Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Shortt, “Christianophobia”

“Christianophobia” is a relatively new word that refers to two fairly old, and distinct, phenomena. The first is the antipathy for traditional Christianity among cultural leaders in the West, especially Europe. This antipathy dates from the Enlightenment, but has gained strength in the last few decades. The second, and far more pressing, matter is the outright persecution of Christians in many other parts of the world.  Later this month, Eerdmans will release Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack, by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Shortt’s book focuses on the latter problem. Here’s the publisher’s description:

On October 29, 2005, three Indonesian schoolgirls were beheaded as they walked to school — targeted because they were Christian. Like them, many Christians around the world suffer violence or discrimination for their faith. In fact, more Christians than people of any other faith group now live under threat. Why is this religious persecution so widely ignored?

In Christianophobia Rupert Shortt investigates the shocking treatment of Christians on several continents and exposes the extent of official collusion. Christian believers generally don’t become radicalized but tend to resist nonviolently and keep a low profile, which has enabled politicians and the media to play down a problem of huge dimensions. The book is replete with relevant historical background to place events within their appropriate political and social context.

Shortt demonstrates how freedom of belief is the canary in the mine for freedom in general. Published at a time when the fundamental importance of faith on the world stage is being recognized more than ever, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in people’s right to religious freedom, no matter where, or among whom, they live.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Inazu, “Freedom of the Church (New Revised Standard Version)”

Have a look at our friend John Inazu’s insightful new piece, Freedom of the Church (New Revised Standard Version).  A methodological theme in John’s writing is the importance of excavating the theological assumptions which lie below many of our current legal doctrines and theories, particularly (though not exclusively) in the law and religion context.  This piece pursues the Inazian (I would have said Inatian, but that’s perhaps too close to Ignatian) theme with respect to Catholic and Protestant ideas about ecclesiastical liberty.  Here is the abstract:

Significant discussion about the “freedom of church” has recently emerged at the intersection of law and religion scholarship and political theology. That discussion gained additional traction with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hosanna-Tabor v. E.E.O.C., which recognized the First Amendment’s “special solicitude” for religious organizations. But the freedom of the church is at its core a theological concept, and its potential integration into our constitutional discourse requires a process of translation. The efficacy of any background political concept as legal doctrine will ultimately stand or fall on something akin to what Frederick Schauer has called “constitutional salience.”

The existing debate over the freedom of the church obscures these insights in two ways. First, its back-and-forth nature suggests that translation succeeds or fails on the level of individual arguments. Second, its current focus on a mostly Catholic argument neglects other theological voices. The kind of cultural views that affect constitutional doctrine are less linear and more textured than the existing debates suggest. This paper adds to the discussion a Protestant account of the freedom of the church: the New Revised Standard Version. Part I briefly sketches the process of translation that any theological concept encounters in the path to constitutional doctrine. Part II summarizes the current debate in legal scholarship about the freedom of the church. Part III introduces the New Revised Standard Version through three prominent twentieth-century theologians: Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Stanley Hauerwas. Part IV assesses the possibility of translation, and Part V warns of the theological limits to translating certain theological concepts. The New Revised Standard Version reinforces some of the normative claims underlying the Catholic story, but it does so through a Protestant lens that is somewhat more familiar to American political thought. It also differs from the Catholic account in two important ways: (1) by characterizing the church as a witnessing body rather than as a separate sovereign; and (2) by highlighting the church’s freedom in a post-Christian polity.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Mohammed, “Muslims in Non-Muslim Lands”

Islam begins with the hijra, the Prophet Mohammed’s flight from persecution in Mecca to the city of Medina, where Muslims first organized themselves as a spiritual and political community–the Muslim umma. This founding event has led to a debate in Islamic law that continues to this day. Does the Prophet’s example suggest that Muslims may not reside in a non-Muslim polity? The dominant position, according to scholar Andrew March, is that Muslims may reside in non-Muslim states, as long as they are free to practice their religion. A minority tradition, however, holds that Muslims may not reside in non-Muslim states and that migration is a religious obligation. This latter view obviously creates complications for citizenship in pluralist democracies.

