “that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.” Not so secular.

Now, the Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and I guess most people, if they thought about it, would expect her Christmas message to be, well, Christian. Earlier in the month, though, Prime Minister David Cameron gave a remarkable address, on the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, which also highlighted Britain’s Christian identity. “We are a Christian country,” he declared, “and we should not be afraid to say so.” He did not mean to minimize the contributions of Britons of other faiths, or of no faith, he insisted. But there was no reason to hide the fact that the Christian tradition, including especially the King James Bible, had helped shape British culture and values. Cameron rejected state “secular neutrality” as “profoundly wrong,” both in its Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Jerusalem Post on Israel’s Christians

From the Jerusalem Post, an interesting article on Israel’s small Christian minority. Christians, the Post says, who comprise about 2% of the population, are both “thriving” and “beleaguered”: their level of unemployment is lower, and their test scores on national matriculation exams higher, than the general population, but they are also subject to acts of “petty discrimination.” The majority of Israel’s Christians are Palestinian Arabs, but there are also Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Greeks, and Syriacs. A new and growing “Hebrew Catholic” community exists are well  — Catholics who have grown up in Israel and attend Mass in Hebrew.

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Is a Nun an Employee?

An Orthodox Christian nun in Canada is suing her former convent for wrongful constructive dismissal. The ex-nun alleges that she worked for the convent for 14 years, providing services that included sewing, caring for elderly sisters, and hosting guests, until she quit, allegedly because of mistreatment by the other nuns. She now seeks back pay and damages. The convent argues that nuns are not “employees” in the civil-law sense, but volunteers who vow to live with other nuns in poverty, chastity, and obedience. “Monastic work is for God and not for people,” the convent argues. “It is not a career.” An article from a Toronto newspaper about the lawsuit is here.

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New York Times on Religious Freedom in America

This week, the Times‘s “Room for Debate” series addresses the question, “Is Americans’ Religious Freedom Under Threat?” Most contributors seem to think the answer is “yes.” An interesting lineup, including law professors Helen Alvaré, Noah Feldman, Michael McConnell, and Winnifred Sullivan. The discussion was organized by Thomas Farr and Timothy Shah of Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Check it out.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Classic Revisited: Justice Joseph Story’s “Commentaries on the Constitution”

Justice Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) (available for free!) is a lively, opinionated, and rangy discussion of the original understanding of the Constitution.  Story was a Supreme Court justice from 1811-1845, and for much of that period he was also a professor at Harvard Law School (one could do both in those days).  Professor Michael Paulsen once aptly called Story’s 3-volume tour de force “comprehensive and brilliant, but often tendentious” and listed it as among the top five books of all-time about the Constitution.  Chief Justice William Rehnquist once used some of Story’s discussion of the Establishment Clause in his dissenting opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree (the moment of silence case).  Here is a good chunk of Story — sections 1865-1871 of his treatise — to give you a sense of his views and style:

§ 1865. And first, the prohibition of any establishment of religion, and the freedom of religious opinion and worship.  How far any government has a right to interfere in matters touching religion, has been a subject much discussed by writers upon public and political law. The right and the duty of the interference of government, in matters of religion, have been maintained by many distinguished authors, as well those, who were the warmest advocates of free governments, as those, who were attached to governments of a more arbitrary character.  Indeed, the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues; — these never can be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive, how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those, who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is the especial duty of government to foster, and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects. This is a point wholly distinct from that of the right of private judgment in matters of religion, and of the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of one’s conscience.

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Egypt’s Copts Fear Western Support Will Backfire

An interesting piece by Reuters’s religion editor Tom Heneghan explains why Western support for Egypt’s Coptic Christians may cause more harm than good. Although well-meaning, Western support tends to associate Copts with foreigners and make Egyptian Muslims suspicious. For example, when Pope Benedict expressed outrage at a suicide bombing that killed 23 Copts in a church in Alexandria earlier this year, the rector of the most important Islamic seminary in Egypt, Al-Alzhar, suspended interfaith dialogue with the Vatican in protest. The Copts are Egyptians, the rector complained, and not the Vatican’s concern. The idea that Christians are disloyal foreigners surfaces periodically in the history of the Muslim Middle East and has led to retaliation against them. To give just one instance, suspicion that Christian communities were collaborating with the Empire’s European rivals contributed to widespread massacres in Ottoman Turkey in the nineteenth century. Heneghan’s piece makes clear how bad things are for Copts today: even expressions of sympathy can place them in serious danger.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Does Banning Religious Texts in Public Schools Violate the Establishment Clause?

