Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Drakeman on Garnett on the Freedom of the Church

Our friend and board member Don Drakeman has a typically smart and interesting response to Prof. Rick Garnett’s excellent piece on the freedom of the church. Over the last few years, Rick has been developing an account of the freedom of the church that depends on the idea of institutional rights (see also Paul Horwitz’s work). 

Don applies the same sorts of methodological insights that he uses in this very good piece about originalism to the idea of the freedom of the church. That is, he considers the sense in which the freedom of the church is, in fact, deemed by the public to be a fundamental right, but also how, as one moves out of the church “sanctuary” and into the world, the world begins to resist. A bit from Don’s piece:

If we were to commission a survey asking, “Should churches have the right of religious freedom?,” I suspect that, except for some parts of académe, the most common response would be: “What is this, some sort of trick question?” After all, two-thirds of the public have recently said that corporations should have “certain religious freedoms.” (From a 2014 “State of the First Amendment” poll that can be found here.) If that many people would, at least in the abstract, give businesses the freedom of religion, it seems likely that nearly all would give that right to churches as well.

It is also likely that the public doesn’t really know what it means for companies, or even churches, to have religious freedom—just that it makes sense. Could we gain more insight on this by considering a contemporary controversy? A “hot button” issue at the moment is what many have called the “contraception mandate.” Here, the pollsters have some interesting data, but first a methodological question: If people are asked about exemptions from the mandate, won’t they just use the question as a proxy for their views on either contraception or healthcare reform, or both? Separating those issues is admittedly hard, but the data may nevertheless tell us something about the public’s sense of the freedom of the church—in particular, what counts as “the church.”

In a March 2012 Public Religion Research Institute poll, Americans were asked if publicly held corporations should be required to provide health plans including contraception at no cost. A total of 62 percent said yes. For “churches, and other places of worship,” only 42 percent said yes. In between were religiously affiliated colleges (54 percent) and hospitals (57 percent). Since the underlying issues of contraception and the Affordable Care Act were the same in each case, the percentages for these three types of institutions should provide us with at least a rough reflection of the public’s sense of the relative strength of each one’s claim for a religiously based exemption.

The take-home here, I think, is twofold. First, the public does seem to believe that there is something to the concept of the freedom of the church; and second, there is a stronger claim for the exercise of that freedom for churches as places of worship than for, say, Notre Dame, Baylor or the country’s large network of religiously-affiliated hospitals.

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Spevack, “The Archetypical Sunni Scholar”

In October, State University of New York Press will release “The Archetypical Sunni Scholar: Law, Theology, and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bajuri” by Aaron Spevack (Colgate University).  The publisher’s description follows:

The Archetypical Sunni ScholarThis is a rare study of a late premodern Islamic thinker, Ibrahim al- Bājūrī, a nineteenth-century scholar and rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar University. Aaron Spevack explores al- Bājūrī’s legal, theological, and mystical thought, highlighting its originality and vibrancy in relation to the millennium of scholarship that preceded and informed it, and also detailing its continuing legacy. The book makes a case for the normativity of the Gabrielian Paradigm, the study of law, rational theology, and Sufism, in the person of al- Bājūrī. Soon after his death in 1860, this typical pattern of scholarship would face significant challenges from modernists, reformers, and fundamentalists. Spevack challenges beliefs that rational theology, syllogistic logic, and Sufism were not part of the predominant conception of orthodox scholarship and shows this scholarly archetype has not disappeared as an ideal. In addition, the book contests prevailing beliefs in academic and Muslim circles about intellectual decline from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries.

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Sniderman et al., “Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy”

This month, Princeton University Press released “Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe and the Danish Cartoon Crisis” by Paul Sniderman (Stanford University), Michael Peterson, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager (all from Aarhus University, Denmark).  The publisher’s description follows:

Paradoxes of Liberal DemocracyIn 2005, twelve cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, igniting a political firestorm over demands by some Muslims that the claims of their religious faith take precedence over freedom of expression. Given the explosive reaction from Middle Eastern governments, Muslim clerics, and some Danish politicians, the stage was set for a backlash against Muslims in Denmark. But no such backlash occurred.

Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy shows how the majority of ordinary Danish citizens provided a solid wall of support for the rights of their country’s growing Muslim minority, drawing a sharp distinction between Muslim immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists and supporting the civil rights of Muslim immigrants as fully as those of fellow Danes—for example, Christian fundamentalists. Building on randomized experiments conducted as part of large, nationally representative opinion surveys, Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy also demonstrates how the moral covenant underpinning the welfare state simultaneously promotes equal treatment for some Muslim immigrants and opens the door to discrimination against others.

Revealing the strength of Denmark’s commitment to democratic values, Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy underlines the challenges of inclusion but offers hope to those seeking to reconcile the secular values of liberal democracy and the religious faith of Muslim immigrants in Europe.