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Around the Web

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

  • In Wallbuilder Presentations v. Mark, a D.C federal court granted a preliminary injunction against the removal of advertisements on a public bus that indicated that the American founders were Christians. The Court found that a local transit guideline banning advertisements that attempt to influence the public on controversial issues was unreasonable and susceptible to the biases of those overseeing its enforcement.
  • In Jane Does 1-11 v. Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, the 11th Circuit found that a policy granting religious exemptions for vaccinations only to certain religions violated the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. The Court rejected the university administration’s decision that only adherents of religions that expressly prohibit all immunizations may claim an exemption, holding that a government policy cannot use its own views of a belief’s legitimacy to judge whether it is sincerely held.
  • In Foothills Christian Ministry v. Johnson, a California federal court rejected a complaint by three churches against California’s Child Day Care Facilities Act which required all preschools to make acts of religious observation discretionary by the student’s parents. Because the Act allowed all registrants to reject the admission of any child whose parents refuse to allow their children to participate, the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked a cognizable injury.
  • In Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany v. Vullo, the NY Court of Appeals rejected a claim that the state’s religious exemption for mandatory coverage of medically necessary abortion was too narrow. The Court held that the state’s four-element test for qualification as a religious employer was generally applicable and therefore not subject to strict scrutiny, despite the alleged hardship of meeting the four elements.
  • A nondenominational church challenged a zoning objection made by the Town of Castle Rock, Colorado against the church’s use of an RV as temporary shelter for the homeless. The complaint alleges that the aforementioned objection violates the plaintiff’s Free Exercise Clause rights, citing multiple passages from Christian Scripture that mandate believers to tend to the homeless and hungry.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

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.

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Around the Web

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

  • In Bardonner v. Bardonner, the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld a custody order that prohibited a father from taking his son to his church. The court held that his free exercise rights were not infringed upon by this restriction as the child’s mother, the legal guardian of the child, had the right to determine the religious upbringing of her child.
  • In Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. State of Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the Catholic Charities Bureau and four of its sub-entities were not exempted from the state’s unemployment compensation law. The court reasoned that the controlling factor for qualification was whether the charity was operated primarily for religious purposes, and held that the charity’s purposes were instead charitable and secular.
  • The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom ended an official visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia following a demand by Saudi officials to have USCIRF Chairman Rabbi Abraham Cooper remove his kippah while visiting a religious site.
  • In Miller v. McDonald, the District Court for the Western District of New York upheld the State of New York’s removal of religious exemptions from its mandatory student vaccination requirement. The Court held that the law was facially neutral, and the mere removal of existing religious exemptions is insufficient to prove hostility towards religion.
  • An observant Jewish passenger on a JetBlue flight filed suit against the airliner in the District Court for the Southern District of New York after being forced off the flight when he refused to sit next to a woman who wasn’t his wife or blood relative, on account of his religious beliefs.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Protestant Missionaries in China

In researching a chapter for a book on international relations last fall, I read a great deal about the efforts of Protestant missionaries–mostly American, but also European–in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. The missionaries had a large impact among local Christians, especially Armenians, founding schools and cultural institutions and generally preaching Western values. They had rather less impact on the foreign policies of their home countries, a matter I address in the chapter. For those who are interested, a draft version of the chapter is here.

Protestant missionaries weren’t active only in Ottoman Turkey, of course. They probably had a greater presence in China. In fact, some scholars argue that the missionaries were a major factor in U.S. policy towards China. That probably overstates things. Foreign policy tends to respond to national interests rather than religious and moral appeals. But the missionaries’ presence did provide a reason–an excuse?–for Western intervention. A new book from Notre Dame Press explores the activities of British Protestant missionaries in 19th century China. The book is Protestant Missionaries in China, by Jonathan Seitz (Taiwan Graduate School of Theology). Here’s the publisher’s description:

With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world.

As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology.

Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire?

Gibbon famously wrote that Christianity was partly responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. By encouraging pacifism and other-worldliness, he argued, Christianity sapped Rome’s fighting spirit. Who knows? Correlation isn’t causation, after all, and anyway a Christian version of the empire survived another 1000 years in the east. But if the rise of Christianity explains Rome’s fall, what explains the apparent decline of the Pax Americana? Surely not the spread of Christian identity: the decline of American influence correlates with a decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians. This week, Yale publishes a book that attempts to explain what’s going on, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West. The authors are historians Peter Heather (King’s College, London) and political economist John Rappley (Cambridge). Looks fascinating. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration.

Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley explore the uncanny parallels, and productive differences between ancient Rome and the modern West, moving beyond the tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to unearth new lessons. From 399 to 1999, they argue, through the unfolding of parallel, underlying imperial life cycles, both empires sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Has the era of Western global domination indeed reached its end? Heather and Rapley contemplate what comes next.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

A New History of the Reformation

This new collection of essays from Oxford on the Protestant Reformation looks very interesting: The Oxford History of the Reformation. The editor is historian Peter Marshall (Warwick). The blurb from Oxford credits the Reformation for creating the pluralist world in which we live. That might be a bit of an overstatement. As Harold Berman and others showed, pluralism has been a big part of Western culture from at least the High Middle Ages. But there’s no denying, as the blub says, that the Reformation transformed pluralism into something even the Reformers didn’t expect. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

The Reformation was a seismic event in history whose consequences are still unfolding in Europe and across the world.

