Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A Pretty Narrow Decision

That’s my first read on today’s opinion in the Hobby Lobby case: narrow and pretty much as expected. Indeed, Justice Alito’s opinion for the Court says as much (“our holding is very specific”). It’s a 5-4 decision; a 5-2 decision on one important point. Still, a win’s a win, and Hobby Lobby, its lawyers, and those who filed amicus briefs in its behalf have a right to be pleased–as do all those who value religious freedom.

Some first impressions:

  • The Court does not address Hobby Lobby’s First Amendment claims; Hobby Lobby wins on RFRA grounds. No surprise there.
  • In holding that a for-profit corporation can exercise a religion for RFRA purposes, the Court takes the route that Chief Justice Roberts suggested at oral argument. It expressly limits its holding to closely-held corporations like Hobby Lobby and declines to discuss whether large, publicly traded corporations also can exercise a religion for RFRA purposes. That, as lawyers say, is a question for another day. (Self-promotion alert: this is what I predicted). The vote was 5-2 here; two dissenters, Justices Breyer and Kagan, would not have reached the issue.
  • The Court makes clear its ruling does not mean it will necessarily rule the same way in other cases where employers seek relief under RFRA, for example, where employers object to covering immunizations. Different governmental interests could be involved in those cases, the Court says.
  • The Court goes out of its way to say that its holding would not allow employers to justify racial discrimination on religious grounds. It says nothing about other sorts of discrimination, however. Surely this is intentional. As everyone knows, a major lurking issue is whether RFRA allows employers to discriminate on the basis of sexuality, especially homosexuality. The Court obviously wishes to avoid any allusions to that issue–perhaps to keep Justice Kennedy on board. The dissent does raise the issue, though.
  • The qualifications in the Court’s opinion are obviously meant to answer the dissent’s “parade of horribles.” Seems a pretty good answer to me–but the dissenters are not impressed. The Court’s logic extends to publicly traded corporations, Justice Ginsburg writes, and there is little doubt, notwithstanding the Court’s reassurances,  that RFRA claims will “proliferate” in future. In particular, the dissent raises the issue of religiously-based objections to sexuality. As I say, the Court studiously avoids that issue.
  • In its least-restrictive means analysis, the Court notes that an accommodation of the sort the government has offered to certain religious non-profits would have achieved the government’s end in this case as well, and would have imposed less on Hobby Lobby’s religious exercise. That is, an alternative to the mandate is available. Is the Court hinting at what it thinks about the Little Sisters of the Poor case? I don’t think so; the Court went out of its way to reserve that issue. But the language here is a bit opaque and may cause trouble in future.
  • Not clear what the point of Justice Kennedy’s concurrence is, except to highlight that he sees this as a close case, to say nice things about the dissent, and to expound a little more about his view that religious liberty is about protecting people’s “dignity and … striving for a self-definition shaped by their religious precepts.”

We’ll have further analysis here at CLR Forum as we digest the opinion a little more. But, bottom line: a narrow decision and a win for religious liberty.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Nelson, “The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding”

Here’s one I will be sure to pick up–Eric Nelson’s (Harvard University) The The Royalist RevolutionRoyalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding published by Harvard University Press later this year. Perhaps not straight down the law and religion fairway, but this fascinating looking book may shed a little ambient light on such issues as the framers’  intent as to the meaning of the religion clauses. The publisher’s description follows.

Generations of students have been taught that the American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. In this revisionist account, Eric Nelson argues that a great many of our “founding fathers” saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. The Royalist Revolution interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power—driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.

Leading patriots believed that the colonies were the king’s own to govern, and they urged George III to defy Parliament and rule directly. These theorists were proposing to turn back the clock on the English constitution, rejecting the Whig settlement that had secured the supremacy of Parliament after the Glorious Revolution. Instead, they embraced the political theory of those who had waged the last great campaign against Parliament’s “usurpations”: the reviled Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century.

When it came time to design the state and federal constitutions, the very same figures who had defended this expansive conception of royal authority—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and their allies—returned to the fray as champions of a single executive vested with sweeping prerogatives. As a result of their labors, the Constitution of 1787 would assign its new president far more power than any British monarch had wielded for almost a hundred years. On one side of the Atlantic, Nelson concludes, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Schull, “Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire”

In May, Oxford University Press published a very interesting looking book at the Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empireintersection of religion and criminal law, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity, by Kent F. Schull (Binghamton University). The publisher’s description follows.

Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual behaviour traditionally associated with Ottoman (or ‘Turkish’) prisons, Kent F. Schull argues that these places were sites of immense reform and contestation during the 19th century. He shows that they were key components for Ottoman nation-state construction and acted as ‘microcosms of modernity’ for broader imperial transformation. It was within the walls of these prisons that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out, such as administrative centralisation, the rationalisation of Islamic criminal law and punishment, issues of gender and childhood, prisoner rehabilitation, bureaucratic professionalisation, identity and social engineering.

