Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Jacoby, “The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought”

Here’s a celebration of Robert Ingersoll, the silver-tongued anti-IngersollCatholic, ardent supporter of James G. Blaine and his notions of separation of church and state, and one-time member of the late nineteenth-century progressive “National Liberal League”: The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (Yale University Press 2012), by the popular polemicist Susan Jacoby.  Ingersoll once wrote that America would “tear the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat of science,” and such rhetoric stood him in very good stead in the Republican party of the 1870s and 1880s.  The publisher’s description follows.

During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America’s enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as “the Great Agnostic.” The nation’s most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of  Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state with a vigor unmatched since America’s revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the U.S. presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its controversial power today—was the United States founded as a Christian nation?—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no.

In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation of  “new atheists.” Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America’s often-denigrated and forgotten secular history encompasses issues, ranging from women’s rights to evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in Ingersoll’s time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as one of the indispensable public figures who keep an alternative version of history alive. He devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all—liberty of conscience belonging  to the religious and nonreligious alike.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Mead on the “Christian Taliban” at West Point

At the always valuable Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead has an interesting post concerning last week’s allegations by a former cadet that a “Christian Taliban” harasses non-believers at the US Military Academy. Mead is skeptical it’s as bad as the former cadet says and argues that Christianity in the military is a good thing. Nonetheless, he says, it’s important to strike a balance between the rights of believers and non-believers and he suggests that West Point review the situation. Serious Christians know, he writes, that their faith requires them to show “respect, fairness, and friendship for those outside the fold.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Levine et al., “The Joy of Secularism”

Secularism, as we say in this business, is a radically contested term. Does it refer j9433 to a political program, a moral philosophy, or a description of reality? Does it suggest a rejection of religion or a religion all its own? Princeton University Press has come out with a paperback edition of last year’s collection of essays, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now (2011), that explores the topic. The collection is edited by George Levine, a professor emeritus of English at Rutgers. Here’s the publisher’s description:

 Can secularism offer us moral, aesthetic, and spiritual satisfaction? Or does the secular view simply affirm a dog-eat-dog universe? At a time when the issues of religion, evolution, atheism, fundamentalism, Darwin, and science fill headlines and invoke controversy, The Joy of Secularism provides a balanced and thoughtful approach for understanding an enlightened, Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Kansas Municipality Changes City Seal After FFRF Complaint

The City Council of Buhler, Kansas, has decided not to fight the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which complained that Buhler’s City seal — which displays a very prominent Latin cross — violates the Establishment Clause.  You can see a story with the seal here; the seal was apparently created in 1988.  And here is an open letter from the Mayor of Buhler to its residents, indicating that the City did not have a taste for an expensive litigation with FFRF which it was very uncertain to win, and which might well deplete the City’s small budget.  Note some of the attachments to the letter as well, including a memorandum opinion from the ACLJ, suggesting that in light of Tenth Circuit case law, the City would be advised not to go to court.

Perhaps the problem was in the tension within Buhler’s own motto, “Traditional Values, Progressive Ideas.”  Sounds like a recipe for conflict.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Mautner on Excluding Women from Torah Study

One of the many things that worries secular liberals about the revival of religion — assuming a revival is really occurring — is the traditionalism of the religious worldview. Since the Enlightenment, liberalism has taught that the individual must be free to  determine for himself, without the interference of tradition or traditional authority,  the meaning of existence and his place in the universe (see, e.g., Planned Parenthood v. Casey). The religious worldview rejects this idea. The meaning of the universe is determined by God, and wisdom lies in discovering His plan and accepting the place He has assigned you in it. (Of course, religions differ on the details of the plan!) There are important qualifications, of course. Liberalism doesn’t think people should just do what they want, and traditionalism doesn’t think that everything must always remain the same. But much of the tension between secular liberals and religious conservatives can be traced to these different premises.

Menachem Mautner (Tel Aviv University – Buchman Faculty of Law) has posted an interesting-looking piece that explores this tension in the context of Jewish law, or, more precisely, the study of Jewish law: A Dialogue between a Liberal and an Ultra-Orthodox on the Exclusion of Women from Torah Study. Here’s the abstract:

This is a fictive dialogue between a liberal and an ultra-Orthodox on the exclusion of women from Torah study. The dialogue begins with a lengthy discussion of the highly intricate preliminary problems of understanding and normatively evaluating the practices of another culture. The Liberal argues that the exclusion of women from Torah study precludes them from fully realizing the intellectual potential that lies within them, i.e., it denies them reaching the height of their human flourishing. It also implies that ultra-Orthodox women are regarded as having lesser moral worth than men.

