For those who are interested, here’s a writeup of this month’s panel discussion on SCOTUS’s recent school-prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, with panelists Stephanie Barclay (Notre Dame), Marc DiGirolami (CUA), and Mattone Center Director Mark Movsesian. Among the topics discussed: the end of the endorsement test, the meaning of the Court’s new history-and-tradition test, and the lingering problem of coercion. A video of the panel is below. Listen in!
Denmark Vesey’s Bible
In my law-and-religion seminar, we spend about a week on religion in public culture, focusing specifically on the United States. Historically, and even today, religious appeals have played a major role in American public conflicts, on all sides. A new book from Princeton University Press, Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, discusses the role of biblical allusions in one important episode, a slave rebellion that shook the antebellum South. The author is Jeremy Schipper, a professor in the Departments for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Here is the publisher’s description:
On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man, was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina. He was convicted of plotting what might have been the largest insurrection against slaveholders in US history. Witnesses claimed that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote and justify the revolt. While sentencing Vesey to death, Lionel Henry Kennedy, a magistrate at the trial, accused Vesey not only of treason but also of “attempting to pervert the sacred words of God into a sanction for crimes of the blackest hue.” Denmark Vesey’s Bible tells the story of this momentous trial, examining the role of scriptural interpretation in the deadly struggle against American white supremacy and its brutal enforcement.
Jeremy Schipper brings the trial and its aftermath vividly to life, drawing on court documents, personal letters, sermons, speeches, and editorials. He shows how Vesey compared people of African descent with enslaved Israelites in the Bible, while his accusers portrayed plantation owners as benevolent biblical patriarchs responsible for providing religious instruction to the enslaved. What emerges is an explosive portrait of an antebellum city in the grips of racial terror, violence, and contending visions of biblical truth.
Shedding light on the uses of scripture in America’s troubled racial history, Denmark Vesey’s Bible draws vital lessons from a terrible moment in the nation’s past, enabling us to confront racism and religious discord today with renewed urgency and understanding.
The Culture Wars, 30 Years Later
Thirty years ago, scholar James Davison Hunter coined the phrase, “the culture wars,” to describe American social dynamics at the end of the Cold War. The wars have only intensified–so much so, in fact, that people now use a new term, “polarization,” to describe what is going on. More and more, it seems the Enlightenment settlement between rationalism and Christianity that characterized American culture has unraveled. (Stay tuned for my new Legal Spirits interview with Dan McCarthy, in which we discuss this topic). What will come next? Can America hold together?
Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, has a new book on the subject, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. The publisher is Yale University Press. Anything by Hunter on this subject is self-recommending. Here’s Yale’s description:
The long-developing cultural divisions beneath our present political crisis
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”
James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.
Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?
A New Collection on Law in the Hebrew Bible
When law professors think of law and religion, we’re apt to think of contemporary church-and-state issues: the free exercise and establishment clauses, statutes like RFRA and RLUIPA and other civil rights laws. But issues of law come up within religions as well. Not too many scholars focus on the latter question, at least in contemporary law schools, which is a pity. A new collection of essays out later this month from Cambridge, The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible, is therefore a very welcome addition. The editor is Bruce Wells at the University of Texas-Austin. Here’s the publisher’s description:
This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law. Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel’s statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah’s laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.
Barclay and DeGirolami at St. John’s Next Week
I’m delighted to announce that next week the Center will welcome Stephanie Barclay (Notre Dame), and welcome back Marc DeGirolami (Catholic University), for a discussion of the recent school prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022). Details about the event, which the Center will co-host with the St. John’s Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, are here (registration is required). Friends of the Center, drop by and say hello!
Making American Religion Moderate
At the Law & Liberty site this morning, I review a new documentary on the history of religious freedom in America, “Free Exercise.” The film shows how minority religious communities–Catholics, Mormons, and others–have changed America over time. But, I argue, America has changed minority religions as well. Here’s an excerpt:
ike the Quakers, who went from being bottle-breaking radicals to sober citizens, Catholics and Mormons themselves changed in ways that made them less threatening to the American majority. One major point of contention between the Catholic Church and the wider American society had to do with religious liberty itself. The nineteenth-century Church was the Church of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), a papal document that condemned freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state as dangerous heresies. America’s Protestant majority saw this document and the values it espoused as hostile to fundamental American commitments. In the 1928 campaign, The Atlantic published an open letter questioning whether a Catholic like Smith could serve as president, citing the Syllabus and other papal pronouncements on church and state.
A hundred years later, though, and largely through the efforts of American Catholics like Fr. John Courtney Murray, the Second Vatican Council adopted Dignitatis Humanae, a document that specifically endorses religious liberty as a civil right. Catholic scholars have argued that Dignitatis Humanae and the Syllabus of Errors can be interpreted consistently with one another and that, from a theological perspective, there was no change. However theologians understand the situation, though, after Dignitatis Humanae, something had indeed changed as a practical matter. A major point of tension between the Catholic Church and American culture had disappeared, largely because of American influence.
Or consider the LDS Church. A primary source of conflict between Mormons and the wider American society in the nineteenth century had to do with plural marriage, the issue in cases like Reynolds and Davis. In 1890, however, the LDS Church officially ended the practice—making it possible for Utah to be admitted as a state six years later. Practically speaking, Mormonism changed in a way that made it much less threatening to the wider American public. Mormons conformed to social convention, and relations between the LDS Church and other Americans have been better ever since.
