January 8, 2015 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Posted on January 8, 2015 by

Aroney on Freedom of Religion as an Associational Right

The latest issue of the University of Queensland Law Journal is devoted entirely to issues of federalism and freedom of religion in Australia. One article by Professor Nicholas Aroney, Freedom of Religion as an Associational Right, is particularly informative. You can read the article in its entirety here.

In his article, Professor Aroney argues that the religious freedom clauses of the Australian Constitution (section 116), which were modeled after the American First Amendment, should be interpreted to protect not only individual rights, but also communal or associational rights. In support of this contention, Professor Aroney provides an impressive textual and historical analysis of section 116. He further shows how this interpretation is in accord with international law.

According to Professor Aroney, correctly interpreting section 116 is of fundamental importance, because to interpret it as protecting merely individual rights has the potential to severely weaken religious freedom. Here is Professor Aroney (footnotes omitted):

Efforts to impose an individualistic view of human rights … continue to be made by groups such as the Discrimination Law Experts Group, who argue that the rights of religious organisations engaging in ‘public sphere activities’ should simply be trumped by the rights of individuals ‘to be treated in a non-discriminatory way.’ The Public Interest Law Clearing House and the Human Rights Law Resource Centre have argued similarly, maintaining that permanent religious exceptions to antidiscrimination laws facilitate and condone discrimination by protecting ‘traditional social structures and hierarchies’. Although the context is that anti-discrimination laws apply only in certain ‘public’ contexts, the reasoning is not so limited. These arguments are not unlike that of Stephen Macedo, who advocates that modern liberalism must ‘constitute the private realm in its image’ by forcing citizens ‘to observe its limits’ and ‘pursue its aspirations’. Such persons are to be actively coerced, Macedo candidly asserts, ‘to help ensure that freedom is what they want’, even in ‘their most “private beliefs”’.

The underlying individualism of this line of argument has been made clear by Margaret Thornton, who has argued that although the ICCPR protects the right to exercise freedom of religion ‘in association with others’, this right not only has to be balanced against the competing rights to equal treatment and non-discrimination, but all such rights need to be understood, fundamentally, as the rights of human beings – not of corporations – and so it is a ‘logical fallacy to extrapolate from an individual’s private beliefs to an impersonal for-profit corporation’. Thornton’s argument shows the weakness of religious freedom rights if they are conceptualised in reductively individualistic terms. This is because one would have to show, first, that certain individuals have particular religious convictions that are legally protected and, second, that these same individual rights are being expressed through the religious corporation’s rules or practices. If religious rights are conceptualised as inherently ‘private’ in this sense, it will be that much more difficult to establish that such rights are really being exercised as private rights in various domains of ‘public’ or ‘quasipublic’ life. But on the contrary, as has been seen, international human rights principles, while certainly premised on the rights of the ‘human person’, are not exclusively concerned to protect only individual rights or only private expressions of religious conviction.

Another problem with individualised conceptions of human rights in this domain is that such rights, although originally conceived as rights against the state, can nonetheless ‘double up as rights against everyone’. Accordingly, as Julian Rivers has shown, there are some for whom it is not sufficient that an individual has a right of ‘exit’ from his or her religious community. Rather, there is evidence ‘of a growing assumption that everyone who wishes should be able to join any religious body’ and that ‘membership tests are suspect’. The underlying assumption, in other words, is that ‘the preservation of religious identity on the part of civil society groups needs justification against the individual who does not share that identity’, even though to adopt such an approach ‘is potentially destructive of the identity of [all] non-State collectivities’. For if any individual can decide whether he or she qualifies for membership of an organisation, no organisation will be able to maintain its distinctive identity.

This reductio ad absurdum suggests that a radical individualist conception of religious liberty is simply incompatible with the existence of religious associations and communities as distinguishable groups within a society. Against such a view, William Galston has observed:

It is not obvious as an empirical matter that civil society organisations within liberal democracies must be organised along liberal democratic lines… A liberal policy guided … by a commitment to moral and political pluralism will be parsimonious in specifying binding public principles and cautious about employing such principles to intervene in the internal affairs of civil associations. It will rather pursue a policy of maximum feasible accommodation, limited only by the core requirements of individual security and civic unity. That there are costs to such a policy cannot reasonably be denied. It will permit internal associational practices (e.g. patriarchal gender relations) of which many disapprove. It will allow many associations to define their membership in ways that may be viewed as restraints on individual liberty … Unless liberty – individual and associational – is to be narrowed dramatically, however, we must accept these costs.

