Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Religious Organizations and the Affirmative Action Case

In America this week, the big legal news was the Supreme Court’s oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case concerning the constitutionality of race-based affirmative action in higher education. This will be the second time in a decade that the Court has addressed this issue, and the case has potentially huge ramifications. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Fisher has drawn great interest. Hundreds (!) of amicus briefs were filed in the case, most of which will be read, if at all, only by hapless law clerks. Among these was a brief from about a dozen religious organizations and campus ministries, including the National Council of Churches, the United Methodists, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (USA). These organizations, the brief explains, support affirmative action partly for religious reasons: in order to affirm “all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God.” The organizations depend on racial diversity in universities, the brief continues, in order to “fulfill their own missions of helping their members grow in their faith, understanding and compassion; providing the tools their members will need to reach their full potential as individuals in our ever-changing pluralistic society; and cultivating leaders for the next generation.” Secularist organizations such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State strongly protested, asserting that religious organizations had no right to interfere in a matter of public debate in order to advance a narrow sectarian position, or to rely on religious propositions inaccessible to non-believers.

Just kidding about that last part.

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Rivers on the Secularization of the British Constitution

Julian Rivers (U. of Bristol Law School) has posted The Secularisation of the British Constitution. The abstract follows.

In recent years, the relationship between law and religion has been subject to increased scholarly interest. In part this is the result of new laws protecting religious liberty and non-discrimination, and it may be that overall levels of litigation have increased as well. In all this activity, there are signs that the relationship between law and religion is changing. While unable to address every matter of detail, this article seeks to identify the underlying themes and trends. It starts by suggesting that the constitutional settlement achieved by the end of the nineteenth century has often been overlooked, religion only appearing in the guise of inadequately theorised commitments to individual liberty and equality. The article then considers the role of multiculturalism in promoting recent legal changes. However, the new commitment to multiculturalism cannot explain a number of features of the law: the minimal impact of the Human Rights Act 1998, the uncertain effect of equality legislation, an apparent rise in litigation in established areas of law and religion, and some striking cases in which acts have been found to be unlawful in surprising ways. In contrast, the article proposes a new secularisation thesis. The law is coming to treat religions as merely recreational and trivial. This has the effect of reducing the significance of religion as a matter of conscience, as legal system and as a context for public service. As a way of managing the ever-deepening forms of religious diversity present within the United Kingdom, such a secularisation strategy is implausible.

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Michaelson on the Religious Roots of American Antinomianism

Jay Michaelson (Ph.D. student at Hebrew University) has posted Hating the Law for Christian Reasons: The Religious Roots of American Antinomianism.  The abstract follows.

Popular American law-talk is a religious discourse. While Americans routinely valorize the “rule of law” and “common sense,” they express hatred for lawyers and laws, which are supposedly drowning our country in a sea of regulation and litigation. What explains this curious ambivalence is a Protestant ethic, beginning with the Apostle Paul, who, in an explicit rejoinder against Judaism, denied that the law (which governs the body) is a path to salvation (which is a matter of the soul). The result is a philosophy of “law without laws,” a religious antinomianism that has shaped, explicitly and implicitly, such disparate phenomena as the jury system, debates over the common law, and contemporary jeremiads about litigation and regulation.

This article, forthcoming in the anthology “Jews and the Law,” edited by Suzanne Last Stone and Ari Mermelstein, traces this American antinomianism in secular and religious sources. It begins by analyzing three different moments in American popular legal history: the Clinton impeachment, the debates surrounding the adoption of the English common law in the early republic, and discourse about the value of the jury from the Colonial period. The paper then turns to the religious sources, chiefly Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians, and later texts by Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther. It concludes by observing that the contemporary American mistrust of law is not a secular, civic, or jurisprudential ideology but a deep, religious conviction.

Posted on by JCPW

Aikman, “One Nation without God?: The Battle of Christianity in an Age of Unbelief”

This September, Baker Books published One Nation without God?: The Battle of Christianity in an Age of Unbelief by David Aikman. The publisher’s description follows.

Christianity in America is under siege. From litigation over coaches starting games with prayer to expulsion from college for refusing to endorse beliefs at odds with the Christian faith, hardly a week goes by without news of the declining influence that Christianity has in the public square. Can Christianity in this country survive the advances of secularists and remain influential in our culture? And if a new spiritual awakening is possible, what form will it take?

Supported by an astonishing parade of concrete examples and direct quotes from reporters, judges, bloggers, and influencers, David Aikman turns a journalist’s eye on the rise of hostility toward Christian expression in America and the alarming decline of orthodox belief among those who call themselves Christians. He explores the inspiring history of Christianity in America, the powerful cultural influences that have weakened the church, and the bright spots of hope he sees across the country, suggesting possible ways Christian influence in America might be refined–and revived.