Juxtaposing state-mandated reform with the reality of prison life, the author investigates how these reforms affected the lives of local prison officials and inmates, and shows how these individuals actively conformed, contested and manipulated new penal policies and practices for their own benefit.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Pope Francis’s Remarks on Religious Freedom for Our Conference (DeGirolami trans.)

I took a shot at translating Pope Francis’s remarks on religious freedom, which he addressed to the participants at our conference on international religious freedom. I have tried to be faithful to the text, sacrificing a bit of readability. I have done this in part because some partial translations I’ve seen are not true enough to the original, even if the resulting translation here still leaves some open spaces in meaning (which, at any rate, should not be filled by the translator). Here is the original in Italian. I’ve also got a few comments at the end of the translation.

I welcome you on the occasion of your international conference, dear brothers and sisters. I thank Professor Giuseppe Dalla Torre for his courteous words. 

Recently the debate about religious freedom has become very intense, asking questions of both governments and religious denominations. The Catholic Church, in this respect, refers to the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, one of the most important documents of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II.

In effect, every human being is a “seeker” of truth about his own origins and his own destiny. In his mind and in his heart arise questions and thoughts that cannot be repressed or suffocated, inasmuch as they emerge from the deeps and are by nature connected with the intimate essence of the person. These are religious questions and they demand religious freedom to manifest themselves fully. These questions seek to shed light on the authentic meaning of existence, on the ties that connect it to the cosmos and to history, and they mean to pierce the darkness by which the human condition would be surrounded if such questions were not asked or if they remained answerless. The Psalmist says: “When I see your heavens, work of your fingers/ the moon and the stars that you have fixed, / what then is man that you would remember him, / a son of man that you would care for him?” Psalms 8: 3-4.

Reason recognizes in religious freedom a fundamental right of man that reflects his highest dignity, that of the capacity to seek the truth and to adhere to it, and recognizes in that right an indispensable condition in order to deploy his own potentialities. Religious freedom is not only the freedom of a thought or of a private sect. It is freedom to live according to ethical principles consequent to discovered truth, whether privately or publicly. This is a great challenge in the globalized world, where weak thought—which is like a disease—lowers the general ethical level, and in the name of a false notion of tolerance ends by persecuting those who defend the truth about man and that truth’s ethical consequences.

Legal regimes, national or international, are called to recognize, guarantee, and protect religious freedom, which is a right that inheres intrinsically in the nature of man, in his dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and one of the principal fonts of the legitimacy of the state.

Religious freedom, implemented in constitutions and in laws and translated into coherent behaviors, favors the development of relationships of mutual respect among the different faiths and their healthful collaboration with the state and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonisms. In place of the global conflict of values, coming from a nucleus of universally shared values, a global collaboration in view of the common good becomes possible. 

By the light of the acquisitions of reason, confirmed and perfected by revelation, and of the civil progress of peoples, it is incomprehensible and worrisome that, even today, in the world there remain discriminations and restrictions of rights for the sole reason of belonging to and professing publicly a certain faith. It is unacceptable that true and actual persecutions exist for reasons of religious membership! And wars too! This wounds reason, attacks peace, and humiliates the dignity of man.

It is a motive of great pain for me to observe that Christians in the world suffer the largest number of such discriminations. Persecution against Christians today is even more powerful than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs than in that era. This is happening more than 1700 years after the edict of Constantine, which granted freedom to Christians to profess their faith publicly.

I hope profoundly that your conference illustrates with depth and scientific rigor the reasons that today oblige the legal order to respect and defend religious freedom. I thank you for this contribution. I ask you to pray for me. From my heart I wish you the best and I ask God to bless you. Thank you.

Some brief thoughts:

1. A note on the fourth paragraph with Patrick Brennan’s good questions in mind. According to my translation, the Pope did not say that “every person has a right to seek the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly, consequent to the truth one has found.” The full paragraph fragment in Italian is:

La ragione riconosce nella libertà religiosa un diritto fondamentale dell’uomo che riflette la sua più alta dignità, quella di poter cercare la verità e di aderirvi, e riconosce in essa una condizione indispensabile per poter dispiegare tutta la propria potenzialità. La libertà religiosa non è solo quella di un pensiero o di un culto privato. E’ libertà di vivere secondo i principi etici conseguenti alla verità trovata, sia privatamente che pubblicamente.

The phrase in question, as well as the entire paragraph fragment, is more faithfully translated as “discovered truth” rather than “the truth that one has found” ; “discovered truth” refers back to the same truth that is being sought for in the previous section of this paragraph.

2. Note the reference to the “global clash of values” in paragraph six–a specific comment on our conference–and the Pope’s statement that such a clash can be overcome. That struck me as relevant to the discussion that Tom Berg and I have been having here, here, and here.

