Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Hedstrom, “The Rise of Liberal Religion”

This one looks like an absolute must-read — a fascinating and innovative thesis related to the phenomenon of civil religion in America (brought to prominence by Bellah).  The claim is that beginning in the 1920s, religious institutions and leaders joined forces with book publishers to forge a kind of national “spiritual unity” loosely connected with mainline Protestantism but also to emerging themes in psychology and other modern developments.   

The book is The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (OUP 2012) by Matthew S. Hedstrom (UVA).  The publisher’s description follows.

In The Rise of Liberal Religion Matthew Hedstrom tells the story of how, beginning in the 1920s, American religious leaders joined forces with the publishing industry in an attempt to form a ”spiritual center”–a set of widely accepted religious ideas, practices, and presuppositions that would hold together a fragmenting society, create new markets for books, and maintain the privileged status of these arbiters in American religious discourse. The consensus they sought to form was essentially a liberal Protestant one, but with elements of mysticism and psychology drawn in from the margins. With the coming of World War II, however, political leaders declared “books as weapons in the war of ideas,” and the National Conference of Christians and Jews became the central broker of religious reading, coordinating a massive, nationwide Religious Book Week campaign that ran from 1943 to 1948. Spiritual unity was seen not simply as morally desirable for individuals but as essential to national survival. The idea of a religious center expanded to include, however tenuously, Jews and Roman Catholics and the term “Judeo-Christian” entered the national vocabulary. These developments laid the foundation for a culture of spiritual seeking that had lasting implications for middle-class American religious beliefs and practices for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. 

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Wiggins, “American Saint”

Here is a very interesting and comprehensive biography on an important but largely unknown figure in early American religious history, Francis Asbury.  The book is American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (OUP 2012) by John Wigger (Missouri).  The publisher’s description follows.

English-born Francis Asbury was one of the most important religious leaders in American history. Asbury single-handedly guided the creation of the American Methodist church, which became the largest Protestant denomination in nineteenth-century America, and laid the foundation of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements that flourish today. In American Saint, John Wigger has written the definitive biography of Asbury and, by extension, a revealing interpretation of the early years of the Methodist movement in America. Asbury emerges here as not merely an influential religious leader, but a fascinating character, who lived an extraordinary life. His cultural sensitivity was matched only by his ability to organize. His life of prayer and voluntary poverty were legendary, as was his generosity to the poor. He had a remarkable ability to connect with ordinary people, and he met with thousands of them as he crisscrossed the nation, riding more than one hundred and thirty thousand miles between his arrival in America in 1771 and his death in 1816. Indeed Wigger notes that Asbury was more recognized face-to-face than any other American of his day, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Justice Pierce Butler’s Catholicism

Over at Concurring Opinions, Gerard Magliocca has an interesting post on how Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler’s Catholicism may have influenced his dissent in Buck v. Bell, the famous 1927 case upholding sterilization of the mentally handicapped. Apparently Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the majority opinion in the case (“Three generations of imbeciles are enough”), thought Catholicism did influence Butler’s vote. Check it out.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

More on Syria’s Christians

As I wrote here last fall, Syria’s Christians have shown a lot of ambivalence about the civil war taking place in their country. Assad runs a police state, but his secular government protects Christians, who make up about 10% 0f the population, allowing them churches, schools, and community centers. When Syria’s Christians consider the persecution of Iraqi Christians that followed the fall of Saddam, and the persecution of Coptic Christians that followed the fall of Mubarak, they wonder what a “democratic” government in Syria would do for them. Not without reason, they worry that the Sunni opposition, if it ever gained power, would be less concerned with their human rights than the Ba’ath Party.

Two recent articles provide some background on the situation. The first is an essay in the New York Times by Clark University historian Taner Akcam, whose recent book I noted here.  Akcam writes that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recip Erdogan has been speaking a lot lately about the need to protect human rights in Syria. Erdogan’s statements are unlikely to reassure Syrian Christians, Akcam Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 15 Comments

Giving Credit Where it is Due

David Orentlicher, a law professor (Indiana), poses the following hypothetical over at The Faculty Lounge with respect to President Obama’s recent statement that business owners do not achieve their successes on their own.  I am far less interested in the President’s original statement, its context, and so on, than in the religious analogy offered by Professor Orentlicher (this is CLR Forum, after all):

[C]onsider how the critics would respond to a somewhat different phrasing that probably has been expressed by other elected officials and perhaps Obama as well.

Suppose a candidate said that entrepreneurs don’t achieve their successes on their own but benefit from the good grace of God. Would business owners be offended by the suggestion that their achievements are the result of more than their own inventiveness, resourcefulness and hard work? I’ve always appreciated the fact that a Sabbath day of rest reminds us that the world goes on even when we are not working, that we are not responsible for all the good that comes to us.

To be sure, there are two parts to the critique of Obama. On one hand, it is said, he doesn’t give sufficient credit to creators of companies. On the other hand, he gives too much credit to government. My alternative phrasing gives credit to God rather than government, and many business owners may feel that they get more help from God than they do from government. Indeed, they may see government as more of a hindrance than a helper. But it’s worth remembering that God can put us through tribulations too, as America’s farmers are finding this year.

I find the hypothetical fascinating not so much on the substance, but for what it says about the world view that would see an equivalence between the two scenarios.  Many people might not see an equivalence between giving credit for their successes to God, on the one hand, and to the government, on the other, because they believe that God is God, while the government is not God.  To believe this, one need not be inherently suspicious of government, or believe that government is a force for evil, or any such nonsense.  One might merely think that, notwithstanding one’s own disagreements with it, the government is as a general matter composed of well-meaning people who try to do their best by their lights but who, like the rest of us (and unlike God), can and often do get things wrong.    Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Eleventh Circuit: No Free Exercise Right to Cling to Your Guns and Religion

It can’t possibly top Mark’s Pussy Riot post, but here’s an unusual case out of the Eleventh Circuit.  In 2010, the state of Georgia passed a statute prohibiting the carrying of weapons or “long guns” in certain public venues.  One of these eight designated locations in this Carry Law was a “place of worship.”  Two individual plaintiffs claim that they “regularly attend religious services, possess a weapons carry license, and ‘would like to carry a handgun’ while in a place of worship.”  The complaint alleges violations of the Free Exercise Clause and the Second Amendment.

