Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Liveblogging the Religion and Civil Society Conference: Glendon

I’m here today at this year’s Religion and Civil Society Conference, “The Changing Faces of ‘Religion’ and ‘Secularity,’” organized by the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra and hosted by Harvard Law School. This morning’s first speaker was Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon, who opened the conference by offering a helpful roadmap of the current social science literature regarding secularization.

Glendon argued against simplistic evaluations of religion’s place in civil society. Organized religion does seem to be in decline in the West, as the old secularization theory predicted, but there is also an upsurge in “political religion” in many parts of the world. She identified four new, competing “grand narratives” regarding secularization: (1) the “New Atheism” of writers like Hitchens, which celebrates the decline of religion; (2) the “Melancholy Secularism” of Habermas and Pera, which agrees that religion is in decline but views this as a sorry development that will lead to the abandonment of the Judeo-Christian values that support classical liberalism; (3) the “Cultural Secularism” associated with Charles Taylor, which describes, in a more or less detached way, a society in which religious belief is only one option among many;  and (4) the “Positive Secularism” of Pope Benedict XVI, which advocates state neutrality, not hostility, toward religion. Ironically, Glendon noted, this last version, championed by the Catholic Church today, shows more sympathy for the Enlightenment value of religious liberty than the New Atheism, which sees itself as the heir of the Enlightenment. She closed with some reflections on the role of social scientists in assessing the contemporary place of religion in society.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Fluhman, “‘A Peculiar People’: Anti-Mormomism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America”

An interesting work about nineteenth-century American religious and political history by J. Spencer Fluhman (BYU), “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press 2012).  The first major Supreme Court religion clause decision, Reynolds v. United States, was decided in 1878 and involved the prosecution of a member of the LDS Church for bigamy in what was then the Utah territory.  The publisher’s description follows.

Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, it does not specify what counts as a religion. From its founding in the 1830s, Mormonism, a homegrown American faith, drew thousands of converts but far more critics. In “A Peculiar People”, J. Spencer Fluhman offers a comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity in nineteenth-century America. He argues that understanding anti-Mormonism provides critical insight into the American psyche because Mormonism became a potent symbol around which ideas about religion and the state took shape.

Fluhman documents how Mormonism was defamed, with attacks often aimed at polygamy, and shows how the new faith supplied a social enemy for a public agitated by the popular press and wracked with social and economic instability. Taking the story to the turn of the century, Fluhman demonstrates how Mormonism’s own transformations, the result of both choice and outside force, sapped the strength of the worst anti-Mormon vitriol, triggering the acceptance of Utah into the Union in 1896 and also paving the way for the dramatic, yet still grudging, acceptance of Mormonism as an American religion.

Posted on by roncolombo

FDR’s D-Day Speech

Yesterday (June 6th) was the 68th Anniversary of the historic allied D-Day invasion of Normandy.

For a fascinating glimpse into how much has changed in the United States since that time (the course of but one lifetime), one can review FDR’s speech to the Nation given on June 6, 1944.

I have reprinted the speech in its entirety below.

Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Court Reinstates Disenrolled Cadet’s Establishment Clause Claim

A federal court has reinstated the Establishment Clause claim of a West Point cadet who was disenrolled for plagiarism and related honor code violations.  As part of the cadet’s punishment, he had been ordered by a panel to “stand with his body rigid in a military posture and to read aloud the ‘Cadet’s Prayer'”:

Oh God, our Father, Thou Searcher of human hearts, help us to draw near to Thee in sincerity and truth.  May our religion be filled with gladness and may our worship of Thee be natural . . . . Help us . . . in doing our duty to Thee[.]

The Secretary of the Army had dismissed the cadet’s Establishment Clause claim for lack of standing.  The court (DDC) disagreed and reinstated the claim, holding that the cadet had alleged an injury in fact.

The case is Spadone v. McHugh, 2012 WL 2017973 (D.D.C. June 6, 2012).

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Patrick on Theocratic Constitutionalism

Jeremy Patrick (University of Southern Queensland School of Law) has posted Religion and New Constitutions: Recent Trends of Harmony and Divergence. The abstract follows.

The explicit incorporation of Islamic principles in the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan has highlighted concern over the past decade that theocratic constitutionalism has become a rival to traditional liberal constitutionalism. Whereas liberal constitutionalism ascribes religion special value but places it in the sphere of the private through guarantees of religious freedom, equal protection of religion, and non-establishment, the emerging ideology of theocratic constitutionalism holds the potential to redefine all rights through the lens of a particular religion.