3. Nevertheless, in spite of his optimism about the prospects for religious freedom, the Pope expresses great distress about the plight of Christians in the world today, as can be seen in the paragraphs toward the close of the speech.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Skepticism about International Religious Freedom: Types 1 and 2

A little more on last week’s conference, “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values,” which CLR co-hosted in Rome.

First, a word of thanks to the participants. The presentations were thoughtful, the debate sharp but respectful. It was all one could want in an academic conference. And we had a private audience at the Vatican with Pope Francis! As Marc writes, to have the Pope address us personally, on a subject we study, at a conference we helped organize, was a remarkable experience.

We’ll post videos of the presentations as they become available. (A video of Pope Francis addressing the group is here). For now, though, I’d like to say just a few words about what I saw as one of the central themes at the conference: a certain skepticism about the promise of “international religious freedom.”

To be sure, many at the conference endorsed the idea of international religious freedom. International human rights law accepts that such a concept exists. International courts and organizations apply it; national governments purport to promote it in their foreign policy. Perceptive scholars like Heiner Bielefeldt, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, who appeared on one of our panels, work hard to advance it across the globe. Yet the concept of international religious freedom also provokes some skepticism, and did so at the conference. It seems to me this skepticism takes one of two forms, what we might call “Type 1” and “Type 2″skepticism.

Type 1 skepticism holds that, although a universally applicable concept of religious freedom exists, states and international organizations lack the commitment to make it effective. At the conference, the Berkley Center’s Tom Farr expressed this sort of skepticism. He maintained that religious freedom is grounded in human nature itself. “Religion,” he argued, “is the universal human search for a greater-than-human source of being and ultimate meaning.” Because the search for transcendence is part of what it means to be human, the international order must allow people to participate in the search without unnecessary obstruction.  “To deny a person the right to engage in this search and to live in accord with the truths he discovers,” Tom maintained, “is to deny the very essence of what it means to be human.”

This formulation owes a great deal to natural law; indeed, in his remarks to the group, Pope Francis spoke of religious freedom in much the same terms. The problem for Tom, the source of his skepticism, is that states, including liberal Western states, do not do enough to protect this universal right. For example, he noted, “the American policy of advancing international religious freedom, which is highly rhetorical and lacks any strategic rationale, has been largely anemic and ineffective.” He noted that the post of US ambassador for international religious freedom has been vacant for months.

The second sort of skepticism, what I am calling “Type 2 skepticism,” differs fundamentally. It objects to the notion that “religious freedom,” as human rights advocates define it, is a neutral, universally applicable concept. What the human rights community perceives as neutral and universal is in fact a product of a particular culture and history–Western Christianity and the Enlightenment, especially the latter. One cannot legitimately expect other civilizations–Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, even Eastern Christian–simply to adopt religious freedom as Western lawyers define it. At the conference, Emory’s Abduh An-Na’im expressed this sort of skepticism. Religious freedom, he argued, must be expressed in idioms that non-Western societies can accept without surrendering their own religious and cultural heritage. I can’t recall his exact words, but he put it something like this: “If I have to choose between my ‘religion’ and ‘human rights,’ I’ll choose my religion every time.”

The two types of skepticism are related. Indeed, Type 2 skepticism provides an explanation for Type 1. In a world where civilizations differ on the core meaning of religious freedom, advancing a universal formulation is impossible. You might get states to agree on vague treaty language; the treatment of the right to change one’s religion in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights offers a famous example. But enforcement is another matter.

None of this is to say the we should give up on the idea of international religious freedom. Religious persecution around the world is too widespread, too serious a problem, for lawyers simply to throw up their hands. The two kinds of skepticism suggest, though, that as a practical matter advocates for international religious freedom may need to accept somewhat modest goals, at least for the present, and avoid universal assumptions that create unnecessary obstacles for their project.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

More on Corporations in Hobby Lobby

At the Religion News Service site, Cathy Lynn Grossman discusses the overheated rhetoric about for-profit corporations in the Contraception Mandate case, quoting my recent post on the subject at the Cornerstone site. As I’ve said, the Court could easily avoid the slippery slope by limiting its holding to close corporations like Hobby Lobby itself. Stay tuned — we’ll know pretty soon.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel on USCIRF Report this Friday

This Friday, June 27, the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington will host a panel on the 2014 Annual Report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom:

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recently released its 2014 Annual Report, entitled 15th Anniversary Retrospective: Renewing the Commitment. USCIRF is an independent U.S. government advisory body that monitors religious freedom worldwide and makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and the Congress. The report examines the past decade and a half of U.S. foreign policy as it relates to religious freedom promotion and provides recommendations for how the United States can more effectively advance this right in the 21st century. In addition, the report highlights the situation of religious freedom globally and identifies governments who are the most egregious violators.

