Next Monday, December 17, the Brookings Institution will host a conference, “Four More Years for the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships,” in Washington, DC. Speakers will include Joshua DuBois, the office’s current executive director, and other Obama Administration officials. Panels will be moderated by E.J. Dionne and Melissa Rogers. Details are here.
Politics and Religious Freedom Theory
In a forthcoming book, which has already transformed the field and is available for preorder now, Marc DeGirolami divides theoretical work on religious freedom into three schools or camps: monist, pluralist, and skeptical. That typology is accepted by many scholars. Monists are thought to believe that law in the area can be attractively explained by a single value or principle, pluralists are seen to argue that only multiple concerns can account for the full range of religious freedom outcomes, and skeptics reportedly contend that a coherent theory of religious freedom doctrine is impossible. DeGirolami takes a new cut at this typology, noticing that some writers approach the task with a sense of tragedy, whereas others have a more sanguine disposition.
Here, I want to explore a different feature of this threefold scheme—its intersection with politics. A notable feature of the typology is that it has been understood to cut across political affiliations. (When I use the term politics here, I mean to refer to the recognized affinities that characterize wider policy conversations nationally.) Each of the three schools has been thought to contain both political liberals and political conservatives. Often, methodology and party politics have intersected in unusual and interesting ways, on this way of thinking. Monism is perhaps the least politically diverse, but if Justice Scalia counts as a member of that school, then it too spans the aisle.
Two questions come to mind about this familiar understanding of the interactions between methodology and politics among religious freedom theorists. First, has this conceptualization of the field ever been correct? Has the role of politics been as complicated and unpredictable as it suggests?
If it has captured a measure of the truth, a second question is whether it still usefully describes the literature, or whether we are witnessing a realignment. Certain debates have moved to the foreground — such as the conversation over whether religion deserves special constitutional protection as compared to deep secular commitments of conscience — and positions within those debates do not seem to be easily captured by the old typology. Yet those positions do seem to track wider political affinities more readily than did the customary choice among monism, pluralism, and skepticism. For example, liberals tend to think that religion is not special, conservatives usually argue that it is, and moderates believe that it only sometimes should be protected like secular conscience. Does this shift, if it is happening at all, suggest a different kind or degree of politicization within the field of religious freedom theory? Is any such shift clarifying or obfuscatory?
Sowerby, “Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution”
Speaking of the use of religious convictions in the construction of political 
arguments, here is a very interesting book in the history of ideas involving the concept of toleration in the era of James II before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Act of Toleration of 1689 — Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, by Scott Sowerby (Northwestern), available in early 2013 from Harvard University Press. The publisher’s description follows.
In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment.
Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby’s groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II’s reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.
If the Answer is “More Religious Freedom,” What Is the Question?
This was, I thought, an illuminating column by Frank Bruni. Bruni uses the regrettable episode of the U.S. Military Academy cadet who was allegedly harassed because of his atheism (discussed here by Mark) as the occasion for offering some larger reflections about the nature of “religious freedom” (his phrase) in America. Bruni observes that “We Americans” are not “careful” about drawing a “line” between church and state. After all, “[r]eligious faith shapes policy debates. It fuels claims of American exceptionalism.” “We have God on our dollars,” Bruni continues, “God in our pledge of allegiance, God in our Congress,” “God in our public schools,” and, of course, God in our national motto. “Last year, the House took the time to vote, 396 to 9, in favor of a resolution affirming “In God We Trust” as our national motto. How utterly needless, unless I missed some insurrectionist initiative to have that motto changed to ‘Buck Up, Beelzebub’ or ‘Surrender Dorothy.'” Add to this that “there’s too little acknowledgment that God isn’t just a potent engine of altruism, mercy and solace, but also, in instances, a divisive, repressive instrument[.]”
Bruni concludes with the view that all of this — this composite of inclusion of religion in public life (more precisely, of God in public life), most of which is, he believes, unhealthy for the country — “doesn’t sound like religious freedom at all.”
That’s the particular point that I find both problematic and illuminating. The problem is that describing what sits at the root of Bruni’s complaints as an absence of “religious freedom” doesn’t really work. For one might have thought that permitting people to voice religious reasons for their public policy and political beliefs was part of religious freedom. One might even believe that retaining God as a part of the public life of the country — manifested in some of the ways that displease Bruni — is also a feature of religious freedom. Bruni is absolutely right that “We Americans” have not drawn hard lines between religion and government. That is certainly true historically. Part of the reason may be that we have not been sufficiently attentive to religious freedom; but another fairly substantial part of the reason not to draw such lines is precisely to protect religious freedom.
So talk of religious freedom and its absence is not really the issue. What Bruni really means is that (1) he disagrees with the policy positions staked out by those who tend to use religious arguments in public contexts, including in the gay marriage context that he raises, and that (2) he dislikes the invocation of God — whose evil works are, “in instances,” as copious as His good ones — in public life generally and wishes that it would end. That’s not an uncommon view. But it would be more straightforward — and much simpler — if Bruni just said as much, without the confusing rhetoric about the demands of “religious freedom.” Even in the separationist era of the mid-20th century, religious freedom, at least as practiced in this country and as constitutionally protected, has not generally been about drawing the kinds of lines that Bruni favors.
