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Houge, “Stumping God: Reagan, Carter, and the Invention of Political Faith”

This August, Baylor University Press published Stumping God: Reagan, Carter, and the Invention of Political Faith by Andrew P. Houge (Baylor University). The publisher’s description follows.

For more than three decades, American presidential candidates have desperately sought the conservative Evangelical vote. With an ever broadening base of support, the Evangelical movement in America may now seem to many a very powerful lobbyist on Capitol Hill. As Andrew Hogue shows, however, this was not always the case.

In Stumping God Hogue deconstructs the 1980 presidential election, in which Ronald Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter and John B. Anderson, and uncovers a disproportionately heavy reliance on religious rhetoric—a rhetoric that would be the catalyst for a new era of presidential politics. Until 1980, the idea that conservative politics was somehow connected with conservative theology was distant from the American imagination. Hogue describes the varying streams of influence that finally converged by the Reagan-Carter election, including the rapidly rising Religious Right. By 1980, candidates were not only challenged to appeal rhetorically to a conservative religious base, but found it necessary to make public their once-private religious commitments.

In compelling and illuminating fashion, Stumping God explains the roots of modern religious politics and encourages readers to move beyond the haze of rhetorical appeals that—for better or worse—continually clouds the political process.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 6 Comments

Does the Name “Theophilus” Violate the Establishment Clause?

The name, Theophilus, means “Lover of God.”  And various important persons have been named Theophilus: Saint Theophilus of Antioch, Theophilus Parsons (about whom our friend Don Drakeman wrote), and the Romantic poet Théophile Gautier are three that come immediately to mind.  [UPDATE: Mark reminds me that the Gospel of Luke is addressed to someone named Theophilus: “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word, It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, That thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed.”  Luke 1:1-4.] 

I was thinking of all of these theo-philes as I perused a recent decision by a Richmond County judge here in New York, in which the court denied a petition by a family which wanted to change its last name from Nwadiuko to ChristIsKing (a few years back, the father’s petition to change his son’s name to JesusIsLord had also been denied but it seems was later accepted; something similar happened with the father’s petition to change his daughter’s name to Rejoice).

The judge in this case denied the application for the reason that he believed it would violate the Establishment Clause. 

To permit this name change would be placing unwitting members of the public including public servants in the position of having to proclaim petitioners’ religious beliefs which may or may not be in agreement with that person’s own equally strongly held but different beliefs.

For instance, a calendar call in the courthouse would require the clerk to shout out “JesusIsLord ChristIsKing” or “Rejoice ChristIsKing.” Other litigants would not necessarily know whether the clerk was reading the calendar or making some religious statement in violation of the separation of church and state. A similar situation would occur in the classroom setting. Not only is the speaker being forced to say something which might be repugnant to the speaker but the general public would be subjected to this unwanted intrusion of the petitioners’ religious beliefs. What would be people’s reaction to hear the petitioners’ being paged at an airport or some other public event?

But how was this a violation of the Establishment Clause?  The court relied on the “inoffensiveness” test (the court may be forgiven for rechristening the endorsement test), citing to McCreary County v. ACLU, as well as to several other Establishment Clause cases, for the proposition that “permitting the petitioners to use the statutory process to effectuate a name change would involve the same prohibited entanglement especially because they could avoid the potentially offensive conduct by employing the equally available legally recognized common law right to achieve that purpose.”

The court also purported to distinguish first names like Jesus because such names do not state a contestable, and therefore offensive, religious proposition:

A review of those names however, reveals a significant difference between their origin and what the petitioners’ are advocating. Almost all of these names, most of which have “El or el” in them, a word which in Hebrew refers to “God,”or contain words that are accepted as the equivalent of “God” and both of which are modified by other words which describe what are accepted as the attributes of “God.” Just about every culture throughout history has had some concept of “God” or “gods.” What petitioners are advocating is a name that is a statement that a particular person is “Lord” or is the “King.” This is a position which is not only offensive to persons who are not Christians but also to those who look to God a being gender neutral and not a male figure.

Frankly, this reasoning is rather odd.  Why should the offensiveness to those who believe that God is gender neutral be a special concern of the Establishment Clause?  What is the distinction between calling someone God, or lover of God, or “bearer of Christ” (which is the meaning of Christopher) and calling them JesusIsLord?  Are not both contestable and possibly offensive propositions?  And is it really true that people would be offended as a matter of gender neutrality because somebody decided to call himself “JesusIsLord”? (I am reminded of Judge Posner’s cogent criticism that this whole area is bespattered with the random armchair empirical guesswork of judges who know next to nothing about what people actually find offensive).

It may well be that government ought to deny petitions like this — in fact, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do so in certain circumstances that have absolutely nothing to do with the Establishment Clause.  Not everything that is silly and therefore eminently regulable needs to be unconstitutional too.  If there is a common law right to change your name, and the court does not wish to issue a judicial order with respect to the name change, then that ought to be sufficient to dispose of the case.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 2 Comments

Panel: Careers in Law and Religion

CLR will host a panel, “Careers in Law and Religion,” at the Law School on Tuesday, October 23, from 5:30-7:30 pm. The panel, which is co-sponsored by the St. John’s Career Development Office, will bring together lawyers from a variety of practices — government, firms, NGOs, and religious tribunals — to discuss how their work implicates the growing field of law religion. Panelists include Elizabeth Cassidy (US Commission on International Religious Freedom), Peter Johnson, Jr. (Leahey & Johnson), Maureen Liccione (Jaspan Schlesinger), Keith Sharfman (St. John’s), Amardeep Singh (Sikh Coalition), and Diana Verm (Becket Fund). Details are here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Lecture: The Arab Spring and International Law

Fordham’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work will host a lecture, “The Arab Spring: Its Impact on International Politics, International Law, International Organizations,” on Thursday, November 1. The speaker will be Yassin El-Ayouty, who teaches Islamic Law at Fordham. Details are here.

