Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tuininga, “Calvin’s Political Theology”

9781107171435Christian political theology is always characterized by a dualism between church and state–a dualism which, of course, is found in the Gospels themselves. In late antiquity, Pope Gelasius famously wrote of “two powers,” church and state (somehow, the reference is always to “two swords,” though Gelasius didn’t actually use that phrase); much later, the classical Reformers spoke of “two kingdoms.” A new book from Cambridge, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms, explores the Calvinist version of the two-kingdoms doctrine which, obviously, had a huge influence in colonial New England and, through colonial New England, America itself. The author is Matthew J. Tuininga of Calvin Theological Seminary. Here is the description from the publisher’s website:

In Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church, Matthew J. Tuininga explores a little appreciated dimension of John Calvin’s political thought, his two kingdoms theology, as a model for constructive Christian participation in liberal society. Widely misunderstood as a proto-political culture warrior, due in part to his often misinterpreted role in controversies over predestination and the heretic Servetus, Calvin articulated a thoughtful approach to public life rooted in his understanding of the gospel and its teaching concerning the kingdom of God. He staked his ministry in Geneva on his commitment to keeping the church distinct from the state, abandoning simplistic approaches that placed one above the other, while rejecting the temptations of sectarianism or separatism. This revealing analysis of Calvin’s vision offers timely guidance for Christians seeking a mode of faithful, respectful public engagement in democratic, pluralistic communities today.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Loeffler, “Rooted Cosmopolitans”

aca1146015d05fa2dd74a8f8d12d3f33Lately, scholars have begun to pay serious attention to the Christian roots of current international human rights law–Samuel Moyn’s interesting work comes to mind. One shouldn’t be surprised to learn about Christian roots; Christians like Maritain and Malik were instrumental in the post-war human rights revolution, to cite just a couple of names. A new book from Yale University Press, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, by University of Virginia historian James Loeffler, makes the point that contemporary human rights law has Jewish roots as well. Here’s the description from the Yale website:

A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists

The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Hobart, “The Great Rift”

9780674983632-lgThe future belongs to people who can do math–which suggests a rather grim future for most of us law professors, who are, let’s just say, more comfortable with words. A new book from Harvard University Press, The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, argues that the divide between the numerate and the literate goes back to the Renaissance, which saw the birth of a new, abstract mathematics, as distinguished from an older arithmetic. The author, Michael E. Hobart (Bryant University) argues that the development of the new math opened a divide between science and religion in the West. Looks very interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference in the work of Renaissance thinkers who invented a revolutionary mathematical system—relational numeracy. By creating meaning through numbers and abstract symbols rather than words, relational numeracy allowed inquisitive minds to vault beyond the constraints of language and explore the natural world with a fresh interpretive vision.

The Great Rift is the first book to examine the religion-science divide through the history of information technology. Hobart follows numeracy as it emerged from the practical counting systems of merchants, the abstract notations of musicians, the linear perspective of artists, and the calendars and clocks of astronomers. As the technology of the alphabet and of mere counting gave way to abstract symbols, the earlier “thing-mathematics” metamorphosed into the relational mathematics of modern scientific investigation. Using these new information symbols, Galileo and his contemporaries mathematized motion and matter, separating the demonstrations of science from the linguistic logic of religious narration.

Hobart locates the great rift between science and religion not in ideological disagreement but in advances in mathematics and symbolic representation that opened new windows onto nature. In so doing, he connects the cognitive breakthroughs of the past with intellectual debates ongoing in the twenty-first century.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The End of “Religion as a Good”: Thoughts on Movsesian and Garnett

Mark has a thoughtful piece over at First Things, in which he argues that the association of religion in America with particular political parties is becoming more pronounced. Mark makes the point that, increasingly, “a new sort of divide appears to be opening up in American politics: Republicans are the religious party, and Democrats are the non-religious party.” He cites Tocqueville for the view that while in Europe, everyone understood that religion and republicanism were enemies, that was not the case in America where, notwithstanding religious differences, Americans have never had religious and non-religious parties in the same way. But that is now changing, Mark claims, citing a Pew Center survey indicating that there is increasingly a correlation between belief in God and party affiliation (Rs believe much more than Ds).

The piece may be read profitably alongside this article about the introduction of the new “Do No Harm Act” by various Senate Democrats, whose object is to narrow the protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, especially as a defense against the operation of “others’ civil rights.” It appears that the civil right of religious liberty would take second place to any other civil right under the proposed statute. Rick Garnett offers the view in the piece that the Act “reflects a mistaken view that religious freedom should only be granted when it is costless.” The story goes on to say that “since the bill is highly unlikely to pass, without Republican support, its purpose is in large part simply to announce Democrats’ priorities to voters before the midterm elections in the fall.” (this opinion is attributed to Charles Haynes of the Newseum)

The story seems to support Mark’s view that religion is becoming politicized along party lines. RFRA, after all, passed with very strong bipartisan support in 1993. Its aim was to protect religious freedom for all. But, so the argument might go, today the breakdown of support for RFRA, and the efforts to shrink it (and, eventually, perhaps to repeal it), demonstrate the fragmentation of support for religious freedom along party lines. Rs support religious civil liberties. Ds support other civil liberties.