This Article is an empirical study of whether, and to what degree, liberal constitutionalism has been supplanted by theocratic constitutionalism. Every constitution enacted since the year 2000 has been examined, and its provisions relating to religion sorted into the following categories: Preambular, Ceremonial Deism, Established Religion, Freedom of Religion, Equal Protection of Religion, and (non-)Establishment Clause. Analysis of the prevalence of these categories in new constitutions demonstrates that most new constitutions display some evidence of both liberal and theocratic constitutionalism.

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Fox (ed.), “Religion, Politics, Society, and the State”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish Religion, Politics, Society, and the State (OUP 2012) edited by Jonathan Fox (Bar Ilan University). The publisher’s description follows.

Featuring contributions from renowned experts, Religion, Politics, Society, and the State provides a uniquely broad perspective on religion’s influence on politics, covering multiple countries in major regions. It shows how religion interacts with politics on many different levels, and that these influences can be divided into the influence of the state and the influence of society on politics.

Representing multiple disciplines, methodologies, and levels of analysis–including individual, social group, institutional, and state–the selections cover several countries in major world regions, including the United States, Israel, Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe. In addition, two chapters include information from the entire world.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Mt. Soledad Cross Case on Tomorrow’s Supreme Court Conference

One of the cases listed as on for tomorrow’s cert. petition conference is Mt. Soledad Memorial Ass’n v. Trunk, which asks the Court to overturn a  Ninth Circuit decision holding that display of a large cross as part of a war memorial violates the Establishment Clause.  See Trunk v. City of San Diego, 629 F.3d 1099 (9th Cir. 2011).  The opinion by Judge McKeown in that case was, in my opinion, truly exceptional — one of the finest decisions in its style of analysis on the issue of state-sponsored religious displays that I have come across — even if I have some disagreements about the holding and whether it successfully negotiates around Justice Kennedy’s plurality opinion in Salazar v. Buono. 

In a somewhat unexpected move (at least to me), the Solicitor General has joined the cert. petition, making it more likely that the Court might take the case.  More tomorrow.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Religion and the Wisconsin Recall

Here’s a very interesting analysis, written just before the results, of the religious cross-currents in yesterday’s Wisconsin recall attempt. The author, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, points out the divisions among and within Wisconsin’s religious communities, which, he says, reflect divisions in the electorate as a whole. For example, on the central issue in the recall attempt, the right of public sector unions to bargain collectively, the Catholic archbishop of Milwaukee wrote  a letter supporting collective bargaining rights, while the Catholic bishop of Madison wrote a letter stating that reasonable people could disagree on the matter. In the end, most Catholics supported Governor Scott Walker: exit polls had him winning the Catholic vote by 10 points. This could portend a shift in Wisconsin politics, where Catholics traditionally vote Democratic, in contrast to Dutch Reformed Protestants, who typically vote Republican. The article contains one great quote that has nothing to do with the recall attempt, but that is nonetheless reflective of the American penchant for non-sectarianism we have discussed elsewhere on CLR Forum. At his inaugural prayer breakfast, the Born-Again Christian Scott Walker declared, “The great creator, no matter who you worship, is the one from which our freedoms are derived, not the government.” Can’t get more American than that.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tomorrow at Harvard Law

I’ll be participating tomorrow in “The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity,” a conference taking place at Harvard Law School. The program is here. CLR Friends in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Seventh Circuit Says Hein Applies to State Funding Decisions

I posted about a Sixth Circuit case last week applying Hein‘s restrictive standing doctrine to dismiss an Establishment Clause challenge to a federal spending decision. Yesterday, the Seventh Circuit applied Hein to dismiss an Establishment Clause challenge to a state spending decision. An Illinois state agency had approved a $20,000 grant to a private organization, “Friends of the Cross,” to help restore the Bald Knob Cross, a local tourist attraction. Plaintiff brought suit, arguing that the grant failed the endorsement test, and claiming standing as an Illinois taxpayer.

The Seventh Circuit dismissed the challenge on standing grounds. Hein limited taxpayer standing to cases alleging specific legislative appropriations, not executive decisions, the court explained, and this limit applied to state as well as federal spending decisions. Here, the legislature had appropriated a $5 million lump sum for “member initiatives”; following Illinois tradition, a single legislator had requested that the executive direct part of the grant to the Friends, and the executive had complied.  Because the ultimate decision to fund the Friends had come from the executive branch, the court ruled, plaintiff lacked standing to challenge it under Hein. The case is Sherman v. Illinois, 2012 WL 1970592 (7th Cir. June 4, 2012).