These questions are no doubt addressed by a book to be published later this month by Britain’s Islamic Texts Society, Muslims in Non-Muslim Lands: A Legal Study with Applications, by author Amjad M. Mohammed. The publisher’s description follows:

Since the Second World War, there has been a significant migration of Muslims to countries in the Western world. Muslims in non-Muslim Landstraces the process by which these migrants arrived in Western Europe-in particular Britain-and explains how the community developed its faith identity through three particular stances: assimilation, isolation and integration. The findings argue that the assumption that Islam causes Muslims to isolate from the indigenous population and form ‘a state within a state’ is false, and that Islamic law actually gives Muslims confidence and the ability to integrate within the wider society.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

USCIRF Issues Annual Report

I posted earlier this week about the US Commission on International Religious Freedom’s special report on violations of religious liberty in Syria. Also this week, USCIRF issued its annual, comprehensive (364 pages) report on religious freedom around the world. It makes for interesting reading.

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan government advisory body that monitors global religious freedom and makes non-binding policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress. For example, each year, USCIRF suggests countries for inclusion on the State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern”–those whose governments engage in or tolerate especially bad violations of religious freedom. This year, USCIRF names 15 such countries, including Burma, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Vietnam.

Iraq’s appearance on the list is especially noteworthy. Notwithstanding the Iraqi government’s “efforts to increase security for religious sites and worshippers, provide a stronger voice for Iraq’s smallest minorities in parliament, and revise secondary school textbooks to portray minorities in a more positive light,” the report states, the government “continues to tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, including violent religiously-motivated attacks.” Please note: Ten years after a US-led war to topple a dictator and establish the rule of law, things are so bad that a US government commission has named Iraq as a particularly worrisome country with respect to religious freedom. Let’s hope the people running our Syria policy are paying attention.

With respect to American policy on religious freedom generally, the report shows some frustration. One gets the distinct sense that the commissioners think the Obama Administration should make global religious freedom more a priority. For example, the report decries the downgrading of the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and the downsizing of her staff. And it criticizes the Administration for not taking more concrete action with respect to  “countries of particular concern” that the State Department already has named.

The report contains a thematic section with helpful material on a variety of issues; this section will be especially useful for scholars. Among the issues addressed are constitutional changes in Muslim-majority countries and the increasing adoption and enforcement of anti-blasphemy laws around the world.

Posted on by Dan Crane · 1 Comment

A Few Comments on Evangelicals and the Legal Elite

I wanted to respond to some of the comments to my post on why evangelicals are underrepresented in the legal elite and thought it might be easier to do it in a separate post.

Several people have attributed evangelical underrepresentation to admissions bias.  That may be part of it, but I doubt that’s a huge factor at least in the last decade or so.  The reason is that law school admissions officers are under HUGE, HUGE pressure to maximize two things:  GPA and LSAT score, which feed into the all-important U.S. News and World Report Rankings.  Yes, other factors are also taken into account, but it’s hard for me to see admissions offices routinely turning down applicants with 3.98 GPAs and 179 LSAT scores just because the undergraduate school happened to be Wheaton, Calvin, Houghton, Taylor, or Westmont.

The suggestion of trying to study this empirically is a great one.  If anyone out there with an interest in these questions is (1) hugely wealthy and/or (2) a skilled social science researcher, there are number of very interesting empirical projects that one could undertake to put some meat on these intuitions.  Drop me a line!

Finally, to the comments that anti-Christian hostility drives evangelicals away, a few observations/questions.  My very preliminary survey data on one elite law school suggested that Catholics were largely holding their national market share (around 20%) whereas evangelicals were not.  Is the elite law school hostility anti-evangelical but not anti-Catholic?  Are the Catholics who go to elite law schools disproportionately from the liberal wing of Catholicism and therefore don’t care about the hostility to traditional Christianity?  In short, why are Catholics but not evangelicals going to these hostile law schools?

Posted on by Dan Crane · 6 Comments

Does It Matter that Evangelicals Are Underrepresented Among the Legal Elite?

This is the third and last post in my mini-series on evangelical underrepresentation among the legal elite.  My first post presented the claim that evangelicals are underrepresented and the second asked why this might be.  To conclude, I want to ask whether it even matters and, if so, in what ways.  I’ll limit myself to three somewhat random observations.