A reductively individualist conception of religious freedom is obviously opposed to the capacity of such groups to determine their own conditions of membership, but an excessively narrow associational conception may also have this effect, for there are many social groupings and traditional communities, including religions, in which membership does not initially arise by deliberate choice but by birth and circumstance. Whether voluntaristic or otherwise, unless such associations and communities are going to be understood, following Thomas Hobbes, as ‘worms in the entrails’ of the body politic, we need to recognise, as Harold Laski argued, that they are ‘as real, as primary, and self-sufficing as the whole [society]’. This does not mean of course that communal religious rights must always prevail. But it does mean that they ought to be treated with the same respect as the rights of individuals. As such, from a liberal point of view, what is most crucial in order to protect individuals is not the right to join (or remain) within a group, but the right to exit it. On this approach, the question of the legitimacy of a law which regulates a religious association becomes one of determining what conditions, if any, must accompany an effective exit right, understood to include the rights to associate, disassociate or not associate with a particular religious community on terms offered by that community. Alternatively, from a more communitarian point of view, what matters is that a religious group genuinely benefits its members and does not inappropriately interfere with the legitimate interests of those outside the group. These are large questions, of course, which lie beyond the scope of this article, the point of which has been to establish the associational and communal dimensions of religious freedom as a matter of principle.

Posted on January 8, 2015 by

“American Law from a Catholic Perspective” (Rychlak, ed.)

This March, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers will release “American Law from a Catholic Perspective: Through a Clearer Lens” edited by Ronald Rychlak (University of Mississpi School of Law). The publisher’s description follows:

As Gerard V. Bradley, Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, asks in his foreword: “What then should one expect to learn from a volume about American law from a Catholic perspective?” His answer is a straightforward one: “One should expect a critical guide to the moral evaluation of laws,” noting of the essays collected in American Law from a Catholic Perspective: Through a Clearer Lens: “The moral evaluative perspective which unfolds in succeeding pages illumines, justifies, and critiques America’s laws.”

Edited by Ronald J. Rychlak, American Law from a Catholic Perspective is one of the most comprehensive surveys of American legal topics by a gathering of major Catholic legal scholars. Contributors explore, among other subjects, bankruptcy, bioethics, corporate law, environmental law, ethics, family law, immigration, intellectual property, international human rights, labor law, legal education, legal history, military law, the philosophy of law, property, torts, and several different aspects of constitutional law, including religious freedom, privacy rights, and free speech.

Here readers will find probing arguments that bring the critical perspective of Catholic social thought to bear on American legal jurisprudence. Essays include Michael Ariens’ account of Catholicism in the intellectual discipline of legal history; William Saunders’ assessment of human rights and Catholic social teaching; Hadley Arkes’ look at the place of Catholic social thought with respect to bioethics; Lucia Silecchia’s examination of a Catholic understanding of stewardship with respect to environmental laws; Dorie Klein’s consideration of the place of Catholic views on the death penalty and Eighth Amendment jurisprudence; and many others on major legal topics in American jurisprudence—and their intersection with Catholic social teaching.

American Law from a Catholic Perspective: Through a Clearer Lens is essential reading for all Catholic lawyers, judges, and law students, as well as an important contribution to non-Catholic readers seeking guidance from a faith tradition on questions of legal jurisprudence. Based on well-developed and established ideas in Catholic social thought, the evaluations, suggestions, and remedies set forth offer ample food for thought and a basis for action in the realm of legal scholarship.

Posted on January 8, 2015 by

“Faithful Republic” (Preston, Schulman & Zelizer eds.)

This March, the University of Pennsylvania Press will release “Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America” edited by Andrew Preston (Cambridge University), Bruce Schulman (Boston University), and Julian Zelizer (Princeton University). The publisher’s description follows:

Despite constitutional limitations, the points of contact between religion and politics have deeply affected all aspects of American political development since the founding of the United States. Within partisan politics, federal institutions, and movement activism, religion and politics have rarely ever been truly separate; rather, they are two forms of cultural expression that are continually coevolving and reconfiguring in the face of social change.

Faithful Republic explores the dynamics between religion and politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many other aspects of American political history, addressing divorce, civil rights, liberalism and conservatism, domestic policy, and economics. Together, the essays blend church history and lived religion to fashion an innovative kind of political history, demonstrating the pervasiveness of religion throughout American political life.