What causes religions in America to move toward the mean over time? Some argue that the Lockean ideology that underlies our First Amendment is designed to encourage religious moderation—to minimize religious “enthusiasms” that threaten social peace. If that’s the case, Lockeanism certainly seems to be working. Or perhaps another factor explains things. Two hundred years ago, Tocqueville wrote about the strong pressures for social conformity that exist in the United States, where he observed “little independence of mind.” Whether as a result of ideology or social norms, or both, the pattern is apparent.
You can read the full essay here.
Modernity and the Muslim State
Modernity, most people think, implies the separation of the state and religion. That has certainly been the case in the Christian West. But it has not been the case elsewhere, including in many Muslim-majority countries. Islam has never divided religion and the state in the same way the Christian West has, of course, and many states where Islam is the majority religion have aspired to modern administrative government while maintaining state identification with Islam. A new book from Princeton, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, explores this phenomenon. The author is Islam scholar Malika Zeghal (Harvard). Here’s the publisher’s description:
In The Making of the Modern Muslim State, Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Zeghal argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements.
Examining constitutional projects, public spending, school enrollments, and curricula, Zeghal shows that although modern Muslim-majority polities have imported Western techniques of governance, the state has continued to protect and support the religion, community, and institutions of Islam. She finds that even as Middle Eastern states have expanded their nonreligious undertakings, they have dramatically increased their per capita supply of public religious provisions, especially Islamic education—further feeding the political schism between Islamists and their adversaries. Zeghal illuminates the tensions inherent in the partnerships between states and the body of Muslim scholars known as the ulama, whose normative power has endured through a variety of political regimes. Her detailed and groundbreaking analysis, which spans Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, makes clear the deep historical roots of current political divisions over Islam in governance.
American Delight
Scholars have noted the link between nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and twenty-first century Nones. In fact, you might think of Nones–it’s more correct to call them Spiritual Independents–as the New Thoreaus. A new book from the University of Chicago Press, The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness explores the links the connect the Transcendentalists and the Nones, including a shared focus on spiritual delight. The author is Catherine Albanese (University of California, Santa Barbara). Here’s the publisher’s description:
An ambitious history of desire in Anglo-American religion across three centuries.
The pursuit of happiness weaves disparate strands of Anglo-American religious history together. In The Delight Makers, Catherine L. Albanese unravels a theology of desire tying Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the religiously unaffiliated today. As others emphasize redemptive suffering, this tradition stresses the “metaphysical” connection between natural beauty and spiritual fulfillment. In the earth’s abundance, these thinkers see an expansive God intent on fulfilling human desire through prosperity, health, and sexual freedom. Through careful readings of Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Esther Hicks, and more, Albanese reveals how a theology of delight evolved alongside political overtures to natural law and individual liberty in the United States.
The Legal History of the Church of England
When the Framers of the First Amendment thought of an established church, they would have had one particular example in mind: the Established Church of England. But the laws respecting the establishment of religion in Britain have changed across the centuries. Establishment today does not mean what it did in the 18th century–or the 16th, for that matter. A new collection of essays from Bloomsbury, The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present, explores the changes. The editors are Norman Doe, who directs our sister Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University and whose work we have noted many times, and Stephen Coleman, the Cardiff Centre’s Assistant Director. Here is the publisher’s description:
This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the principal legal landmarks in the evolution of the law of the established Church of England from the Reformation to the present day.
It explores the foundations of ecclesiastical law and considers its crucial role in the development of the Church of England over the centuries.The law has often been the site of major political and theological controversies, within and outside the church, including the Reformation itself, the English civil war, the Restoration and rise of religious toleration, the impact of the industrial revolution, the ritualist disputes of the 19th century, and the rise of secularisation in the twentieth. The book examines key statutes, canons, case-law, and other instruments in fields such as church governance and ministry, doctrine and liturgy, rites of passage (from baptism to burial) and church property.
Each chapter studies a broadly 50-year period, analysing it in terms of continuity and change, explaining the laws by reference to politics and theology, and evaluating the significance of the legal landmarks for the development of church law and its place in wider English society.
A New Book on Religion in Modern Ireland
Scholars frequently cite Ireland as an example of rapid secularization–how a country can go, in the space of one or two generations, from identifying strongly with a religion to viewing it with indifference and even hostility. In Ireland’s case, the collapse of Catholicism seems to have been particularly sudden and unanticipated, much like the similar “Quiet Revolution” that took place in Quebec, another overwhelmingly Catholic society, after 1968. A forthcoming collection of essays from Oxford, The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, addresses this transformation, as well as other phenomena, including the rise of the Irish Nones. The editors are sociologist Gladys Ganiel and historian Andrew R. Holmes, both of Queen’s University Belfast. Here is the publisher’s description:
What does religion mean to modern Ireland and what is its recent social and political history? The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition.
The handbook’s thirty-two chapters address long-standing historical and political debates about religion, identity, and politics, including religion’s contributions to division and violence. They also offer perspectives on how religion interacts with education, the media, law, gender and sexuality, science, literature, and memory. Whilst providing insight into how everyday religious practices have intersected with the institutional structures of Catholicism and Protestantism, the book also examines the island’s increasing religious diversity, including the rise of those with ‘no religion’.
Written by leading scholars in the field and emerging researchers with new perspectives, this is an authoritative and up-to-date volume that offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the enduring significance of religion on the island.