Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Is American Christianity in Decline?

In his column in last week’s Times, the always interesting Ross Douthat sifts through recent data on the decline of Christianity in the United States. It’s true, he writes, that the percentage of people declaring themselves Christian is declining, and that the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they have “no religion” is increasing. But that doesn’t indicate an across-the board decline in Christian belief and practice. Seriously committed Christians remain so. It’s the nominal, weakly committed Christians who are leaving the churches:

The relative stability of the Gallup data fits with analysis offered by the sociologists Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock in a 2017 paper, “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion.” Drawing on the General Social Survey, they argued that the recent decline of institutional religion is entirely a function of the formerly weakly affiliated ceasing to identify with religious bodies entirely; for the strongly affiliated (just over a third of the American population), the trend between 1990 and the present is a flat line, their numbers neither growing nor collapsing but holding steady across an era of supposedly dramatic religious change.

That resilience should not be entirely comforting for Christian churches, since both their everyday work and their cultural influence depends on reaching beyond their core adherents, and inspiring a mix of sympathy and interest among people who aren’t at worship every week. Indeed, combining an enduring core of belief with a general falling-away could make the Christian position permanently embattled, tempting the pious to paranoia and misguided alliances while the wider culture becomes more anticlerical, more like 19th-century secular liberalism in its desire to batter down the redoubts of traditional belief.

But for now that resilience also puts some limits on how successfully anti-Christian policies can be pursued, how easily religious conservatism can be marginalized within the conservative coalition (not easily) and how completely the liberal coalition can be secularized — not completely at all, so long as its base remains heavily African-American and Hispanic. (The tragic racial polarization of American Christianity, in this sense, may have one positive effect: preventing a complete polarization of our politics between Christian and post-Christian coalitions.)

Douthat is right about this. As I’ve written elsewhere, the real story in American religion is its increasing polarization. The middle is dropping out in favor of extremes on either end: the Nones and the Traditionally Religious. Whether the departure of the Laodecians from America’s churches will be on the whole a good thing, for the churches and the society at large, remains to be seen.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Standing Argument in the New Abortion Case

In our latest Legal Spirits podcast, Mark and I discuss June Medical Services v. Gee, the latest case about abortion picked up by the Supreme Court. This is a 5th Circuit case reviewing a Louisiana law requiring doctors to obtain admitting privileges at area hospitals in order to continue performing abortions at clinics. The 5th Circuit upheld the law, distinguishing a facially similar law in Texas that the Supreme Court struck down three years ago by a vote of 5-3 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. In the podcast, Mark and chat about the lower court opinion, the petition, and the cross-petition.

I want to say just a little more in this post about the cross-petition, which advances an argument about standing–the constitutional requirement that a claimant allege a concrete and particularized injury that was caused by the defendant and can be redressed by the Court. One widely recognized rule of standing–a “prudential” rule rather than a constitutionally compelled rule (meaning that Congress could, if it wished, legislate around the prudential doctrine)–is that one cannot assert claims on behalf of other parties; that is, so-called “third party standing” or jus tertii is generally impermissible. There are exceptions to the rule. For example, a parent may assert a claim on behalf of a child. But in the main, third party standing has been rejected by the Court as adequate.

One of the exceptions to the third party standing prohibition was carved out by the Court in 1976, after Roe v. Wade, in a case called Singleton v. Wulff. In Wulff, the Court held that two Missouri physicians had standing to challenge a law excluding abortions that were not “medically indicated” for purposes of Medicaid coverage. A majority of the Court found adequate standing for the doctors themselves because of the financial consequences they might face in the absence of Medicaid coverage. But a plurality of the Court went further: in an opinion by Justice Blackmun, it held that physicians have the right to assert third party standing on behalf of women whose rights may be affected by a particular law because it thought that the interests of physicians and their patients in the abortion context are “inextricably bound up” and thus there exists a “close relationship” between them, that doctors are “effective advocates” for their patients, and that women may not be effective advocates of their own rights in this area.

The Gee cross-petition takes aim at this plurality holding in Wulff. Citing Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion in Whole Woman’s Health (which only he signed), it argues that the Court should revisit the third party standing rule of Wulff and that the interests of women and physicians are actually adverse in this case (it claims that many of the doctors simply do not want to obtain admitting privileges, which would enhance patient safety). It also argues that because the issue of prudential third party standing was not explicitly raised below, the physicians have waived that standing, while the physicians say that it is the state that has waived its right to object to third party standing.

As we discuss in the podcast, there is also an amicus brief in the case submitted by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a former clerk of Chief Justice John Roberts. It argues that the effect of this third party standing rule is to give physicians a heightened standard of review that they would not ordinarily get if they were asserting their own injuries. On their own, the law would be reviewed for a rational basis, but through third party standing, it is now reviewed under the higher undue burden standard of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And it also argues that even if the physicians are granted third party standing, they cannot satisfy the undue burden standard as fleshed out by Casey and WWH because they cannot show that the statute affects a “large fraction of women,” which is the language used in the cases.

The Court could certainly use this case as a chance either to rethink or to rein in the Wulff rule. Option A: it could revisit the rule altogether and reject the plurality portion of the Wulff rule. Option B: it could narrow the Wulff rule to situations in which there is evidence that a “large fraction of women” might be affected by the legislation in question, and that there is insufficient evidence in Gee. Note that rejecting the third party standing rule altogether would abrogate that part of Whole Woman’s Health concerning standing (doctors brought the challenge there too), while the remainder of the “law” of WWH would remain in effect. Probably there are other possibilities. But resolving the case on the basis of third party standing doctrine might give the Court a way to chip away at existing abortion law without going directly after the likes of Casey. “They’ve narrowed Singleton v. Wulff!!” just doesn’t have the same sky-is-falling quality for abortion rights supporters that a more direct attack might. Going in this direction would also track some of the skepticism with which some members of the Court view its broader standing doctrines (see, for example, Justice Gorsuch’s views on standing in the Bladensburg Cross opinion).

It will be interesting to see just what the Court does with the standing claim. Stay tuned. And for more on the case generally (including some speculation about the standing claim), have a listen to our podcast!

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Religion of Prison Abolition

A stirp of liberation theology, as it were. A new book discussing religious features or religious phenomena attending the movement from the far left to abolish all prisons. The book is Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (Oxford), by “activist-scholars” Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd.

“Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition.

Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America’s grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era’s biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today’s grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition “spirit.””