An interesting case out of the 9th Circuit back in August, Nampa Classical Academy et al. v. Goesling (the panel consisting of Judges Reinhardt, W. Fletcher, and Rawlinson, who concurred only in the result), in which an Idaho Public School Commission adopted a policy banning  outright the use of public funds to purchase all “sectarian and denominational texts” for instructional use in public school classrooms.  Apparently there is a provision of the Idaho constitution which provides, in relevant part, as follows:

No sectarian or religious tenets or doctrines shall ever be taught in the public schools, nor shall any distinction or classification of pupils be made on account of race or color. No books, papers, tracts or documents of a political, sectarian or denominational character shall be used or introduced in any schools established under the provisions of this article, nor shall any teacher or any district receive any of the public school moneys in which the schools have not been taught in accordance with the provisions of this article.

The provision seems to me to be talking about proselytism in public schools; otherwise, it would really and truly mean that no “political” books or documents could be used in public school education, a rather perplexing position — ‘no U.S. Constitution in public schools!’  But I guess the Idaho school commission came up with a different interpretation.  There are speech claims and other standing issues involved here which knocked the case out, but what about the religion clause issue?  The policy may be rather knuckle-headed, but does it violate the Establishment Clause? 

ADDENDUM: I suppose somebody might think that including religious texts as part of secular instruction would itself violate the Establishment Clause.  Indeed, it appears that the district court thought this very thing: “If the Defendants allowed the Plaintiffs’ proposed curriculum, they would be in violation of the Establishment Clause.”  Nampa Classical Academy v. Goesling, 714 F. Supp. 2d 1079, 1093 (D. Idaho 2010).  That a school commission or school district would think this is regrettable, but these are not legal bodies and so the misunderstanding is not too surprising.  But that a district court could be this completely wrong about the law is mystifying.  In no way is it improper for a public school to include religious texts in the regular curriculum.  That’s been true historically since the founding of the country, and it was stated explicitly in Abington v. Schempp by Justice Clark.  What a strange mistake.

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Hart on the Future of Religion in America

A very rich essay by the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in The New Criterion.  Some of the reflections on the differences between the United States and France are well worth thinking about, but do read the whole thing.  Here’s a bit:

A civilization’s values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendental desires, and a people’s greatest collective achievements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order. This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but only because the gods have first called out to mortals. There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elements. They disclose their unseen world by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privileged places where divine and human gazes briefly meet.

Such places, moreover, are only the most concentrated crystallizations of a culture’s highest visions of the good, true, and beautiful; they are not isolated retreats, set apart from the society around them, but are rather the most intense expressions of that society’s rational and poetic capacities. And it is under the shelter of the heavens made visible in such places that all of a people’s laws and institutions, admirable or defective, take shape, as well as all its arts, civic or private, sacred or profane, festal or ordinary. This is a claim not about private beliefs, or about the particular motives that may have led to any particular law or work of art, but about the conceptual and aesthetic resources that any culture can possess or impart, and those are determined by religious traditions—by shared pictures of eternity, shared stories of the absolute. That is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless.

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Same Name, Different Case

American law and religion scholars know the case of St. Nicholas Cathedral, a Supreme Court decision from the 1950s, about which Rick Garnett has  written recently. Briefly, the case involved a dispute over a Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York between two parish councils, one loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate and the other loyal to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), a group that broke away from the Communist-dominated Patriarchate in the twentieth century. It turns out that a similar dispute has been making its way through the French courts. Since the fall of Communism, the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR have reestablished communion, and the Patriarchate has been reasserting its right to church properties around the world, including St. Nicholas Cathedral in Nice (above), an impressive, onion-domed structure, reputedly the largest Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe. The local parish council objected to returning St. Nicholas to Moscow and a six-year legal battle ensued. The battle ended last week, when the local council sadly turned over the keys to the Patriarch’s representative. The story is here, from a local paper (in French).

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Lemert, “Why Niebuhr Matters”

From Charles Lemert (Wesleyan/Yale), an overview of the career of 20th Century Protestant  theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, Why Niebuhr Matters (Yale 2011). Niebuhr has been much in the news lately as the inspiration for liberal realism in contemporary American politics; Barack Obama, among others, has acknowledged his debt to him. Niebuhr has also been the subject of other recent books, including one CLR Forum has noted. The publisher’s description follows.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) was a Protestant preacher, an influential religious thinker, and an important moral guide in mid-twentieth-century America. But what does he have to say to us now? In what way does he inform the thinking of political leaders and commentators from Barack Obama and Madeleine Albright to David Brooks and Walter Russell Mead, all of whom acknowledge his influence? In this lively overview of Niebuhr’s career, Charles Lemert analyzes why interest in Niebuhr is rising and how Niebuhr provides the answers we ache for in the face of seismic shifts in the global order.

In the middle of the twentieth century, having outgrown a theological liberalism, Niebuhr challenged and rethought the nonsocialist Left in American politics. He developed a political realism that refused to sacrifice ideals to mere pragmatism, or politics to bitterness and greed. He examined the problem of morality in an immoral society and reimagined the balance between rights and freedom for the individual and social justice for the many. With brevity and deep insight, Lemert shows how Niebuhr’s ideas illuminate our most difficult questions today.