Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Sutto, “Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists”

In November, the University of Virginia Press will release “Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690,” by Antoinette Sutto (University of Mississippi).  The publisher’s description follows:

Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists analyzes the vibrant and often violent political culture of seventeenth-century America, exploring the relationship between early American and early modern British politics through a detailed study of colonial Maryland. Seventeenth-century Maryland was repeatedly wracked by disputes over the legitimacy of the colony’s Catholic proprietorship. The proprietors’ strange policy of religious liberty was part of the controversy, but colonists also voiced fears of proprietary conspiracies with Native Americans and claimed the colony’s ruling circle aimed to crush their liberties as English subjects. Conflicts like these became wrapped up in disputes less obviously political, such as disagreements over how to manage the tobacco trade, without which Maryland’s economy would falter.

Antoinette Sutto argues that the best way to understand this strange mix of religious, economic, and political controversies is to view it with regard to the disputes over the role of the English church, the power of the state, and the ideal relationship between the two—disputes that tore apart the English-speaking world twice over in the 1600s. Sutto contends that the turbulent political history of early Maryland makes most sense when seen in an imperial as well as an American context. Such an understanding of political culture and conflict in this colony offers a window not only into the processes of seventeenth-century American politics but also into the construction of the early modern state. Examining the dramatic rise and fall of Maryland’s Catholic proprietorship through this lens, Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists offers a unique glimpse into the ambiguities and possibilities of the early English colonial world.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Schaposchnik, “The Lima Inquisition”

In October, the University of Wisconsin Press will release “The Lima Inquisition:
The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” by Ana E. Schaposchnik (DePaul University).  The publisher’s description follows: 

The Holy Office of the Inquisition (a royal tribunal that addressed issues of heresy and offenses to morality) was established in Peru in 1570 and operated there until 1820. In this book, Ana E. Schaposchnik provides a deeply researched history of the Inquisition’s Lima Tribunal, focusing in particular on the cases of persons put under trial for crypto-Judaism in Lima during the 1600s.

Delving deeply into the records of the Lima Tribunal, Schaposchnik brings to light the experiences and perspectives of the prisoners in the cells and torture chambers, as well as the regulations and institutional procedures of the inquisitors. She looks closely at how the lives of the accused—and in some cases the circumstances of their deaths—were shaped by actions of the Inquisition on both sides of the Atlantic. She explores the prisoners’ lives before and after their incarcerations and reveals the variety and character of prisoners’ religiosity, as portrayed in the Inquisition’s own sources. She also uncovers individual and collective strategies of the prisoners and their supporters to stall trials, confuse tribunal members, and attempt to ameliorate or at least delay the most extreme effects of the trial of faith.

The Lima Inquisition also includes a detailed analysis of the 1639 Auto General de Fe ceremony of public penance and execution, tracing the agendas of individual inquisitors, the transition that occurred when punishment and surveillance were brought out of hidden dungeons and into public spaces, and the exposure of the condemned and their plight to an avid and awestricken audience. Schaposchnik contends that the Lima Tribunal’s goal, more than volume or frequency in punishing heretics, was to discipline and shape culture in Peru.

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Gamwell, “Religion Among We the People”

In November, SUNY Press will release “Religion Among We the People: Conversations on Democracy and the Divine Good” by Franklin I. Gamwell (University of Chicago). The publisher’s description follows:

Franklin I. Gamwell holds that democracy with religious freedom is dependent on metaphysical theism. Democratic politics can be neutral to all religious convictions only if its constitution establishes a full and free discourse about the ultimate terms of justice and their application to decisions of the state, and the divine good is the true ground of justice. Notably, Gamwell’s view challenges virtually all current accounts of democracy with religious freedom. This uncommon position emerges through a series of essays in which Gamwell engages a variety of conversation partners, including Thomas Jefferson, David Strauss, Abraham Lincoln, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred North Whitehead, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Iris Murdoch. Discussions of Jefferson, Lincoln, and the US Constitution illustrate the promise of neoclassical metaphysics as a context for interpreting US history. Gamwell then defends his metaphysics against both modern refusals of metaphysics and accounts of ultimate reality offered by Niebuhr and Murdoch.

Posted on by geraldrussello · 1 Comment

Ballard and “Sincere” Religious Beliefs

Marc DeGirolami kindly referred me to United States v. Ballard on the question of how, or whether, courts should analyze a person’s “sincere” religious beliefs. The defendants in Ballard had been convicted of fraud. The misrepresentations concerned the religious “I AM” movement, which the Ballards had founded. The court instructed the jury not to consider whether the defendants’ beliefs were true or false, but whether the defendants believed them to be true. If so, they were to be acquitted. The jury convicted them of a scheme to defraud. The Court of Appeals reversed, arguing that the question of truth or falsity also needed to be presented to the jury.

The Supreme Court reversed, and found the district court had properly excluded the question of truth from the jury. The majority opinion (written by Justice Douglas) affirmed that “[t]he law knows no heresy, and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect.”  Yet the majority found that the defendants could be convicted of fraud for not really believe what they said, even if the content of that belief was outside judicial notice. Justice Jackson, in dissent, stated that he could “not see how we can separate what is believed from what is ‘believable’” and warned of the potential for religious persecution. He would have affirmed the reversal of the conviction.

Ballard is regularly cited (for example in the contraceptive mandate cases) for the proposition that courts cannot question the sincerity of religious beliefs. That is true, but the result in Ballard was upheld nonetheless. The Supreme Court determined that a court could rule on the acts of the plaintiffs (there, misrepresentations) without caring whether their belief was true. Cases like the Third Circuit Zubik case are doing something similar when they hold that “free exercise jurisprudence instructs that we are to examine the act the appellees must perform—not the effect of that act—to see if it burdens substantially the appellees’ religious exercise.” There, the Court found that requiring religious institutions to fill out the accommodation form was not prohibited, because it disagreed that doing so interfered with the exercise of their religious beliefs, as the Court interpreted them.

So although the strict terms of the balance-shifting test may seem to support those seeking the accommodation, that is only a matter of drafting a statute that is better tailored to further government interests. The more basic question – who gets to decide “substantial burden” and on what grounds – still weighs against believers.