Martin Luther’s protests against the marketing of indulgences in 1517 were part of a long-standing pattern of calls for reform in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany, and then Europe, in furious arguments about how God’s will was to be ‘saved’.

However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity’s transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas.

Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this compact volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of ‘reform’. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Why American Rationalism Failed

At First Things today, I review The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, a new history of 19th-century American rationalists. The book offers interesting and sometimes amusing portraits of these men and women, one of whom turns out to be my great-granduncle, M.M. Mangasarian (left), who founded his own rationalist congregation in Chicago in 1900. Mangasarian had initial (and unusual) success, but his “Independent Religious Society” ultimately failed, for the same reason all the rationalist societies failed: an inability to resolve basic incoherencies in the movement. Plus, the religion of science is a hard sell for Americans, who tend to believe in transcendent reality, even if they are skeptical of organized religion.

Here’s an excerpt:

Inspired by the French positivist Auguste Comte and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and taking the eighteenth-century freethinker Thomas Paine as a kind of patron saint, a small group of Americans attempted to found a rationalist “religion” with science as its highest authority. They started congregations in cities like New York, Chicago, and Portland; they held meetings on Sunday mornings to compete with Christian rivals; they even wrote catechisms and ran Sunday Schools to indoctrinate new members. All confidently believed they were the vanguard of a new, secular religion that would displace Christianity and promote human progress.

But the new religion failed. The congregations attracted few followers; typically, as one British humorist wrote, these were churches “of three persons, but no God.” Most fizzled out or merged with larger groups like the Unitarians. Other than cranks who seemed as credulous as the believers they mocked, Americans had little interest in Comte’s wedding and funeral ceremonies or the relics of secular saints. (In 1905, after a long quest, a small group of freethinkers placed something they claimed to be a piece of Thomas Paine’s brain, sold to them for five pounds by an obscure London bookseller, in a monument in New Rochelle.)

Schmidt shows that rationalist congregations failed because organizers never resolved basic inconsistencies. Rationalism valued science and rejected metaphysics. Why, then, collect relics and meet weekly for thinly disguised worship services? Moreover, rationalism “made intellectual independence and the displacement of all religious authorities foundational to its platform.” Paine himself had railed against organized religion, famously declaring, “my own mind is my own church.” Similarly, although Emerson had prophesied a new religion with “science” for its “symbol,” he insisted on individual spiritual autonomy: “I go for Churches of one.” What, then, was the point of joining a new religion, even a rationalist one? People who share only a commitment to radical individualism and an opposition to religious orthodoxy are unlikely to form an enduring community.

You can read the whole review here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Liturgy Matters

I thought I was reasonably well informed about the English Reformation, but a new book from Yale recounts an episode of which, I confess, I had never heard, the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, in which the people of Cornwall and Devon revolted when the government forbade Latin liturgies and required use of the new, English-language Book of Common Prayer. The government quickly put down the rebellion–but at the cost of 4000 lives. I’m not sure if the rebellion passed out of general knowledge, or if their antipathy to Catholicism led the Framers to pass over it, but I have never seen a reference to the Prayer Book Rebellion in the Framers’ frequent warnings about the dangers of establishment. Odd, because the rebellion seems a good example of such dangers–as well as the importance of liturgy to religious identity. Few things matter more to believers than the language they use to pray, as current controversies in the Catholic and other Christian churches reveal even today.

The book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549, by historian Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton). The publisher’s description follows:

The fascinating story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” of 1549 which saw the people of Devon and Cornwall rise up against the Crown

The Western Rising of 1549 was the most catastrophic event to occur in Devon and Cornwall between the Black Death and the Civil War. Beginning as an argument between two men and their vicar, the rebellion led to a siege of Exeter, savage battles with Crown forces, and the deaths of 4,000 local men and women. It represents the most determined attempt by ordinary English people to halt the religious reformation of the Tudor period.

Mark Stoyle tells the story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” in full. Correcting the accepted narrative in a number of places, Stoyle shows that the government in London saw the rebels as a real threat. He demonstrates the importance of regional identity and emphasizes that religion was at the heart of the uprising. This definitive account brings to life the stories of the thousands of men and women who acted to defend their faith almost five hundred years ago.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Of Montaigne and Liberal Tolerance

Following on Marc’s recent posts on skepticism and knowledge, here is an interesting-looking new book from Notre Dame Press: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, by philosopher Ann Hartle (Emory). As Donald Frame once observed, Montaigne expressed skepticism about customs and culture (“Que sais-je?”), but never about the ultimate authority of the Church and its teachings about eternal life. In fact, accepting certain background assumptions about eternal truths may have allowed Montaigne space to tolerate diverse opinions about wordly things. In her new book, Hartle suggests that what she calls Montaigne’s project of “civility” depends on taking “sacred tradition” for granted. Perhaps, as a practical matter, liberal tolerance requires that a society accept certain assumptions without debate, so that doubt can be expressed on other subjects. What do I know? It’s worth thinking about.

Here is the publisher’s description:

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches. What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Edition of a Classic Textbook

Next month, Eerdman’s will release a new edition of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, a textbook by one of the greatest living historians of Christianity, Mark Noll (Notre Dame – Emeritus). Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

Mark Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada has been firmly established as the standard text on the Christian experience in North America. Now Noll has thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded his classic text to incorporate new materials and important themes, events, leaders, and changes of the last thirty years. Once again readers will benefit from his insights on the United States and Canada in this superb narrative survey of Christian churches, institutions, and cultural engagements from the colonial period through 2018.