The ultra-Orthodox argues that whereas modernity is premised on the denial of any status bestowed by tradition in the life of a person, for the ultra-Orthodox tradition has a binding force: it embodies God’s imperatives as to the good life, together with the ways these imperatives have been interpreted throughout the generations by Halakhic sages. Torah study is a religious imperative (mitzvah) that under the accepted tradition is Read more

Posted on by JCPW

Fitzpatrick, “Strange Gods: Legal Theology in a Modern Age”

This July, Routledge-Cavendish will publish Strange Gods: Legal Theology in a Modern Age by Peter Fitzpatrick (Birkbeck College, University of London). The publisher’s description follows.

Legal Theology provides a genealogy of modern law as a secular theology, calling into question the received ideas that modern law is radically different from its religious antecedents, and that modernity involved a repudiation of theological concepts. Peter Fitzpatrick charts the lineage of this secular theology through three ‘historicities’: the creation of the world’s imperium, of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century; the time of revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the high modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Respectively condensed here in the writings of Vitoria, Hobbes and Nietzsche, Fitzpatrick documents the substitution of a monotheistic God by successive articulations of a persistently ‘deific’ law. Legal Theology thus questions the story of secularism’s triumph, by eliciting the essentially religious force of modern law: a force that is, moreover, recognisable in secularism’s contemporary imperial mission.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Massachusetts High Court to Hear Challenge to Pledge of Allegiance

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a state law requiring schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Plaintiffs, a Secular Humanist family with children in Massachusetts public schools, argue that the phrase, “under God,” in the Pledge violates a state constitutional ban on religious discrimination. Eight years ago, in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, the US Supreme Court dismissed a federal constitutional challenge to the Pledge on the ground that the plaintiff in that case lacked standing. It doesn’t look like standing will be a problem in the Massachusetts case, however, so the Massachusetts court may well reach the merits. Apparently, there is little case law under the state constitution that addresses the question. Can Newdow  provide any guidance? Newdow is noteworthy mostly for Justice O’Connor’s concurrence, arguing that the phrase “under God” would be permissible under the Establishment Clause as a sort of ceremonial deism. It will be interesting to see whether the Massachusetts court adopts similar reasoning under the state constitution. The case is Doe v. Acton-Boxborough Regional School District.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Religious Affiliation in America

This month’s Pew Report on religious affiliation in America has drawn much well-deserved attention, particularly two of its findings: a continuing increase in the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion – the “Nones” – and a continuing decrease in the percentage who identify as Protestant. In the last five years, the Nones have gone from roughly 15% of American adults to roughly 20%. The increase is especially pronounced among adults under the age of 30, a third of whom say they are religiously unaffiliated. And, for the first time since Pew started polling, the percentage of adults who identify as Protestant has dropped below 50%.

These statistics could have profound significance for the future of American religion and law. Take the increased percentage of Nones among people under 30. In a couple of decades, this age cohort will be running American cultural, legal, and political institutions. Traditionally, American institutions have viewed religion as a good thing, both for individuals and society. Will they continue to do so if they are run by people who themselves lack a religious identity, who view religion, at best, with indifference? Will legislatures accommodate religious minorities as readily? Will courts defer to traditions that reflect assumptions large percentages of the population no longer share? It seems doubtful.

The media has jumped on the rise of the Nones, predicting everything from a political realignment (good news for Democrats, bad news for Republicans) to major changes in education and family structure. Maybe – but we need to be cautious. We shouldn’t assume that the increase in the percentage of Nones will Read more

Posted on by JCPW

Scherer, “Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion”

In April, Cambridge University Press will publish Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion by Matthew Scherer (Union College). The publisher’s description follows.

Secularism is often imagined in Thomas Jefferson’s words as ‘a wall of separation between Church and State’. This book moves past that standard picture to argue that secularism is a process that reshapes both religion and politics. Borrowing a term from religious traditions, the book goes further to argue that this process should be understood as a process of conversion. Matthew Scherer studies Saint Augustine, John Locke, John Rawls, Henri Bergson and Stanley Cavell to present a more accurate picture of what secularism is, what it does, and how it can be reimagined to be more conducive to genuine democracy.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: “Whose God Rules?”

This Friday, Harvard Law School will host a panel on “Whose God Rules?”, a recent book that outlines a new “theolegal” theory of American government. The description follows. Details for the panel are here.

Is the United States a secular nation or a theolegal democracy? The theolegal theory describes a political system that allows public officials to use theology in its democratic process to shape law without instituting an official state religion. Join co-editors of the new book “Whose God Rules?” (Palgrave Macmillan) for a review of how preeminent scholars debate theology theory, which describes the gray area between a secular legal system, where theology is dismissed as irrational and a threat to the separation of religion and state, and a theocracy, where a single religion determines all law. The United States is neither a secular nation nor a theocracy, leading scholars to ask whether the United States is a theolegal democracy. If so, whose God rules?