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On Why the West Should Not Abandon Armenia

In First Things today, I have an essay on the continuing crisis in Karabakh, where 120,000 Armenians face a real threat of ethnic cleansing by the Aliyev regime in Baku. I argue that Baku has so far played a double game, cozying up to Moscow while avoiding sanctions by hinting at potential benefits to the West. It’s time for that to stop. The West needs to do more to encourage Baku to negotiate about resolving the Karabakh crisis in good faith. Here’s a sample:

But without sanctions or other serious action, Aliyev will continue to treat Armenian concessions as invitations to engage in further aggression. For example, in negotiations in Brussels last month, both Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to recognize each other’s territorial integrity and discussed reopening railway connections based on mutual reciprocity. Pashinyan subsequently confirmed that Armenia was ready to recognize Azeri sovereignty over Karabakh (provided arrangements could be made to guarantee Armenians’ security there)—a painful public concession, apparently made at the urging of the U.S., which caused anger in Karabakh itself.

How did Aliyev respond? After Pashinyan’s statement, Aliyev again threatened Karabakh Armenians with ethnic cleansing and, for good measure, threatened Armenia as well. Armenia would have to agree to Azerbaijan’s demands with respect to border demarcation, he announced, or face further aggression. “The border will pass where we say,” Aliyev crowed. “They know that we can do it. No one will help them.” A bewildered Pashinyan asked whether Aliyev was already abandoning the position he had taken in Brussels and demanded clarification. The U.S. has not yet responded.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, American and European leaders have spoken of the need to defend democracy and self-determination against authoritarian aggression. That is precisely what is needed in the South Caucasus now. At the very least, Western sanctions against the Aliyev regime should be on the table. Even in realist terms, it would not be in the West’s interest to abandon Armenia, which is looking to reorient itself and which can serve, in time, as an important bridge between the West, the South Caucasus, and beyond. Unless the West creates greater incentives for Azerbaijan to negotiate in good faith, however, a humanitarian crisis looks about to unfold.

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Law and Religion in Judaism and Christianity

Jews and Christians–or, more correctly, Judaism and Christianity–have been contesting the place and purpose of law for two thousand years. It’s a debate that never exhausts itself, because each religion has defined itself largely as against the other, and law has been one of the central points of controversy. This month, the British publisher, James Clarke & Co., releases an addition to the debate, Law and Religion: Essays on the Place of the Law in Israel and Early Christianity, edited by the late Biblical scholar Barnabas Lindars of the University of Manchester. The book’s introduction indicates that most of the papers date from decades ago, so I’m not sure why the collection is appearing only now. Anyway, the table of contents looks very interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:

The place of the Law and its relationship to religious observance and faith is a contested topic in the study of both the Old and New Testament. In Law and Religion, members of the Erhardt Seminar group provide an insight into the debate, probing key topics and offering new contributions to the subject. Their essays are grouped into three sections, focusing in turn on the Law’s place in Israelite religion, in the Jesus tradition, and in Paul and the Apostolic tradition.

Thus, the foundation of the connection between law and religion in ancient Israel is explored, along with the decisive influence of the Deuteronomic reform and the radical new understanding now emerging of the later development in Judaism of the New Testament Period. So, also, the contemporary challenge to the conventional picture of Jesus and the Law is addressed, the attitude of Paul is shown in new light, and post-Pauline developments are examined. Readers will find in this symposium a refreshing breadth of opinion on a debate that spans the gamut of disciplines within Biblical studies.

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A New Study of Fatwas in Islamic Law

Even people who know little about Islamic law have heard of the fatwa: an opinion, issued by a qualified scholar, or mufti, on a question of Islamic law. In classical thought, a fatwa is not binding in itself; its authority is persuasive and dependent largely on the learning and reputation of the mufti who issues it. The relationship in Islamic law between fatwas and court judgments, which are binding, is a fascinating one and worthy of sustained study.