The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time
There are many reasons why America seems to be moving inexorably toward legalizing same-sex marriage. The Sexual Revolution that has swept American society since the 1960s is probably the main explanation. There’s plenty of evidence that Americans, especially Americans below a certain age, accept the Sexual Revolution’s basic premise that sex is a harmless pleasure without much moral content, at least when it does not involve coercion or, sometimes, adultery. Divorce, once seen as a traumatic, though perhaps necessary, last resort for very troubled marriages is no longer regarded as an exceptional event. People speak without irony of “starter marriages;” fewer and fewer people marry at all. And these cultural changes are not limited to the Secular Left. An Evangelical pundit got in trouble recently because, he said, he didn’t realize that being engaged to one woman while simultaneously being married to another was frowned upon in Christian circles.
Given their views about sexuality and marriage, SSM seems to many Americans a non-issue. But there is something else at work, too. Much of the success of the campaign for SSM has to do with supporters’ adoption of the language of civil rights. In our national discourse, the phrase “civil rights issue of our time” immediately suggests SSM; last week’s NYT editorial is a good example. As a rhetorical device – and I don’t mean to suggest that SSM advocates are being insincere – this is a brilliant strategy. In American politics, a group that can successfully appropriate the language of civil rights is bound to win.
That’s why I was struck recently when I saw that Rick Warren, perhaps the most influential Evangelical pastor in America today, has adopted this language on behalf of conservative Christians. In an interview about the ACA’s Contraception Mandate, Warren called religious liberty “the civil rights issue of the next decade.” He was echoing, among others, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has also emphasized the civil rights aspect of resistance to the mandate. This is a very shrewd rhetorical move – and, again, I don’t mean to suggest anyone is being insincere. If religious conservatives are going to prevail on issues like the Contraception Mandate, they can’t hope to persuade people on the merits of traditional sexual morality, much of which the American public now finds incomprehensible. They will have to persuade people that they represent the advance of civil rights.
Danforth Center Dissertation-Completion Fellowship in Religion and Politics
Here is a very useful Religion and Politics Dissertation Fellowship for those who are completing their dissertation in a field related to law and religion, courtesy of the Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis and our friend John Inazu.
Conference: Christianity and Freedom
Georgetown’s Berkley Center will host a conference, “Christianity and Freedom: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” this Friday, December 14, in Washington, DC. RSVP is required; details are here.
O’Malley, “Trent: What Happened at the Council”
The Counter-Reformation Council of Trent (1545-1563) had a major 
impact on the canons of the Catholic Church, including regulations concerning marriage and papal authority. This week, Harvard University Press is releasing a new study of the council by Georgetown University Professor John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (2013). The publisher’s description follows:
The Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church’s attempt to put its house in order in response to the Protestant Reformation, has long been praised and blamed for things it never did. Now, in this first full one-volume history in modern times, John W. O’Malley brings to life the volatile issues that pushed several Holy Roman emperors, kings and queens of France, and five popes—and all of Europe with them—repeatedly to the brink of disaster.
During the council’s eighteen years, war and threat of war among the key players, as well as the Ottoman Turks’ onslaught against Christendom, turned the council into a perilous enterprise. Its leaders declined to make a pronouncement on war against infidels, but Trent’s most glaring and ironic silence was on the authority of the papacy itself. The popes, who reigned as Italian monarchs while serving as pastors, did everything in their power to keep papal reform out of the council’s hands—and their power was considerable. O’Malley shows how the council pursued its contentious parallel agenda of reforming the Church while simultaneously asserting Catholic doctrine.
Like What Happened at Vatican II, O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council strips mythology from historical truth while providing a clear, concise, and fascinating account of a pivotal episode in Church history. In celebration of the 450th anniversary of the council’s closing, it sets the record straight about the much misunderstood failures and achievements of this critical moment in European history.
Mead on the “Christian Taliban” at West Point
At the always valuable Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead has an interesting post concerning last week’s allegations by a former cadet that a “Christian Taliban” harasses non-believers at the US Military Academy. Mead is skeptical it’s as bad as the former cadet says and argues that Christianity in the military is a good thing. Nonetheless, he says, it’s important to strike a balance between the rights of believers and non-believers and he suggests that West Point review the situation. Serious Christians know, he writes, that their faith requires them to show “respect, fairness, and friendship for those outside the fold.”
Boubekeur & Roy, “Whatever Happened to the Islamists?”
This fall, Columbia University Press published a new book by Amel Boubekeur of the Center for European Policy Studies and Olivier Roy of the European University Institute, Whatever Happened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam. The publisher’s description follows:
Islamism and political Islam might seem like contemporary phenomena, but the roots of both movements can be traced back more than a century. Nevertheless, the utopian beliefs of Islamism have been irrevocably changed by the processes of modernization, especially globalization, which have taken the philosophy in unmistakable new directions.
Through meticulous theoretical and ethnographic research, this collection maps the movements of current and former Islamists to determine what has become of political Islam. Islam continues to be Read more