First, evangelicals don’t seem to care too much about their underrepresentation in the legal elite.  Although there have been a few murmurings about the lack of an evangelical on the Supreme Court, evangelicals seem to be much more interested in judicial appointments that will vote for outcomes favored by evangelicals than on the religious identity of the appointees. Thus, for example, after the Supreme Court nomination of evangelical Harriet Miers fell apart (and to repeat a point from yesterday’s post, observe that Miers, an SMU Law grad, lacked “elite” credentials), there seemed to be no great reaction from evangelicals when John Roberts, a Catholic (who undoubtedly had elite credentials), was picked instead.  The choice of Sam Alito, a Catholic, over one of the (very few) plausible evangelicals (like Mike McConnell) barely registered.

That evangelicals by and large feel “represented” by conservative Catholics in the upper echelons of the legal system is interesting in many ways.  One interpretation is that evangelicals accept that viewpoint rather than identity is what matters to representation—a claim that has all sorts of implications for other kinds of “diversity” questions (i.e, do liberal whites adequately represent the interests of liberal African-Americans?).

Another implication—and I’ll go ahead and say it although I know I’ll get pushback (perhaps even assassination)—is that evangelicals care about identity, but increasingly understand evangelical and conservative Catholic identity as converging.  Is it possible that, in the post-Vatican II world, evangelicals and Catholics are beginning to see themselves less as mere political allies and more as sharing a common identity in the loyal and traditionalist wing of Christendom?  This is clearly happening at least at the margins (witness the growth of evangelical Catholicism and liturgical revivals within Protestant evangelicalism, for example).

A second point:  Does evangelical underrepresentation in elite legal jobs matter to the way law is performed?  In his wonderful book Constitutional Faith, Sandy Levinson draws parallels between the competing Catholic and Protestant traditions on textualism, Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Center for Law and Religion’s Year-End Report

This academic year has been an exciting one for the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s. We hosted a conference in Rome and several events in New York, named a board of advisers, and continued to enhance this  website. Our faculty have published books, articles, and book chapters, and participated in conferences around the world. Our year-end report is available here. Thanks to our friends for their continuing support, and please let us know if you have any suggestions for future activities.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

National Day of Prayer

You might not have noticed it, but today is the National Day of Prayer. I should say, a National Day of Prayer, as that’s what the US Code calls it. Every year, by law, the President issues a proclamation “designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, or as individuals.” President Obama’s proclamation this year is rather moving. It stresses the comfort that Americans draw, in times of suffering, from the simple fact that other Americans are praying for them:

Prayer brings communities together and can be a wellspring of strength and support. In the aftermath of senseless acts of violence, the prayers of countless Americans signal to grieving families and a suffering community that they are not alone. Their pain is a shared pain, and their hope a shared hope. Regardless of religion or creed, Americans reflect on the sacredness of life and express their sympathy for the wounded, offering comfort and holding up a light in an hour of darkness.

The proclamation itself ends with a prayer: “I join the citizens of our Nation in giving thanks, in accordance with our own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection.”

The day is not without its critics. The Freedom from Religion Foundation once filed a lawsuit, dismissed on standing grounds, arguing that a National Day of Prayer violates the Constitution, and the American Humanist Association hosts a competing National Day of Reason every year. (You might not have noticed that, either.) Orthodox theists of various sorts might find the day objectionable as well. To whom or what are Americans being invited to pray? Doesn’t officially-encouraged prayer to a nondescript deity lead to confusion and least-common-denominator religion? Not everyone finds generic prayers so harmless.

I’m not sure what the answer is, except to say that designating a National Day of Prayer seems entirely American. Public religious references of a nonsectarian character have long been a part of the American tradition, for better or worse, and there’s no stopping them now. The wisdom of our ancestors is in such things, as Dickens once observed in another context, and if we disturb them, the Country’s done for. Purists, of the secular and orthodox variety, have to adjust.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Fordham Panel on Faith-Based Humanitarian Aid (May 15)

On May 15, Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture will host a panel, “Saving the World: Does Faith-Based Humanitarian Aid Deliver Relief or Redemption?”–

Faith-based humanitarianism has become a growth industry in recent years, channeling the influence of privately-held religious commitments into the public sphere around the globe. Yet surprisingly little is known about these initiatives—and to what extent their religious inspiration might help or hinder their success, particularly in troubled regions marked by religious division and conflict.

Does the added dimension of faith contribute something unique to humanitarian work? Or is faith-based aid really just another form of religious proselytizing?

This forum will compare faith-based organizations to their secular counterparts and look at how they are transforming the landscape of humanitarian intervention today.

Details are here.