A new book from Cambridge, Fatwa and the Making and Renewal of Islamic Law
From the Classical Period to the Present, explores the history of the practice. The author is Omer Awass (American Islamic College). Here’s the publisher’s description:

In this book, Omer Awass examines the formation, history, and transformation of the Islamic legal discourse and institutions through the lens of a particular legal practice: the issuance of fatwas (legal opinions). Tracing the growth of Islamic law over a vast geographical expanse -from Andalusia to India – and a long temporal span – from the 7th to the 21st century, he conceptualizes fatwas as the ‘atomic units’ of Islamic law. Awass argues that they have been a crucial element in the establishment of an Islamic legal tradition. He also provides numerous case studies that touch on economic, social, political, and religious topics. Written in an accessible style, this volume is the first to offer a comprehensive investigation of fatwas within such a broad spatio-temporal scope. It demonstrates how instrumental fatwas have been to the formation of Islamic legal traditions and institutions, as well as their unique forms of reasoning.

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Movsesian on Defining Religion

In First Things this month, I have an essay arguing that religion, for legal purposes, presumptively means a collective rather than a purely personal pursuit. It’s a question that already has perplexed courts in the context of COVID-19, and is likely to become more pressing with the rise of the Nones.

Here’s an excerpt:

It’s time for the Court to establish that religion, at its core, denotes communal beliefs and practices rather than idiosyncratic personal commitments. A communal definition makes sense for several reasons. First, the existence of a community captures something important about the social reality of religion. In lived experience, religion suggests a group of people linked with one another, through time, in worship. As sociologist Christian Smith writes, “religions are almost invariably social activities—communities of memory engaged in carrying on particular traditions.” Without a communal structure to give them meaning, religious practices such as prayer, fasting, and so on are incoherent, “simply the strange doings of odd people.”

Second, a focus on community accords with an important goal of religious freedom: the promotion of private associations that encourage cooperative projects and check state power. As Tocqueville explained, the despotic state desires nothing more than for individual citizens to feel isolated from and indifferent to others, so that it can divide and dominate them all. By encouraging people to identify with and look out for one another, private associations militate against self-centeredness and social isolation and help keep the state in check. Religious groups perform this function especially well. No associations have been better, historically, at promoting cooperative social projects and defying state oppression—as dictators down the centuries have learned.

Third, the existence of a religious community reduces the possibility of fraud. Everyone agrees that courts need not honor a religious claim that a litigant does not genuinely hold or raises merely as a pretext. But sincerity, which depends on a claimant’s subjective state of mind, is notoriously difficult for courts to evaluate. The existence of a religious community to which the claimant belongs can provide objective evidence of the claimant’s good faith. A continuous tradition of teaching and worship, and an organized body that enforces discipline, can go a long way toward demonstrating the claimant’s genuineness about his religious convictions.

Fourth, the existence of a community helps ensure that religious commitments are not frivolous and fleeting, but serious and lasting. It is one thing for the state to accommodate a citizen’s profoundly held beliefs. To do so honors the citizen’s dignity and accords him respect. It is another thing to defer to commitments that may be temporary and superficial. Not all idiosyncratic commitments fit that description, of course, and beliefs can be religious even if novel. But the existence of an established religious community can screen out passing whims that the state need not honor.

Finally, making the definition of religion turn at least in part on the existence of a religious community reduces the potential for administrative disorder. Long ago, the Supreme Court warned that if personal spiritual convictions were sufficient to override legal obligations, “every citizen [would] become a law unto himself.” One should not overstate this concern, but the rise of the Nones makes it important today. Requiring a claimant to show that his or her objections are not merely personal but derive from the teachings of an organized body of believers can reduce the potential for conflict with state laws—especially in a society in which very large numbers claim to follow their own spiritual paths.

You can find the rest of the First Things essay here. A much longer version of the essay will appear in a forthcoming symposium issue of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.

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On the Autonomy of Religious Communities

Marc has written before about the rise of what he calls the “Australian School” in law and religion, a group of scholars, many fairly young, which “offers justifications for religious freedom rooted in theological considerations.” Marc identifies Alex Deagon (Queensland University of Technology) as a member of this school. Earlier this year, Bloombsury published Deagon’s latest work, A Principled Framework for the Autonomy of Religious Communities: Reconciling Freedom and Discrimination, which takes a comparative perspective and argues for “a peaceful coexistence of difference which supports both religious freedom and equality.” Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

This book engages in a theological critique of the legal frameworks and theoretical approaches of Australia, the US and England to create a peaceful coexistence of difference which supports both religious freedom and equality.

It develops a new framework for reconciling religious freedom and discrimination in Western liberal democracies and presents a unique approach to practically supporting both religious freedom and equality as fundamentally important objectives which promote more compassionate and cohesive communities.

