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Around the Web:

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

  • In Woolard v. Thurmond, a California federal court upheld the requirement that state funds for home school programs be used only for secular instructional materials. The court ruled that this policy does not infringe on parents’ free exercise of religion, as states are permitted to provide strictly secular education in public schools.
  • In Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Abbott, a Texas federal court ordered the state to pay $346,500 in attorneys’ fees to the Freedom From Religion Foundation in connection with litigation over Texas’s removing FFRF’s Bill of Rights Nativity display from the State Capitol in 2015.
  • In Aldersgate United Methodist Church of Montgomery v. Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, Inc., the Alabama Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from 44 Methodist congregations trying to disaffiliate from the church’s main body but still keep their property. The court applied the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, ruling that deciding the case would require it to interpret church doctrine and internal rules, which is prohibited by the First Amendment.
  • The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and others filed a lawsuit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission challenging the inclusion of abortion as a covered medical condition in the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The plaintiffs argue this inclusion and the nullification of the Act’s religious exemption will force employers to support abortion.
  • Ohio’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit to prevent Hebrew Union College from selling off its valuable Judaica library collection to address a financial deficit. The lawsuit alleges the college is violating state law by not disclosing the sale to donors and by breaching fiduciary duties by not preserving the collection according to donor intent.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Teaching American Religious History

Here at the Mattone Center, we focus on the study of law-and-religion, that is, the relationship between these two social institutions. Mostly, we emphasize the “law” part. But from the beginning we have tried to pay attention as well to religion as a subject in itself, especially to the history of religion in the West generally and the United States particularly. In my law-and-religion seminar, for example, I spend significant time on American religious history, much of which students are learning for the first time. I believe the material is essential. Without a knowledge of our religious history, it’s difficult to understand why our law with respect to religion has developed as it has.

A book out this month from the University of Wisconsin Press, Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History, seems a very good resource for instructors getting into this material. The editors are historian Karen J. Johnson (Wheaton College) and religious studies scholar Jonathan M. Yeager (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

How to learn, think, and teach about a vital and sometimes contentious topic

Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history’s broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early Native American beliefs and practices, to European explorations of the New World, to the most recent presidential elections, religion has been a significant feature of the American story. In Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History, a diverse group of eminent historians and history teachers provide a practical tool for teachers looking to improve history instruction at the upper-level secondary and undergraduate level.

This book offers a breadth of voices and approaches to teaching this crucial part of US history. Religion can be a delicate topic, especially in public education, and many students and teachers bring strongly held views and identities to their understanding of the past. The editors and contributors aim to help the reader see religion in fresh ways, to present sources and perspectives that may be unfamiliar, and to suggest practical interventions in the classroom that teachers can use immediately.

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Around the Web

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

  • In Carter v. Local 556, Transport Union Workers of America, the Fifth Circuit stayed an order by a Texas District Court ordering attorneys to attend 8 hours of religious liberty training by a Christian non-profit. The attorneys were responsible for firing an employee after she espoused religiously-motivated pro-life content on her personal social media accounts.
  • Three Jewish students of UCLA sued the university for failing to protect its Jewish student population from campus unrest and discrimination in violation of federal law. The complaint alleges that Jewish students have been effectively banned from large segments of the campus informally called the “Jewish Exclusionary Zone”, and that the university has failed to act in the face of widespread antisemitism.
  • In St. Mary’s Catholic Parish in Littleton v. Roy, a District Court in Colorado ruled that the State could not refuse to exempt faith-based preschools from complying with a policy against discrimination on the basis of sexual identity while also allowing congregational-based preschools to prefer their own members. The Court criticized the policy for effectively allowing preschools to discriminate based on church membership, while simultaneously failing to allow these same schools to dictate their own admission standards.
  • A Vermont couple filed suit against the state over a policy that mandated all foster parents unconditionally demonstrate their ability to assent to a child’s potential desire to dress, cut their hair, or act in any way according to their stated gender identity. The couple claimed that the policy violated their Free Speech and Religious Liberty Rights by forcing them to act and speak in a way inconsistent with their beliefs.
  • In Oklahoma, the State Legislature has enacted a bill requiring schools to offer a released-time course dedicated to religious teaching and moral instruction for up to three class-periods per week. The courses would be taught by an independent entity outside of school grounds and grades would be evaluated using secular criteria.
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Around the Web

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

  • In Lozano v. Collier, the 5th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision on several claims by a Muslim inmate. The inmate argued that his religious practices were burdened by the denial of private facilities for prayer and insufficient access to religious programming. Additionally, he challenged the neutrality of faith-based dormitories and the absence of a Muslim-designated unit.
  • In Diocese of Albany v. Harris, the New York Court of Appeals is rehearing a case regarding the New York Department of Financial Services’ mandate that employers cover abortion in their employee health insurance plans. The main issue is whether New York’s narrowing of the exemption to protect only religious groups that primarily teach religion and primarily serve and hire those who share their faith is valid as a religious exemption.
  • In Ex parte The Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, Inc., the Alabama Supreme Court decided that a property ownership dispute between a local Methodist church and its parent church bodies is a civil matter, not ecclesiastical. This decision allows the civil court to resolve the issue using neutral legal principles, as the local church’s property deed does not include a trust clause for the parent bodies.
  • In Matter of Ferrelli v State of New York, a New York State appellate court upheld the denial of a religious exemption from the Covid vaccine mandate for court system employees. The court ruled that the mandate was a neutral law of general applicability, subject only to rational basis review.
    In The King (On the application of TTT) v. Michaela Community Schools Trust, a British court upheld a secular school’s policy preventing a Muslim student from using lunchtime for prayer, citing school unity considerations The court noted that the student was aware of the school’s secular nature upon enrollment and found that missed prayers could be made up later. The policy was deemed proportionate, balancing the school’s aims against the rights of Muslim students.
  • A new paper by economist Devin G. Pope analyzes religious worship attendance using geodata from smartphones for over 2 million Americans and finds that 73% of people step into a religious place of worship at least once during the year on the primary day of worship. However, only 5% of Americans attend services “weekly”, which is far fewer than the ~22% who report to do so in surveys.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

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.