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Ben-Porat, “Between State and Synagogue”

This December, Cambridge University Press will publish Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel by Guy Ben-Porat (Ben-Gurion University). The publisher’s description follows.

A thriving, yet small, liberal component in Israeli society has frequently taken issue with the constraints imposed by religious orthodoxy, largely with limited success. However, Guy Ben-Porat suggests, in recent years, in part because of demographic changes and in part because of the influence of an increasingly consumer-oriented society, dramatic changes have occurred in secularization of significant parts of public and private lives. Even though these fissures often have more to do with lifestyle choices and economics than with political or religious ideology, the demands and choices of a secular public and a burgeoning religious presence in the government are becoming ever more difficult to reconcile. The evidence, which the author has accrued from numerous interviews and a detailed survey, is nowhere more telling than in areas that demand religious sanction such as marriage, burial, the sale of pork, and the operation of businesses on the Sabbath.

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Corbin on the Contraception Mandate

Caroline Mala Corbin (University of Miami School of Law) has posted The Contraception Mandate. The abstract follows.

Under the new health care regime, health insurance plans must cover contraception. While religious employers are exempt from this requirement, religiously affiliated employers are not. Several have sued, claiming that the “contraception mandate” violates the Free Exercise Clause, the Free Speech Clause, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This essay explains why the contraception mandate violates none of them.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: “Whose God Rules?”

This Friday, Harvard Law School will host a panel on “Whose God Rules?”, a recent book that outlines a new “theolegal” theory of American government. The description follows. Details for the panel are here.

Is the United States a secular nation or a theolegal democracy? The theolegal theory describes a political system that allows public officials to use theology in its democratic process to shape law without instituting an official state religion. Join co-editors of the new book “Whose God Rules?” (Palgrave Macmillan) for a review of how preeminent scholars debate theology theory, which describes the gray area between a secular legal system, where theology is dismissed as irrational and a threat to the separation of religion and state, and a theocracy, where a single religion determines all law. The United States is neither a secular nation nor a theocracy, leading scholars to ask whether the United States is a theolegal democracy. If so, whose God rules?

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Diouf (ed.), “Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal”

In January, Columbia University Press will publish Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal edited by Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University).  The publisher’s description follows.

This collection critically examines “tolerance,” “secularism,” and respect for religious “diversity” within a social and political system dominated by Sufi brotherhoods. Through a detailed analysis of Senegal’s political economy, essays trace the genealogy and dynamic exchange among these concepts while investigating public spaces and political processes and their reciprocal engagement with the state, Sunni reformist and radical groups, and non-religious organizations.

Through a rich and nuanced historical ethnography of the formation of Senegalese democracy, this anthology illuminates the complex trajectory of the Senegalese state and its reflection of similar postcolonial societies. Offering rare perspectives on the country’s “successes” since liberation, this collection identifies the role of religion, gender, culture, ethnicity, globalization, politics, and migration in the reconfiguration of the state and society, and it makes an important contribution to democratization theory, Islamic studies, and African studies. Scholars of comparative politics and religious studies will also appreciate the volume’s treatment of Senegal as both an exceptional and universal example of postcolonial development.

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Sherwood, “Biblical Blaspheming”

Last month, Cambridge University Press published Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for the Secular Age by Yvonne Sherwood (University of Glasgow).  The publisher’s description follows.

This book explores the strange persistence of ‘blasphemy’ in modern secular democracies by examining how accepted and prohibited ways of talking and thinking about the Bible and religion have changed over time. In a series of wide-ranging studies engaging disciplines such as politics, literature and visual theory, Yvonne Sherwood brings the Bible into dialogue with a host of interlocutors including John Locke, John Donne and the 9/11 hijackers, as well as artists such as Sarah Lucas and René Magritte. Questions addressed include:  What is the origin of the common belief that the Bible, as opposed to the Qur’an, underpins liberal democratic values?  What kind of artworks does the biblical God specialise in?  If pre-modern Jewish, Christian and Islamic responses to scripture can be more ‘critical’ than contemporary speech about religion, how does this affect our understanding of secularity, modernity and critique?

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O’Brien & Koons on A Hylomorphic Critique of the New Natural Law Theory

Matthew B. O’Brien (Rutgers U.) and Robert C. Koons (U. of Texas, Austin) have posted Objects of Intention: A Hylomorphic Critique of the New Natural Law Theory. The abstract follows.

The “New Natural Law” Theory (NNL) of Grisez, Finnis, Boyle, and their collaborators offers a distinctive account of intentional action, which underlies a moral theory that aims to justify many aspects of traditional morality and Catholic doctrine. In fact, we show that the NNL is committed to premises that entail the permissibility of many actions that are irreconcilable with traditional morality and Catholic doctrine, such as elective abortions. These consequences follow principally from the NNL’s planning theory of intention coupled with an implicitly Cartesian conception of human behavior, in which behavior chosen by an agent has no intrinsic “intentionalness” apart from what he confers upon it as part of his plan. Pace the NNL collaborators, we sketch an alternative hylomorphic conception of intentional action that avoids untoward moral implications by grounding human agency in the exercise of basic powers that are either essential to human nature or acquired through participation in social practices.