Details are here.

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Hampton, “Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era”

In August, University of Alabama Press will publish Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era by Monte Hampton (North Carolina State University). The publisher’s description follows.

Storm of Words is a study of the ways that southern Presbyterians in the wake of the Civil War contended with a host of cultural and theological questions, chief among them developments in natural history and evolution.

Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science.

As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions.

Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture.

The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Reflections on “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values”

Mark has noted the important and interesting talk that Pope Francis gave about the condition of religious freedom around the world–a very fitting address inaugurating our conference in Rome, “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values.” It really was quite special and memorable to have the Pope give remarks on a subject that we study here at the Center, at an audience we attended, for a conference that we organized. I thought to add a few thoughts about some of the themes that emerged from the conference presentations.

The keynote address was delivered by the Berkley Center’s Tom Farr, whose primary claim was that in order for international religious freedom to thrive as a human right, we need a deeper grounding–both principled and pragmatic–of the importance of the right of religious freedom as both an anthropological reality and as a practical necessity. I had the honor of moderating Tom’s talk and asked him whether in this particular climate what was needed was a thicker account of religious freedom or instead an (even) thinner account. He gave a thoughtful answer reflecting both the need for deep structures of justification and the difficulty of achieving consensus about them.

The first panel concerned the politics of international religious freedom and included the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, Ken Hackett, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Heiner Bielefeldt, and Pasquale Annicchino of the European University Institute. It was in Dr. Bielefeldt’s talk that a useful tension began to emerge among some of the speakers–between those who were bullish or optimistic about the prospect that international law can effectively promote religious freedom and those who were a little more skeptical. Dr. Bielefeldt falls into the more optimistic camp–a good thing indeed, given his position. He emphasized the difference between the promotion of religious freedom in order to advance civic peace, on the one hand, and its promotion in order to vindicate a basic human right, on the other. Here I was reminded of the controversial “civic peace” justification in the American law of religious freedom.

The second panel dealt with comparative perspectives on international religious freedom. The perspectives compared included those of the member states of the Council of Europe and of Italy specifically. Here I was particularly interested in Marco Ventura’s lucid presentation about the difference between divergent and convergent approaches to religious freedom among and across European member states. Professor Ventura described the move toward convergence and argued for even greater convergence than has already been achieved. I had some questions about this coming from a country that has also struggled with the issue of convergence and divergence in the constitutional law of religious freedom. Here again, the tension between globalism and regionalism was in evidence in a slightly different way.

The third panel concerned Islamic and Christian perspectives on international religious freedom, and included presentations by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Olivier Roy, and Nina Shea. Here the primary point of tension involved the causes or roots of religious persecution of these two major religious groups. And here, too, there was skepticism, principally from Professor An-Na’im, about the efficacy of human rights regimes to protect religious freedom. “There was a world before international human rights, and there will be a world after international human rights,” he said.

In all, a very rewarding set of presentations.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Pope Francis Opens Center’s Conference with Statement on Religious Liberty, Persecution of Christians

Pope Francis opened our conference in Rome last week with a statement on religious liberty and the persecution of Christians. He reflected on the place of religious liberty in Catholic thought and decried religious discrimination across the world, particularly against Christians.

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Pope Francis Greets Conference Participants (News.va)

The Pope’s remarks came at a special audience at the Vatican for participants in the conference, “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values,” which the Center for Law and Religion co-sponsored with the St. John’s Center for International and Comparative Law and the Department of Law at the Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta. Referring to the Second Vatican Council’s declaration, Dignitatis humanae, the Pope argued that people require religious freedom in order to be fully human:

“Every human is a ‘seeker’ of truth on his origins and destiny,” the Pope said. “In his mind and in his ‘heart,’ questions and thoughts arise that cannot be repressed or stifled, since they emerge from the depths of the person and are a part of the intimate essence of the person. They are religious questions, and religious freedom is necessary for them to manifest themselves fully.”

He called religious freedom “a fundamental right of man.” It is “not simply freedom of thought or private worship,” but “the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly, consequent to the truth one has found.”

“Legal systems, at both national and international level, are therefore required to recognize, guarantee and protect religious freedom, which is a right intrinsically inherent in human nature.”

Religious freedom is also “an indicator of a healthy democracy” and “one of the main sources of the legitimacy of the state,” the Pope continued.

Nowadays, international and domestic law protect religious freedom. Notwithstanding this protection, however, religious discrimination continues. In fact, Pope Francis noted, 1700 years after the Edict of Milan, Christians worldwide suffer disproportionate discrimination and persecution. “The persecution of Christians today is even more virulent than in the first centuries of the Church,” he said, “and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.”

We’ll have a fuller discussion of the Pope’s statement when the Vatican releases an official English translation. Meanwhile, here’s a video report on the audience in English.