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Around the Web

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

  • In Farrakhan v. Anti-Defamation League, a New York federal district court dismissed a complaint alleging that the Anti-Defamation League violated Farrakhan’s First Amendment Rights by repeatedly referring to him and his organization as antisemitic. In the dismissal, the Court reasoned that Farrakhan failed to allege that his injuries were concrete or traceable to the ADL.
  • The City of New York has agreed to settle a class action damage claim brought by Muslim women protesting a policy that required wearers of hijabs to remove them when sitting for arrest photos. The NYPD agreed to change the policy in an earlier settlement in 2020, and the settlement amounts to $17.5 million.
  • In Citizens United to Protect Our Neighborhoods v. Village of Chestnut Ridge, New York, the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a complaint challenging a new zoning law that allowed places of worship to be more easily built, claiming that the law improperly promoted religion. The Court reasoned that the plaintiffs lacked standing, suffering no cognizable harm apart from tax dollars passing the law.
  • In United States v. Safehouse, a Pennsylvania district court held that the prosecution of a nonprofit providing safe injection sites for drug users did not violate the Free Exercise Clause. Despite the leaders of the nonprofit claiming religious motivation, the entity itself has no religious affiliation, and the Court therefore held that the religious inspiration of its leaders doesn’t protect it against prosecution for the violation of a federal statute criminalizing the maintenance of drug-involved premises.
  • In Ocean Grove, New Jersey, the NJ State Department for Environmental Protection ordered the Christian nonprofit owners of the waterfront area to allow beach access to the public on Sunday mornings or face up to $25,000 in fines per day. State officials claim that the closure violates the Coastal Area Facilities Review Act, which itself is based on the public-trust doctrine, outlining that certain natural goods like waterfront areas are to be reserved for public use.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

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?

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In Garrick v. Moody Bible Institute, the Seventh Circuit permitted a sex discrimination lawsuit against the Moody Bible Institute to proceed, rejecting the institution’s argument for dismissal based on the religious autonomy doctrine. The court reasoned that while religious autonomy is important, it does not provide immunity in cases of non-ministerial employee discrimination.
  • In The Satanic Temple v. The City of Chicago, an Illinois district court allowed the Satanic Temple’s claim that the city violated the Establishment Clause by consistently delaying a request for a Satanic clergyman to deliver an invocation at a City Council meeting to proceed, stating that the city must treat the Satanic clergy member equally with those of other religions.
  • Iowa enacted a state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects individuals’ religious exercise from government interference unless the government proves a compelling interest and uses the least restrictive means.
  • In Omid v. Ahmadi, a Connecticut trial court declined to enforce an Islamic mahr agreement in a divorce case. The court found the agreement’s terms ambiguous and intertwined with Islamic law and therefore deemed the agreement unenforceable due to difficulty in separating secular from religious considerations.
  • In Ramirez v. World Mission Society, Church of God, a plaintiff sued a church and its pastor for fraud, emotional distress, and negligence. The plaintiff alleges she was pressured into joining the church through concealment of its leader’s identity and coerced into donating money based on a misrepresented charitable use of funds.
  • Six inmates at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York filed a lawsuit against a statewide prison lockdown preventing them from viewing the solar eclipse. The inmates are arguing they hold sincerely-held religious belief that this eclipse is important to the practice of their religion.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

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.

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart v. City of Madison, Wisconsin, the 7th Circuit ruled against a religious school’s appeal for zoning approval to install lights for nighttime athletic events. The court found that the inability to host these events does not constitute a “substantial burden” on the school’s religious mission, noting that alternative venues could host such events, thus not impeding the school’s religious mission.
  • In Pendleton v. Jividen, the 4th Circuit found that a West Virginia prison’s dismissal of a Sufi inmate’s religious diet claim was incorrect. The inmate’s Sufi beliefs require a diet excluding soy, which cause him health issues, making soy-based foods religiously “Haram.” The court emphasized that an inmate does not need a medical allergy test to prove a substantial burden on religious practices, thus allowing his RLUIPA claim to proceed.
  • The Satanic Temple has filed a lawsuit in a Tennessee federal district court against the Memphis-Shelby County School Board, alleging unconstitutional hurdles in renting space for an After-School Satan Club.
  • Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb vetoed House Enrolled Act 1002, aimed at defining antisemitism in educational settings, citing its failure to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition and examples, particularly concerning criticism of Israel.
  • The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey violated Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (concerning freedom of thought, consciousness, and religion) by convicting a conscientious objector for refusing reserve duty. The Court emphasized the absence of alternative service options for conscientious objectors in Turkish law, upholding previous case law on balancing societal interests and individual rights. Turkey is ordered to compensate the objector for non-pecuniary damage and costs.