The Eleventh Circuit tossed the case.  “The Supreme Court has reiterated time and time again that personal preferences and secular beliefs do not warrant the protection of the Free Exercise Clause,” it said.  The Court held that it had searched the complaint for any allegation that the Carry Law violated a sincerely held religious belief of the plaintiffs, but to no avail.  “That Plaintiffs ‘would like’ to carry a firearm in order to be able to act in ‘self-defense’ is a personal preference, motivated by a secular purpose . . . . [T]here is no First Amendment protection for personal preferences; nor is there protection for secular beliefs.”

The Second Amendment claim was also dismissed.  The case is Georgiacarry.org, Inc. v. Georgia, 2012 WL 2947817 (11th Cir. July 20, 2012).

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“Pussy Riot,” Russian Feminist Punk Band, to Remain in Jail

I don’t know how many CLR Forum readers are following this story, but it’s a major news item in Russia and has drawn attention in the international human rights community as well. Last February, in a protest against Vladimir Putin, a Russian feminist punk band called “Pussy Riot” (above) stormed the altar at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and performed performed a”punk prayer” called “Mother of God, Cast Putin Out.” You can find the video on the internet; it’s pretty juvenile. Authorities arrested three members of the band for the crime of “hooliganism,” which carries a sentence of seven  years. They have been in jail since March. A Russian court today extended their pretrial detention for another six months, to January 2013. The imprisonment and prosecution has become a cause célèbre in Russia, pitting the Orthodox Church hierarchy, which resents the cathedral protest as a sacrilege, against liberals, who resent the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin and see the threatened punishment as arbitrary and extreme. Amnesty International has declared the members of Pussy Riot “prisoners of conscience.” Russians themselves are divided about the case. In a recent poll of Muscovites, half said they opposed the prosecution, but 36% approved.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 3 Comments

The Anti-Separationism of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

This is a very interesting column by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan which expresses succinctly her particular brand of anti-separationism with respect to the proper relationship of church and state.  The column is rich with insights and repays close reading, even though I am in substantial disagreement with at least some parts of it.  Specifically, I am far less skeptical than she is that certain (though not all) older understandings of separationism remain vitally important, and far less sanguine that doing away with those older understandings would be a healthy legal or political development, either for the sex abuse crisis that she describes or for many other controversies.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Walsh on Strossen on RFRA and Compelled Provision of Contraceptive Services

Over at our friend and former guest Kevin Walsh’s blog, one can see an absolutely extraordinary quote from ACLU president Nadine Strossen in the 1992 legislative history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, condemning Employment Division v. Smith for, in part, leading to a situation in which religious hospitals would be compelled “to provide abortion and contraceptive services.”

Take a look.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Finnis on the Philosophy of Law and the Relevance of “Common Custom”

This is a short and highly accessible essay by the eminent John Finnis entitled, “What is the Philosophy of Law?”  Readers of CLR Forum will know that Finnis is the author of one of the most important books of jurisprudence of the last century, Natural Law and Natural Rights, which represents the keystone in the revival of natural law thought in contemporary times. 

In this short piece, Finnis explains in summary form what the philosophy of law (or jurisprudence — he believes the terms are synonymous, for reasons he discusses) is and what its tasks are to be.    Why is this relevant to religion?  Well, grossly oversimplifying (and I mean really grossly and highly incompletely), though it does not appear in this essay, one of the basic common goods described by Finnis in NLNR (see pp. 89-90 and 371-410) is the good of religion (obliquely adverted to in this essay at page 4 as one of the common goods “of other associations of society”).  And inasmuch as a society provides for freedom of religion, the philosophy of law “consider[s] precisely how far choices made today for one’s political community should be determined or shaped by choices made in the past, in the form of contracts, wills, constitutions, legislative enactments, customs, judicial decisions, and the like.”

Two little noteworthy items in Finnis’s new piece.  First, Finnis gives a very clear and easily digested explanation for why the statement “an unjust law is no law” is true (he has done this before, and this essay does it succinctly).  Again, I am oversimplifying, but the criticism has been: well of course an unjust law is a law — in fact, whether a law is really a law has nothing to do with its morality or ultimate justice.  Finnis says:

Natural law theory has no quarrel with – indeed, promotes – a distinction or bifurcation between intra-systemic [legal] validity (and obligatoriness) and legal validity (and obligatoriness) in the moral sense.  Indeed, it is not unreasonable to see such a distinction at work in the famous tag — “An unjust law is not a law.”  Such a way of speaking is not self-contradictory, paradoxical, or even remarkable: “an insincere friend is not a friend”; “a logically invalid argument is no argument”; “a quack medicine is no medicine”… So too in the famous tag or theorem: “unjust law” (lex iniusta) here refers to an intra-systemically valid legal rule or order, and “not law” (non lex) signifies that, moral limits having been transgressed, this same law lacks validity (as law) in the moral sense (i.e., legitimacy) and thus, as such, lacks moral obligatoriness.  (8-9) (footnotes omitted)

The second item to note is the conclusion, in which Finnis is discussing the philosophy of law’s tasks and its future.  I was especially struck by Finnis’s emphasis of the importance of “common custom” in maintaining a healthy legal system. 

Read more