I’m not sure this account is accurate. At the very least, it does not account for the way in which many progressives have thrown their support against, for example, the Trump Immigration order and in favor of Muslim immigrants. It does not account for at least some progressive support for the expansion of religious freedom to include non-traditional “religious” groups such as the Nones and other conscientious believers. It does not account for progressive support for at least some of the Court’s recent religious liberty cases, such as Holt v. Hobbs.

My own view is that we are witnessing the end of the period in which “religion” is seen to be a general good, and therefore in which “religious” freedom ought to be protected for that reason. I have written before about the vacuity and ultimate unsustainability of the category of “religion” in contemporary American law, and so I do not think it is particularly surprising to see this development. But that does not mean that one party is the party of “religion” while the other is the party against “religion.” It means that “religion” as a conceptual category thought, in general, to be worthwhile, and “religious freedom” as a right generally worth supporting, is moribund (there are reasons it is dying off, which I discuss in the piece).

Instead, what is emerging in the partisan fragmentation is that the Rs and Ds are becoming the parties of particular religions and religious traditions. Rs are in general more sympathetic to traditional Christian religious beliefs (in general, of course…there are prominent exceptions at the highest levels of government), while Ds are in general hostile to them–believing that Christians in particular “impose” their views (particularly their views about sexuality) on others in the name of Christianity. Ds are in general more sympathetic to religious views that are not traditionally Christian (indeed, one might even say that the Nones represent a distinctively modern Christian heresy, but that’s a subject for a different post) or that they associate with minority groups that they believe warrant special protection, while Rs are in general hostile to them. The reason that Senate Ds sponsor the No Harm Act is that they oppose the right of traditional Christians to use their views about sexuality to discriminate against LGBT people (I am putting it polemically, of course). The reason that Senate Rs oppose the Act is that they disagree. None of this has much at all to do with “religion” as an abstract category.

Perhaps if we had more parties in this country than the usual dreary duo (something to be fervently wished for, but that is also for another post), we would see even more fragmentation. But the growing divisions between our existing political parties along these lines reflect preferences for certain kinds of religion over others, not religion as such. They are both religious parties. The place of the specific religious tradition (or, in the case of the Nones, view) in American public life, its substantive positions (particularly as respects sexuality), its market strength, its “other-ness”–all of these and more are true markers of partisan support or opposition. What has changed politically is the notion that religion qua religion is worth protecting as an American good. And, in light of the incoherence of the category in American law and politics, small wonder that it has.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Some Thoughts on Our New Religious Politics

At the First Things site, I have an essay on the religious divide opening up in American politics, between Democrats and Republicans. Based on the increasing number of Nones among party members, Democrats are becoming the non-religious party, and Republicans the religious party. This divide would have been unknown at earlier periods of our history; Tocqueville, for example, famously commented on the absence of religious division in American politics. I predict what our new religious politics may mean for religious liberty. Here’s a snippet:

In short, a new sort of divide appears to be opening up in American politics: Republicans are the religious party, and Democrats are the non-religious party. This new divide may not be stable, of course. The racial and ethnic divisions among Democrats, which closely track the divide between the religious and the non-religious, may cause fissures within the party. African-Americans and Hispanics may press white progressives to make more room for traditional believers. And over time, Nones may make headway in the Republican Party. If current trends continue, though, religion will become a marker of political difference in a way it never has been before.

The new religious divide seems likely to make American politics even more bitter than it already is, particularly with respect to religious liberty. People’s commitment to religious liberty depends on whether they think religion is, on balance, a good thing for individuals and society. If people come to see religion as an obstacle rather than an aid to human flourishing, they are unlikely to sympathize with calls for the free exercise of religion. By definition, Nones reject traditional, organized religion as harmful or, at least, unnecessary. Their growing dominance in the party suggests that arguments in favor of religious freedom will have less and less appeal for Democrats. The divide is likely to be self-reinforcing, as Democrats come to see religious freedom as something only the other party cares about—and therefore something to be resisted. If Tocqueville came back to visit America today, he might not be so surprised.

You can read the whole essay here.

 

 

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Stanley, “Christianity in the Twentieth Century”

It was only last week that Mark noted University of Edinburgh historian BrianStanley Stanley’s book on Evangelicalism. Well, Professor Stanley has been busy, because he also has a second new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton UP). In American law, the twentieth century saw major changes as respects Christianity. Christianity is far and away the predominant religion in the United States as a historical matter, and nearly all of the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause firepower was directed at it in the twentieth century (as I discuss in this paper). It would be interesting to see what Professor Stanley has to say about the American situation in this new book.

Christianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world’s great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. Written by a leading scholar of world Christianity, the book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today–one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia.

Brian Stanley sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. Rather, Stanley provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom’s fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe.

