Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In CI.G v. Siegfried, the Tenth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a high school student’s claim that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was expelled for an antisemitic Snapchat post. 
  • In Ervins v. Sun Prairie Area School District, a Wisconsin federal district court rejected a claim that a sixth-grade lesson on ancient Mesopotamia, which called on students to apply the Code of Hammurabi to a hypothetical situation, amounted to a violation of the Establishment Clause. 
  • In Gonzales v. Collier, a Texas federal district issued a temporary injunction barring the execution of death row inmate Ramiro Gonzales unless authorities grant all of his requested religious accommodations. Gonzales requests that his spiritual advisor be allowed in the death chamber so she can pray aloud, hold his hand, and place her other hand on his chest. 
  • In Perlot v. Green, an Idaho federal district court issued a preliminary injunction requiring the University of Idaho to rescind no-contact orders issued to three law students who are members of the Christian Legal Society (“CLS”). The University issued the no-contact orders after the CLS students discussed with a female LGBTQ student the Christian biblical view of marriage and sexuality. 
  • In Rutan-Ram v. Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, a Tennessee state three-judge panel held that a Jewish couple who were denied foster-parent training by a state-funded Christian child placement agency lacked standing to challenge a Tennessee law permitting faith-based adoption and foster care agencies to refuse to provide services that violate their religious convictions. 
  • In State of Wisconsin v. Whitaker, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a defendant’s claim that his religious liberty and associational rights were violated when the judge sentencing him made reference to his Amish community. 
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Evangelicalism and Migrants

We’ll see what happens, but one of the big political stories of 2022 seems to be a movement of Latino voters to the Republican Party. I’ve thought for some time that an underreported element in this story is a movement of Latinos to evangelical Christianity. A new book from Princeton University Press, In the Hands of God: How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States, by anthropologist Johanna Bard Richlin (University of Oregon) explores the latter phenomenon. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants’ turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment.

The conditions of migrant life—family separation, geographic isolation, legal precariousness, workplace vulnerability, and deep uncertainty about the future—shape specific affective maladies, including loneliness, despair, and feeling stuck. These feelings in turn trigger novel religious yearnings. Evangelical churches deliberately and deftly articulate, manage, and reinterpret migrant distress through affective therapeutics, the strategic “healing” of migrants’ psychological pain. Richlin offers insights into the affective dimensions of migration, the strategies pursued by evangelical churches to attract migrants, and the ways in which evangelical belonging enables migrants to feel better, emboldening them to improve their lives.

Looking at the ways evangelical churches help migrants navigate negative emotions, In the Hands of God sheds light on the versatility and durability of evangelical Christianity.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Constituents of Fanaticism

Fanaticism is a term almost always used pejoratively. The connotations are of excessive devotion, commitment, extremism, and uncritical enthusiasm. Often enough, fanaticism is paired with religion, as in, “he’s a religious fanatic,” and here one sees the presuppositions of liberal rationalism concerning the nature of religion in the phrase. But is there more of substance to fanaticism as a concept? Something more than simply a shallow term of conventional dismissal or disapproval? In this new book, Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History, (U. Penn. Press) Professor Zachary Goldsmith argues that there is, focusing on elements that include the pursuit of abstraction and novelty; violence to achieve messianic political ends; and the special appeal fanaticism has held for the intellectual class. Professor Goldsmith seems to contrast liberal political commitments with fanatical ones, and it will be interesting to see just what he means by this.

As the post-WWII liberal democratic consensus comes under increasing assault around the globe, Zachary R. Goldsmith investigates a timely topic: the reemergence of fanaticism. His book demonstrates how the concept of fanaticism, so often flippantly invoked with little forethought, actually has a long history stretching back to ancient times. Tracing this history through the Reformation and the Enlightenment to our present moment of political extremism run amok, Goldsmith offers a novel account of fanaticism, detailing its transformation from a primarily religious to a political concept around the time of the French Revolution. He draws on the work of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—all keen observers of fanaticism, and especially its political variant—in order to explore this crucial moment in the development of political fanaticism.

Examining conceptualizations of fanaticism from different geographical, political, temporal, and contextual backgrounds, Goldsmith reveals how the concept has changed over time and resists easy definition. Nevertheless, his analysis of the writings of key figures from the tradition of political thought regarding fanaticism yields a complex and nuanced understanding of the concept that allows us to productively identify and observe its most salient characteristics: irrationality, messianism, the embrace of abstraction, the desire for novelty, the pursuit of perfection, a lack of limits in politics, the embrace of violence, certainty, passion, and its perennial attraction to intellectuals. Goldsmith’s political-philosophical history of fanaticism offers us an argument and warning against fanaticism itself, demonstrating that fanaticism is antidemocratic, illiberal, antipolitical, and never necessary.

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a school district violated the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses when the district disciplined a football coach for visibly praying at midfield following football games. Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch found that the coach sought to engage in private, sincerely motivated religious exercise and decided that the district could not bar this activity because of its own Establishment Clause concerns. In reaching this decision, the Court repudiated the Lemon test – which had been relied upon by the lower courts in deciding the case. 
  • In LaCroix v. Town of Fort Myers Beach, Florida, the Eleventh Circuit preliminarily enjoined a town’s ban on all portable signs. The ordinance was challenged by an individual who was cited for carrying a sign on a public sidewalk that conveyed his “religious, political and social message” that Christianity offers hope and salvation. 
  • In Apache Stronghold v. United States, the Ninth Circuit held that a proposed federal government land exchange in Arizona will not substantially burden Apache religious exercise in violation of RFRA. The court also held it will not violate the First Amendment because the Land Exchange Provision is a neutral and generally applicable law. 
  • In Halczenko v. Ascension Health, Inc., the Seventh Circuit affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction that had been sought by a pediatric critical care specialist. The specialist was fired from his hospital position after he refused, on religious grounds, to comply with the hospital’s COVID vaccine mandate. The court concluded that Plaintiff had shown neither irreparable injury nor inadequate remedies through a Title VII action. 
  • In Mishler v. Mishler, a Texas state appellate court held that there is neither a state nor a federal free exercise issue with a divorce decree, based on the parties’ prior agreement that the husband would deliver certain property to the wife only upon the wife’s acceptance of a “Gett” (a Jewish divorce document that the wife must accept for the divorce to be valid under Jewish religious law).