The book applies the idea of peaceful coexistence of difference by assuming the dignity and goodwill of different people and perspectives, and proceeds upon shared virtues such as love which are affirmed by all.

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2022-2023 Year-End Review

It’s been a productive 2022-2023 academic year at the Center. We’re pleased to share below some of the highlights (PDF). We have lots more planned for next year, so please stay tuned–and if you’d like to get on our mailing list, please let us know. Meanwhile, best wishes for a great summer!

23_CLR_YE_NewsletterDownload
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Kronman on Disbelief

“I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race,” the author of Ecclesiastes writes. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Yale law professor Anthony Kronman takes on this burden in a recent book, After Disbelief, which Yale releases in paperback form this month. The book tries to make sense of the essential human wish to understand eternity in a disenchanted world. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Many people of faith believe the meaning of life depends on our connection to an eternal order of some kind. Atheists deride this belief as a childish superstition.

In this wise and profound book, Anthony Kronman offers an alternative to these two entrenched positions, arguing that neither addresses the complexities of the human condition. We can never reach God, as religion promises, but cannot give up the longing to do so either. We are condemned by our nature to set goals we can neither abandon nor fulfill, yet paradoxically are able to approach more closely if we try. The human condition is one of inevitable disappointment tempered by moments of joy.

Resolutely humanistic and theologically inspired, this moving book offers a rational path to the love of God amidst the disenchantments of our time.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Decline and Fall

Gibbon, among others, famously argued that the rise of Christianity contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, in the West, anyway: In the East, the Empire lasted another 1000 years, which is a long time to fall by any standards. A new book from Harvard University Press, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy, discusses the establishment of Christianity in the Empire, among other topics, in its account of the last two centuries of the Empire in the West. The author is historian and classicist Michael Kulikowsi (Penn State). Here’s the publisher’s description:

A sweeping political history of the turbulent two centuries that led to the demise of the Roman Empire.

The Tragedy of Empire begins in the late fourth century with the reign of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, and takes readers to the final years of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the sixth century. One hundred years before Julian’s rule, Emperor Diocletian had resolved that an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the Rhine and Tyne to the Sahara, could not effectively be governed by one man. He had devised a system of governance, called the tetrarchy by modern scholars, to respond to the vastness of the empire, its new rivals, and the changing face of its citizenry. Powerful enemies like the barbarian coalitions of the Franks and the Alamanni threatened the imperial frontiers. The new Sasanian dynasty had come into power in Persia. This was the political climate of the Roman world that Julian inherited.

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Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions

From the beginning, when we started this center a dozen years ago (time flies!), one of the subjects we have most wanted to study is comparative law and religion. The US is not the only country to have to negotiate the competing demands of church and state, and observing how other countries manage those demands can be instructive.

A new book from Oxford University Press looks to be a worthy edition to the area: Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions: Contemporary Entanglements of Faith and Government, by political scientist Nashon Perez (Bar Ilan University). The book covers four of the cases that we have discussed here at the Forum and in Legal Spirits podcasts over the years. Here’s the description of the book from the publisher’s website:

The institutional entanglement of religion and government takes many forms, including direct governmental funding of religious associations, legal recognition, and governmental endorsement of religious symbols in public spaces. The entanglement of church and state remains contentious in many democratic countries today. In fact, in Europe and North America, there are a growing number of instances of governments becoming entwined with religious matters.

Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions explores the entanglement of religion and government in a comparative analysis of four cases within democratic countries: the British Jewish Free School (JFS) case, in which the U.K. Supreme Court forced a government-funded faith school to change its admission policies; The European Court of Human Rights decision in Martinez, in which the Catholic church kept its right to dismiss religion teachers within the Spanish public school system; The Lautsi case, in which the Italian government successfully defended its policy of mandating a crucifix in all public school classrooms – at the European Court of Human Rights; and the case of the Bladensburg World War I Memorial (often called the Peace Cross) in Maryland, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the cross’s public placement and maintenance funding does not violate the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment. Perez describes how these cases create complex, hybrid religious-statist institutions and outlines a novel framework for understanding these cases.

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Movsesian on Kresta on Tocqueville

I was happy to chat again last week with Al Kresta of Ave Maria Radio about the recent Wall Street Journal poll showing a decline in interest in community, country, and tolerance–and how the poll shows that Tocqueville was basically correct. A link to the interview is here.