Transnational in scope and drawing on the latest scholarship, Christianity in the Twentieth Century demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Gienapp, “The Second Creation”

Here’s an interesting new volume that seems to want very much to reflect an anti-originalist view of the meaning of constitutional text (and that aspires to “explosive”Second Creation implications for originalism), and yet might be thought, at least from the description, to be consistent with certain theories of “liquidation” of constitutional meaning that have been employed to supplement originalism. Incidentally, the original meaning of the religion clauses, as Donald Drakeman and others have shown, is notoriously opaque. Perhaps it might benefit from the sorts of methods employed by the author in this work. The book is The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard UP), by the historian Jonathan Gienapp.

Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Rosenblatt, “The Lost History of Liberalism”

Here is what looks like a rich and very useful intellectual history of liberalism that Liberalismdisagrees with, or at least greatly qualifies, certain contemporary views about the nature of the dominant political philosophy of the last 500 years. Of particular interest is the authors claim that many “liberals” were originally deeply religious thinkers and invested in the comprehensive (to use a modern term) morality of liberalism. The book is The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP) by historian Helena Rosenblatt.

The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry—and a term of derision—in today’s increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words “liberal” and “liberalism,” revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning.

In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. She shows that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and Germans who transformed it. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the concept become widely known in the United States—and then, as now, its meaning was hotly debated. Liberals were originally moralists at heart. They believed in the power of religion to reform society, emphasized the sanctity of the family, and never spoke of rights without speaking of duties. It was only during the Cold War and America’s growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms.

Today, we still can’t seem to agree on liberalism’s meaning. In the United States, a “liberal” is someone who advocates big government, while in France, big government is contrary to “liberalism.” Political debates founder because of semantic and conceptual confusion. The Lost History of Liberalism sets the record straight on a core tenet of today’s political conversation and lays the foundations for a more constructive discussion about the future of liberal democracy.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 2 Comments

“Dignity in the Legal and Political Philosophy of Ronald Dworkin” (Khurshid et al., eds.)

“Dignity” has become an increasingly important legal value in recent decades. It has Dworkintaken up a central position in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of substantive due process, where values including privacy and autonomy occupied the limelight in prior decades. Dignity has become, in these discussions, a right that the state can and/or must confer to particular individuals and groups for identitarian reasons. Dignity has a much longer and richer heritage in European legal systems as the source of rights in, for example, the European Convention on Human Rights and caselaw from the European Court of Human Rights.

The path of dignity in Anglophone legal philosophy is a complex one as well. Human dignity was not particularly emphasized by the great figures of legal positivism (Hart and Raz, for example, the latter of whom has focused primarily on autonomy). But recent studies by philosophers including Jeremy Waldron have also placed it in a more central position. Here is a new volume of essays concerning the place of dignity in the work of the eminent philosopher of law and political philosopher, Ronald Dworkin: Dignity in the Legal and Political Philosophy of Ronald Dworkin (OUP), edited by Salman Khurshid, Lokendra Malik, and Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco.

Well-known for his contribution to the juristic world, Professor Ronald Dworkin was an outstanding legal philosopher of his generation. This volume celebrates the thoughts of Ronald Dworkin on dignity. The contributors have critically engaged with different perspectives of Dworkin’s thoughts on dignity. The aim is to shed light on juridical and moral contemporary conundrums such as the role of dignity in constitutional contexts in India, and the understanding of dignity as either a foundation of human rights or as a supra value that illuminates other values and rights.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first part ‘Integrity, Values, Interpretation, and Objectivity’ focuses on Dworkin’s interpretive methodology and examines the way his value holism relies on his interpretative methodology. The second part ‘Dignity, Responsibility, and Free Will’ concentrates on elucidating the complex relationship between dignity, human will, and responsibility in Dworkin’s moral, legal, and political philosophy. In the third part ‘Freedom of Speech, Right to Privacy, and Rights’, the authors use Dworkin’s philosophical moral framework and the interpretative methodology to shed light on his own views on freedom of speech and the language of rights, including human rights. The fourth part ‘Dignity, Constitutions, and Legal Systems’ critically discusses Dworkin’s interpretative methodology to understand dignity in the context of constitutions, state, and law beyond the state. With contributions from eminent scholars across the world, the present volume will help in disseminating Dworkin’s rich jurisprudential thoughts.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Reinert, “The Academy of Fisticuffs”

9780674976641-lgIn this space last month, I wrote about a reference I had seen to an 18th Century Italian school called “The Academy of Fists” and suggested Marc might know what this was. I never received a response, and so I’ve had to do the digging on my own. It turns out it was a group of Enlightenment thinkers, including Cesare Beccaria, who sought to establish a new, secular order based in commerce–the Italian version of the doux commerce school. Later this year, Harvard will publish a study of the group, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy, by Harvard Business School professor Sophus Reinert. The doux commerce theory has drawn a lot of interest from scholars lately and this new book looks like it will be a good read. Here’s the description from the Harvard website:

The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed.

Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations.

Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.