Posted on by JCPW

Gorski, Kim, Torpey & VanAntwerpen (eds.), The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society

This past March, New York University Press published The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society edited by Philip Gorski (Yale University), David Kyuman Kim (Connecticut College), John Torpey (Cuny), and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (NYU). The publisher’s description follows.

The Post-Secular in Question considers whether there has in fact been a religious resurgence of global dimensions in recent decades. This collection of original essays by leading academics represents an interdisciplinary intervention in the continuing and ever-transforming discussion of the role of religion and secularism in today’s world. Foregrounding the most urgent and compelling questions raised by the place of religion in the social sciences, past and present, The Post-Secular in Question restores religion to a more central place in social scientific thinking about the world, helping to move scholarship “beyond unbelief.”

Posted on by ddrakeman

Getting Out of Our Grooves — Part II: Islam and Secularization?

We tend to think of countries such as Pakistan as quintessentially religious states.  As Humeira Iqtidar, of Kings College London, writes in her fascinating new book, Secularizing Islamists? (2011), the “increasing prominence of Islamists in Pakistani political space, especially over the last two decades, has crystallized a particular reading of Pakistan past and present . . . . Pakistan, Islam and fundamentalism – the conflation of the three has become an inescapable focus of media portrayals . . . . “

To provide a fuller picture, Professor Iqtidar spent a great deal of time in the relevant communities and had the rare opportunity to interview members of competing activist Islamist groups.  Her description of their competition for members, for power, and for the ability to define correct Islamic practices is remarkably interesting.

In the end, Professor Iqtidar argues that “Islamists are facilitating secularization at a social level even as they oppose secularism as an official policy.”  This is not, she is quick to note, a “strict demarcation of the public realm from the private . . . .”  Rather, the “Islamist insistence on the internal coherence of religious practice, its appropriateness to tackle the challenges of modern life, as well as competition among Islamist groups have led to a broad . . . thinking through of the role of religion in contemporary Muslim life . . . .  Religious practice can no longer be a matter of communal following of norms; it has been changed into a largely individualized decision that must be justified internally, that is, within a subject, and externally, to others around the subject.”

Finally, for those of us who periodically chafe at how some social scientists have superimposed Western European philosophical assumptions and religious categories on not necessarily matching American phenomena, I wanted to stand up and cheer while I was reading Professor Iqtidar’s comments about “universalist claims in social scientific analysis.”  In particular, she writes, “Within much of academic literature secularism continues to have immensely positive normative associations intertwined with a continued assumption of universal application.”  Until quite recently, social science theories “conflated diagnosis with prescription, description with projection.  This becomes particularly problematic in studying societies that are markedly different from the contexts in which there concepts took initial shape.”  No kidding.

Don Drakeman

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Berlinerblau, “How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom”

This month, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau (Georgetown University). The publisher’s description follows.

Seen as godless by the religious and weak by the atheists, secularism mostly has been misunderstood. In How to Be Secular, Berlinerblau argues for a return to America’s hard-won secular tradition; the best way to protect religious diversity and freedom lies in keeping an eye on the encroachment of each into the other.

Berlinerblau passionately defends the virtues of secularism, reminds us what it is and what it can protect, and urges us to mobilize around its cause, which is for all Americans to continue to enjoy freedom for—and from—religion. This is an urgent wake-up call for progressives in and out of all faiths.

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Ferrari on a European Perspective of Law and Religion in a Secular Society

Silvio Ferrari (U. of Milan) has posted Law and Religion in a Secular World: A European Perspective. The abstract follows.

This article examines two interpretations of the process of secularisation that can be traced back through European legal and political thought, and a more recent trend that challenges both of them. It does this through the prism of the public sphere, because in today’s Europe one of the most debated issues is the place and role of religion in this sphere, understood as the space where decisions concerning questions of general interest are discussed. The article concludes, first, that the paradigm through which relations between the secular and the religious have been interpreted is shifting and, second, that this change is going to have an impact on the notion of religious freedom and, consequently, on the recognised position of religions in the public sphere.

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Agrama, “Questioning Secularism”

This October, the University of Chicago Press will publish Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt by Hussein Ali Agrama (University of Chicago). The publisher’s description follows.

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.

Posted on by JCPW

Luhmann, “A Systems Theory of Religion”

This October, Stanford University Press will publish A Systems Theory of Religion by Niklas Luhmann (translated by David A. Brenner and Adrian Hermann). The publisher’s description follows.

A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann’s death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann’s most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are “autopoietic,” which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent.

Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion’s meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society’s most fundamental phenomena.